 Thank you guys for all coming out. It's a great turnout today. I think it kind of speaks to the level of interest in remote work, which is the topic du jour. So I'm Kyle Doherty, managing director with General Catalysts where a venture capital firm that's been investing in tech companies for about 20 years now. Companies including Airbnb, Stripe, Snapchat and thankfully GitLab. So the idea for this event actually came about after my first meeting with Cit. So he invited a group of us to Mission Control which is his apartments in the Millennium Tower in Soma. And I walked in and right there in his dining room, on his dining room table, he had his keyboard, zoom camera, six screens, each one with a dashboard monitoring a different aspect of his business. And it really hit me at that moment in time that my God, he's got over 500 employees at the time. Now you're at about 1,000 employees in 50 different countries, no offices. He's able to run this global business from his dining room table. It was really incredible. So why is that relevant for everybody that's here today? I think there's aspects of, or issues and challenges of all businesses, technology and non-tech as well, that could be addressed with remote work. So the war for talent. Everybody's looking to hire great people. If you can really expand the boundaries beyond just your geography, you can really actually have a pretty nice competitive advantage versus other companies as well. Cost of living issues. The major tech hubs have experienced significant increases in housing costs and just general issues that a lot of people can't do, that they can't move to San Francisco. Also work-life balance. There's shifting values around how people want to live their lives and remote work enables people to live it the way that they want to. So you're gonna hear from a number of leaders today from organizations that are applying remote work and they're all doing it slightly differently. There's no one-size-fits-all. Some like GitLab are fully remotes, no offices. Others are taking more hybrid approaches to it. There's no right or wrong answer, but I do think we're gonna take away some really good nuggets of wisdom, some very good tactics today that we can all apply to our businesses. Just the last thing I wanted to address as well is the number one piece of feedback I get is this is a remote work conference. Why aren't we doing it remotely? It's a good question. I think you'll see a theme through all of these panels that face-to-face still matters. Pretty much every company still does at least one of any year where they bring everybody together in person to be able to talk and learn. So we felt that was important for this conference as well. So with that, I'll hand it over to Sid. Thank you, Kyle. We're really grateful that General Catalyst and Kyle in specific is co-organizing this conference with us. For us, remote was something that we got to do because we started a company from scratch and people stopped showing up at the office. The office was two blocks from here and Ethan Howard and we'll talk more about that later but it gave us a chance to do things differently. And now it seems like remote is a great way to spread opportunity more equally around the world but also to give people more flexibility in their daily lives, to allow them to spend less time commuting, to interleave tasks throughout the day and to be there for their family when there is an emergency. So we think it's a great thing and I think it's really important to organize it correctly. There are certain values that are super helpful. It's helpful to be intentional about informal communication. And there's lots of other things that we hope we'll address today. We really will try to go into the details and give you those things that you need to do remote right in your organization. We are very excited. We think that remote can change the world and I'm very pleased to welcome the emcee of today, Sung Hye, the chief people officer at Goodlap. Welcome, Sung. Thank you. Welcome and good morning. I'm Sung Hye and I'm your emcee today and we have an amazing lineup of experts for you. What we hope to achieve is to have a highly interactive session where we can demonstrate how we can make remote work successful in so many different ways. So our agenda is up here and to make this interactive, we urge you to use Slido to enter your questions and you can either download the app or I'm told it's actually easier to just go onto theslido.com and punch in your numbers and while you're using your phone, please remember to turn them on silent. A couple of housekeeping things. You know the exit in the front. We also have another emergency exit over here and we have two sets of restrooms just outside where that exit sign is in the entrance and then some right below the fan. So for our first panel, consider this. There is no talent shortage. There is no war for talent if you're able to access talent remotely around the world. I'd like to introduce our first panel and moderator, Mark Jacobson, CEO. Sorry, CEO of Terrain and Visor Summit. Hi, thank you, thank you so much. All right, good morning. How's everyone doing? So there's at least three people awake. How's everyone doing? All right, all right. We have a great panel today. Thank you to the general catalyst team for inviting me and inviting everyone here. It's good to chat with everyone in prepping for today's session. We've got a lot of great questions. So we'll go through a couple and then we'll turn it over to audience questions as well. But going from left to right, we've got AJ Josephson, VP of Human Resources at Miro. We've got Brittany Rode from GitLab, Compensation and Benefits Manager. Excuse me, I'm getting over a cold. Betsy Church, Senior Talent Brand Manager from GitLab and Andrew Cargis, VP Global Talent Acquisition at Elastic. So maybe we just get started and you guys can give a little bit of your own backgrounds and an interesting fact that maybe folks in the audience don't know about you. I'm AJ. My background's really been in learning and development and people system design. Thinking about building platforms, global platforms, local platforms to attract, engage and retain top talent. Right now, I'm at Miro. We're 210 people. I work with people across the full 12 time zones. So my days start at 7 a.m. every day. The time zone couldn't get worse without getting better because it's exactly the opposite part of the world. So we've made that work. And one fun fact about me is I was chased by a wombat when I was 15. And I don't think I ever truly recovered if any wombat survivors out there we can meet after the session. Wombat. I'm Brittany Rody. I started at GitLab when we were much smaller, series A phase. And from that time I started out as sort of a people ops generalist, all different things from recruiting to actually writing and sending out contracts and have become more specialized in the development of our compensation and our benefits practices globally. I'm based out of Nashville, so traveled out here for the conference. And then a fun fact about me is whenever anybody's on a video, call with me. I have two office assistants, a St. Bernard and a golden retriever who lovingly lay full lay down on the couch next to me to make themselves known in calls. I'm Betsy Church. And I am based in Charlotte, North Carolina. So like Brittany, I've traveled here today and I'm excited to be here. I previously prior to GitLab was working for another technology company and doing implant branding work for them as well. A larger company. So it's been really cool to be able to come to GitLab. I started earlier this year and kind of bring that knowledge to a company that is starting out but has an awesome foundation with the talent brand. And so it's been exciting to be here. Another similar to Brittany is that my office is also going to often feature a golden retriever puppies. I spend lots of my time chasing her around when I'm not on calls. Hi, I'm Andrew Cargis. I've been in talent acquisition or staffing recruiting for about 20 years in hyper growth companies. I recently joined Elastic about two years ago. One of the reasons was because of this distributed concept, this remote concept, thinking about how to take a company from 500 to 5,000 over the next few years was really something that was exciting. The bane of my existence has been trying to find developers and hubs in New York and Boston and Chicago, Shanghai to Hyderabad. So it was a really interesting concept of, hey, how do we do this differently? So that was one of the reasons why I'm excited to be here and talk about it and share a little bit about what we've learned. My fun fact, I guess, is that I'm an avid mountain biker. Just got over a broken shoulder finger and elbow, chasing my 14-year-old son down A-line and whistler if anyone knows it. Great, cool, thank you. So we'll start with the first question. Maybe A.J., we'll start with you. We've got a lot of early-stage founders in the audience. How do they begin thinking about recruiting globally, especially if they are pre-product or stealth or just emerging? Yeah, I think early-stage, you don't have the resources and time to engage a lot of services. So it's all about trust. You're an early-stage founder, you're either really good at networking, listening to smart people and stealing their ideas, or you're gonna get really good at that. So from my experience, it's a lot about building your network of informal advisors and partners and asking them to debrief you on what they know. So you're trying to hire someone in the Netherlands for the first time and you have a million questions. How could you ever find the information? Well, you're gonna find somebody who's done it before and you're gonna get them to give you 15 minutes, 30 minutes to download on the thing that everyone in Amsterdam already knows and then go from there. So a lot of it's about pumping your network and not being afraid to reach out. Information is free. It doesn't mean it's easy to access, but that's what early-stage hustle is about. Got it. Andrew, how about you? What advice would you give? What I see out there is people reach out to me all the time. I just recently got reached out to by a CEO of a smaller company that said, look, I'm trying to go from this five hires a month to 50, how do I do that? And we talked about the various things that he needed for his company that are very different from what we do, right? And I think you respond on leveraging your network. People are out there and willing to help. You might get ghosted or you might get a non-response, but most of the people I think are really excited about what others do and they're willing to share their knowledge about how to recruit, how to find people. I think as you start talking to people, this is what I do as a recruiter. I manage our executive recruiting at Elastic and I just talked to one person. Like yesterday I talked to this person who's a friend of mine, just about family stuff, and he said, hey, what are you working on? And I said, well, I'm working on this VP role for A, B, and C, and he goes, oh, you should talk to this guy. And I reached out to that person and we connected and now I'm talking to him later today. And it's just about those connections and I totally believe in that. So as you're looking at this and you're beginning to kind of fact find, how do you think about Regents, right? How do you think about expansion to different cities in the US internationally and layer kind of an added dimension? How do you think about that from a tech talent perspective versus a managerial perspective? What advice can you offer? I'll go. We're a larger company, so we can afford some tools out there and I don't know the size of your organizations or where you're going, but as you get larger, there are tools out there that will afford you these opportunities to understand that my CFO came to me and said, I want to hire a bunch of accountants and I don't want to do it in the Bay Area. Where's the best place to go for that? And so we used a tool called Insights by LinkedIn. We found that the best cost market with the highest amount of talent that is not being recruited today is Denver. And so we started building a little talent hub of accountants in Denver. And then we look at other markets like Austin or other places and we can do that across the board. We're really high on diversity and what we found is there are 15 markets in the US where there are black African-Americans and Hispanic, even populations of women that are in tech that are higher than other markets. And so we specifically post in those markets and we've seen a massive increase in our funnel of that type of talent that's coming in. And we actually have a rule that you have to post in 10 of those 15 markets every time we open up a distributed job. And it really helps us. So those tools can be very, very helpful for you if you can read those articles. Sometimes they come out once or twice a year. These are the best markets for diverse talent. These are the best markets for accountants or for this type of skill set. Austin is obviously up and coming. We've been hiring a lot of people there and it's a great affordable market, so. I would say like, and if you're smaller than that, you can't afford tools. My question to you is can you just fast follow? Can you go where other people are going? The danger is if you think I've got a great idea, I'm gonna go to Perth, Australia. I'm gonna hire my first engineers there and there are no software engineers that you need there. You can sink a year, 18 months and a lot of capacity trying to make that work. Looking for talent at a small stage where it doesn't exist is not a good recipe. So is fast following a safe method? I mean, from what we've seen, it's definitely something that's been kind of put into practice over the years. I think there's a lot of reports that come out. Where's the unicorn money going and you hear about kind of networks and ecosystems. So Seattle is a city that's exploding but the dynamics of a Seattle, I think are very different than the dynamics of Portland, maybe of Denver. When you think about the concentration of large employers, mid-size employers versus kind of startups. And when we talk to our companies, we're always trying to help them think about what types of talent pools are you intentionally trying to access? Cities aren't kind of composed the same way. And so trying to be deliberate in what your intentions are or maybe being intentional about how you build. Kind of what I was curious to get your perspective on is, do you kind of look at the second expansion or a multi-city expansion around kind of competencies? Do you do it just a little bit at hawk and say, okay, we're gonna commit to being more distributed, being more remote. We've got the infrastructure and the tolerance to do that. Curious to hear your perspective on, if you are to open up a secondary site or multiple sites, like how would you really dissect that? What are the challenges you find? How do you overcome some of them? I think the biggest challenge is, is the talent there we need? So we've got a big presence in LA and we've hired amazing people in LA and it's been really great for certain roles and then other roles, it's been incredibly hard to fill. And you think, well, LA is a mega city. Bigger city, one of the biggest cities in America. Incredibly talented people across the thing. Totally different talent profile in the Bay Area or New York. So I think number one is, is the talent there? Number two is, for us, is how the time zones work with our collaboration. Like we have some pretty intense time zone differences and so you can make it work. It's got to change a lot of how you collaborate and where you have which teams. So do the time zones work with, we've got stand-up scrums, you don't want to have people in scrums ranged across 12 hours, that's not going to work out. And then cost is another factor. And then there's a bunch of cities where there is talent but you double click, the talent has all migrated to that city. And is that sustainable for scale? Or is that always going to be a lot of extra lift for the recruiting team? Andrew, when you've looked at differences that you've mentioned, Denver, you've mentioned Austin and I think a few others. What went into the analysis of kind of how to pick those cities beyond maybe just there's a concentration of accountants. I'm sure that was a key component of that particular exercise, but as you thought about scaling beyond that, what was the math behind that? Again, I use these specialized tools that I do recommend as you get to a certain point, but they will say, in the Bay Area, an engineer, the attrition is like one year nine months. That's how long they stay in a company. When you look at Arizona, they stick around for 11 years in a company. When you look at Philadelphia, they stick around for seven years. When you look at Denver accountants, they're there for seven years. When you look in the Bay Area, Denver accountants are gone in 24 months. So there's data around that. There's also the data around, like I said, diversity. We just talked to a guy yesterday who owns a diversity network for Hispanics, and he's gonna run a campaign for us that has 900 Hispanic accountants, just what we're looking for, and 70% of them are women. So we're gonna start with our campaign with the women accountants in the Denver market, and we'll be able to reach 70% of that 900 people. And that, for us, will translate into hires. Can I build on that for a second? I also heard yesterday from a thousand person SaaS company here, same point about Denver, not about retention, but about expectations for career progression. So they hired a bunch of support people in SF, all of who wanted to move into engineering, at the, go from support to technical support, and then into Eng, after like a year, 18 months, really hungry. In Denver, they had people who were very happy with careers in support for four, five, six years. So that's a really different dynamic there as well. You've mentioned tools, do you utilize anything around university concentration? Is that a factor? Just talking to Rhonda about that. This is the first time in my 20-year career I haven't either led or built a campus recruiting function. It's hard because our entire tech team works out of their home, and that's almost 40% of our company right now, and we're almost 2,000 people, so it's a very, very large engineering function. And it's, you know, when you think about a campus student, so I was telling Rhonda, they're coming out of their home, right, where their social dynamic is, and then they go to a school where their social dynamic gets much bigger, right, and then they go, and they're gonna work from their home. You know, behind my door is four children, my wife, two guinea pigs, and a dog and a cow, like I got a pretty big social dynamic when I opened that door. When you get a campus student who's been surrounded by hundreds of people, potentially, they're in an apartment now in San Francisco, and there's nothing behind their door. Some of the people that we have hired have been very intentional about scheduling, you know, coffee meetings in the morning, lunch, and dinners with their friends so that they get that social dynamic, but sometimes working from home, and it's just you, you know, one person apartment, it can get pretty lonely. And we have had people that have come into the company and said, man, I thought this was gonna be great. This isn't great. And so we've had people who have left for that specific reason. It just wasn't a fit for them. Cool. So shifting gear, let's talk a little bit about, you know, how you attract talent. Let's talk about the interview process, the way you kind of financially structure the business. You know, we'd love to hear your thoughts just around like process approach, best practices, maybe just kind of a high level intro and we can drill into a couple more questions. Sure, so for the interview process? Yeah. Yeah, so I think for GitLab, everything with our interview process really goes back to a high level of documentation and transparency. That's, you know, it's part of our core values as a company. And so we're really wanting to kind of be, have your potential candidates have kind of every piece of information that they might need in the beginning so that they know exactly what to expect from your process. And then the focus can really be on the content of the interview and like whether this person is actually a fit for the role, not a guessing game. So that's a really important kind of high level piece of how our interview process is set up. And you know, it definitely depends on the role, like exactly the way that might be structured, but we publish all of that in the job description, in the job family and our handbook, our company handbook is completely public and has all of that information, kind of at your fingertips, so that a candidate can be really well informed coming into our process. Great. And then maybe let's kind of go a couple of steps deeper. So what are the actual tools and, you know, kind of components that you put in place in order to stand this up in order to, you know, make it an A plus experience internally as well as externally. Yeah, so for GitLab, at least we heavily use our own product for that. So, you know, especially for things like onboarding new candidates, but if you take it step back to the interview process, you know, everything in our handbook tells you what you're gonna need to really know to be successful at GitLab. And so it takes you through what those tools are and kind of gives you that ability to see it in advance. As far as interviewing tools, I think we heavily use the tools that we would use on the job. So we do all of our interviews through Zoom and, you know, that way we're able to really determine whether somebody is gonna succeed in that type of environment. And like Andrew said, like certain people may not thrive in that type of kind of video chat environment and being able to work that way every day. And so it's important in the interview process not only to give them that sort of taste of what it's like to work that way, but also, you know, really, really find out whether they're gonna be able to thrive in that type of remote environment. Yeah, I was just gonna say that I think it sounds, I love your documentation at GitLab. It's really world-class in so many areas. For earlier stage people, what are the kind of like, what are the big steps they need to think through to make those, you know, zero to 50 steps in their recruiting process? Well, 50's a lot. Don't make it 50. For me, I don't care if you're a remote company distributed or if you've got a dev center in San Francisco. The most important thing you can do when hiring anybody is spending as much time up front knowing exactly what you're looking for. If you really define that well and you've got three, four, five people who are gonna be your core interviewers, you're gonna have 25 very specific things you're looking for and each one of those five people is gonna have those five things that they are good at interviewing to focus on. And then at the end, you come together after an interview and you all talk about those things and you figure out what are the trade-offs? What are the must-haves? Does this person have the potential and the capabilities and what are we gonna have to train them or what are they gonna really add value to the team? And then you can make a really sound decision. What I find is the worst thing that every company start-ups tend to do is they wing it. And they just don't make those good decisions up front and your first hundred hires I think are absolutely the most critical in terms of the foundation of your company. And if you screw those up, you're gonna be spending a lot more time trying to fix that. And so if you're making rec decisions after you've talked to a candidate, right? What I mean by that is you start talking about, oh, you know, we really need these three skill sets after we've talked to this person, right? You didn't put enough time in upfront to really define what that rec was, what that job that you were looking to fill was. If you do that upfront, as soon as you find the right person, they move really fast through the process. And that is how you actually get people hired very quickly by spending that time upfront. Another thing I would add to that, I think that's important kind of from the talent brand lens is even if you're early on starting from scratch, in a lot of ways, there are things that you can do, like with that upfront work for your brand as well. So starting out like some of the grassroots things that GitLab had done prior to me joining earlier this year were like defining your company values and the things that you really are gonna, not only hold yourselves accountable to, but what you're looking for in new hires and really going out there and tapping into your team's network and talking about those things. There's lots you can do in that beginning stage that will then bring you more informed candidates already so that you're not using the interview process to also be trying to kind of bring them up to speed and make sure that they actually know about your values or fit with them or can add to them and contribute to them. So I think that is a huge piece of the upfront work that you can do without a huge expensive tool or someone to do it formally full time quite yet. That's really important in the end. That makes a lot of sense. One of the challenges I've seen in early stage and even mid stage is people start recruiting by consensus. Like we all like this person and we can judge expertise by people who look like us. Hey, I'm an MIT engineer. I know what good looks like in an MIT engineer, but now I'm talking to someone from a different college, CSU, another kind of school, different background, someone who has not been coding since they were 10 but has went to boot camps and maybe moved in the later stage. How do I judge what that looks like? Or this person is in another country. How do I judge what that looks like? So I think at first it's easy to recruit people who look like you in consensus but then making that migration to this structured way you're talking about is super important and especially when you're getting more diverse candidates. It eliminates a ton of bias. If you just focus on, I mean, whenever I read a scorecard and it says I really like this person, the first thing I go back to him is say, I don't care that you really like them. Please don't ever put that in again. You had five things to focus on. What were those five things that you really liked about them? And it helps when you do get a couple of candidates and they're diverse and people start leaning in that direction of the MIT or the, they were at four years at Amazon or oh, they were at Google. You got all excited. It's like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What does it have to do with these five things that you were supposed to focus on? And it really removes a lot of that and people will eventually get more objective on what we're looking for. So when you start looking at town in different regions, obviously the Bay Area is arguably the most expensive talent pool. Probably not much of a debate. But you start looking at secondary and tertiary sites. How do you think about compensation and benefits? You know, maybe even more specifically, you know, weak of it equity in the Bay Area. A lot of other tech hubs do. A lot of other regions don't maybe feel the same way. So, you know, what are the kind of best practices to approaching how to think about compensation and benefits structurally? And then maybe some examples of nuances within different regions. Sure, so, you know, our compensation philosophy is paying competitive rates in local market. So that's where we start from. And then in line with our value of transparency, we built a compensation calculator that would show you in the numbers and, you know, local currency and USD, what that actually outputs to based on your geographical area, your level and the role that you're applying for. So it limits a lot of the conversation piece in recruiting because you talk about compensation up front, you have that in front of you and then you talk about it against the end at offer stage. So you're not getting into, you know, this place where you feel like you're talking about compensation at each stage. It can be equitable among, you know, regardless of gender, ethnicity, you know, and it's very, very open source in that sense too. In addition to that, it's important to document what your total rewards package looks like. So we have our global compensation page that has weather. We offer base salary, bonus, stock options. We've even put specifically what number of stock options. We recently created a stock options calculator that actually will help sort of model that out for you depending on different scenarios. So really that transparency around compensation from the start and having it documented and clear to candidates, to your team, you know, for any increases or changes they'll have, but also just, you know, to the wider community, sharing those best practices since a lot of remote companies might look at compensation from different lenses. Great. What about full-time versus contractors? Does it, any other insights around that? Yeah, so there's, we have a blend of full-time employees either through an entity or a professional employment organization, PEOs, as well as contractors. And we abide by the local regulations in each country on what that looks like. So, you know, we have documented in our handbook based on, you know, where the country you're in, whether, what type of relationship it would be. And, you know, we definitely advise and utilize our local resources, whether that's legal resources or, you know, through some professional employment organizations to advise us on those best next steps to make sure that we are compliant with those local regulations. Cool. One little slightly funny story that I learned the last couple of months is not everyone understands the value of equity. Like in the Bay Area, it's like breakfast, like it's pretty clear exactly. It's the best meal of the day is your one-year cliff or whatever. And we have a big operation in Russia and Russians didn't really believe in equity. And partly because they had, like, yeah, okay, this piece of paper says that I'm gonna be whatever in the next years. And in the history, there was a bit of, like, some financial scams that sounded kind of similar. And they're like, this, we're a bit skeptical. And so we really like to spend a lot of time explaining, like, what this meant, why we were giving equity to everybody. Like, why we wanted people to feel like they were owners of the company. And then to use analogies, like, with these growth rates, we're planning to make sure everyone has, everyone's equity is worth, like, one to two to three times their annual salary to make it more real and tangible. And it required a lot more comms than it would in the Bay Area. So that's just part of understanding that diversity. So with the time remaining, I thought maybe we would just shift to address some of the questions coming from the audience. So I think maybe just taking a step back, we'd love to hear more from the GitLab members. You're unique in the sense that you're all remote and you're north of a thousand people. You can just share a little bit more about, like, that story and that evolution. Yeah, I'd love to speak to it. So when I joined GitLab, we were at about 70 people. So seeing it go from 70 to over a thousand is really, really exciting. But it also comes with, you know, understanding that there's gonna be change. And I think that can be the hardest part when you go through that type of scale, is knowing that, you know, your job when you first start as, you know, a people operations generalist, you know, all the way up as you scale is gonna be different. And I read an interesting article about letting go of your Legos. And so being able to hand that off to different people and know that your role isn't changing and communicating that to your team, you know, your specific job is still equally as important as it was before. But at a thousand people, you can't do the things that you could do at 70. So hiring in experts or, you know, internally bringing people up to different roles and giving them the opportunity to work on those different aspects helps for professional growth and just helps for really commitment back to the, you know, company and seeing it get to that next stage. But not being afraid to do that. Cool. Sorry, I'm just trying to keep up with folks here. So when you are, when you're doing a review, are there any countries that you cannot hire in due to legal structures or administrative issues with any learnings along the way that you found? Yeah, we have a no country hire list that we do document where, you know, there's places where we can and can't hire for different reasons. And so it's very dependent based on the country, but we are also very transparent about that through the process. Yeah, and I think that goes back to part of kind of the candidate experience as well. Like not only do we document it in the handbook, but we're very careful to put it on things like, a link to it on things like Glassdoor and places where candidates are gonna kind of touch your brand before they even get to you. So we wanna be sure that that experience is as good as it can be and that they're not kind of learning too far down the line that they are in a country where we can't hire. So, you know, being able to get out there and explain why we have to do that is an important piece of that too. How about maybe just going back to kind of the equity component. Have you found that there are different policies around equity or revenue sharing? You know, kind of profit plans, anything like that that you've come across? Yeah, there's so many different ways you can offer those plans, whether you offer stock options or SUs, you know, depending on what stage of a company you're at, how you change what grants you're offering based on as you go through different funding rounds. You know, your strike price as a series A company is gonna be very different than your strike price as a series D and so communicating what that means to people, I think assuming that everybody understands equity can be one of the first mistakes made. Some people might not negotiate equity because they don't know what its value could be. So making sure that they're clear on that, making sure that, you know, it's fair and equitable across the board too. So, you know, we have our comp calculator that outlines base salary and then we have our equity calculator that says specifically how many number of options for each role in that level you receive and that helps with that, you know, structure of making sure that everybody has fair compensation and they know what to expect. So even with respect to equity, putting out training, communicating that or over communicating that in the recruiting process is, you know, super vital to make sure that somebody understands their total package and not just their base salary component. How do you communicate the value of an option? So we, our calculator has different modeling. So it might have, you know, company fails $0 or negative if you exercise your shares up to, you know, what it could look like if you IPO. So having those different, you know, modeling and really clarifying this, it's not a guarantee. You know, we have legal language around that as well to make sure that, you know, this is just what we hope would happen and, you know, with people working at the company contributing to our goals and, you know, our mission that hopefully will be what the course of action, but there is always a downside to equity. So looking at it from both sides of that coin and not over communicating like, hey, we could go public and it could be worth $10 million. You know, that's not the best way to talk about it in my opinion. So a lot of folks in the audience are early stage founders and I realize maybe kind of a little bit of a later stage bent here, but for early stage founders, maybe 20 people, 30 people are less. What are your suggestions on how to build and manage remote teams when things change fast? Right? Like we know that these are super dynamic companies. So how do you manage the reality of the business with the desire to build remote teams? I'll briefly talk about the, like managing a remote team. So Miro is where a visual collaboration start up. We have about three million users, including like started as a digital whiteboard and expanded from there. So a lot of product development use cases, a lot of design thinking use cases, a lot of key tools around managing workflow and planning and your scrums. And so we think we're a key part of the toolkit. Obviously Zoom is a key part of your toolkit, Slack is a key part of your toolkit. There's some more boutique products for different workflows, but really picking the modern toolkit that's supporting all this making remote work, it's gonna be huge and that wave is happening everywhere. We're part of it and we're seeing it grow in every company, fully remote distributed, but do you have a collaboration toolkit that matches your workflow? And they exist. So if you're not using those things now, I would really reach out and make sure you're picking up on them. And forget that the key was being iterative in our projects too. So not taking a project and planning it out for six months and implementing it at the end, but instead taking small steps to the end result since the end result of the project could change 30 times in a six month period for a dynamic, especially smaller startup, but even at a larger scale. So taking that iterative approach and letting people know it doesn't have to be perfect when you submit something, there just has to be something there that we build off of and we continue to collaborate on. Yeah, I think that's also huge when we think about new hires and hiring too, because we go back to the level of documentation that we were talking about. It's so important that someone starting out can jump in and see the history of a project and what those iterations were and exactly what decisions were made because it's all documented for us in a GitLab issue or somewhere in the handbook. It's all there for them to be able to access and know where we left off and that also helps the way that we communicate which is asynchronously when possible so that we can kind of address those time zone issues and be able to pick up on projects and collaborate in that way. So it's really important to be able to kind of go back to some of those practices and have that be your basic. Yeah, I would echo most of that. Zoom is, it's so funny. We work with a lot of vendors and usually at some point the vendors go, you're the only people who we do Zoom's with that your videos are always on and it's just kind of a rule, an unwritten rule but we always have our video on. We do use Slack a lot although you can get caught in Slack hell I think sometimes. I just deleted about 15 channels yesterday. I was just so frustrated with it. And then we do these docs. Everything that we do is in a doc. So when an idea comes up, we start generating a doc around how we're gonna develop whatever it is that we're gonna develop. We'll bring five people into that doc. My team is about 50 I think right now. So there'll be five people who'll be working on that project, they build that out and then they'll share it with the rest of the team who can go in and comment and make it hopefully better. Most of the time it is better. And then we'll share that out with the company and we have a Wiki that we put everything on and it really does help to share that out. I've never been a real big doc person. I like to get in a room with a slide deck and talk and leave with action items and that's not as easy to do over Zoom but when you can go into a doc and everybody can have their own thoughts and ideas and questions and how is this gonna work. It's really become for me an invaluable tool that I really love and it's been great for our productivity. So a lot of these things that we're talking about are a little bit kind of inward facing. How does it help you personally? How does it help your team? Let's maybe zoom out a little bit and kind of refocus on the candidate experience because ultimately what we're doing is we're trying to recruit people to our companies and as much as we want to be efficient and get as much done in a day as possible, you're all competing technically for the same people. So how do these processes and tools shape the candidate experience, the employer brand? Talk a little bit more about the other side of the equation and kind of the goals and the intent, how you measure it, what really goes into a world-class experience because you can't bring them into a room like this, something that's beautiful, you're not interacting with them face-to-face, they're not walking the hall, they're not getting the vibe, they're not seeing the cafeteria or whatever lunch delivery. So there's a little bit of that kind of lost moment to bond with them. So how do all these tools that we're talking about really impact success when it comes to hiring? We use Greenhouse and it's got a great kind of auto-generated candidate follow-up so as we move them through each stage, when they apply, they get a video of who we are. If there's sales rep, when they go to the first interview, they get a little document around all of our use cases and if they move to the next stage, they'll get something else about our source code and our values. And so we kind of place those there because based on our interviews, they have these very specific things that they're gonna do. One of those is if they're meeting with the hiring manager, the hiring manager's just gonna ask, so have you checked out our use cases? That's why we put that in there. We're not telling them that they need to read it because this is gonna be part of the interview but we want them to hopefully get excited about the company and the use cases and so we nudge them in that direction and 90 plus percent of the people tend to have said, oh yeah, I read your use cases, it was great that they sent it out and so we provide that along the way. We try to touch them at every stage and we try to personally reject everybody that goes through our process. Kennedy experience was huge and is huge for us. Because we post in 15 different markets, we'll only do eight, 900 hires this year but we get 150,000 applications which is off the chart for a company of our size and so that means we're gonna reject 149,200 people and so how do we do that in a very thoughtful way? From the very first step and through the process, we really try to think about our communications and what we share with people. I think too, it's funny we talk, I think the video kind of interview process gets kind of a bad rap. It's kind of sometimes seen as a lesser experience but in many ways it's so much more convenient for both parties. It's more inclusive, you're not requiring people to travel somewhere where their situation may not allow for that or it may be difficult. So it really does allow not only that convenience factor for both parties but then it gives them a taste for us. We're gonna be working all remote and your every day would be communicating with someone through a video chat so knowing in that interview process whether or not that's something that works for you is extremely important. We don't want someone to continue on through the process if that's not gonna be a good fit for them and I think it's important for us to be able to go out there and model that and in a lot of ways if you bring someone into an office for an interview, it's not exactly, you might be showing them the best of the best of your company but it may not be an accurate reflection of what it's actually gonna be like on a day to day basis but for us the candidate experience also goes back to that heavy level of documentation and we really try also to keep the timeframe short as much as possible so if you think about interviewing in an office setting you're not gonna bring someone in like three, four, five different times. To interview them you're gonna try to kind of keep it either to one day or maybe one more final round interview. So we try to sort of mimic that in the remote setting as well and ask our internal team members to really prioritize those interviews so that we can, if we can fit their sessions in with our team within like a two week period because we don't want it to be kind of an uncomfortable situation where they're just interviewing one week and then two weeks later they've got one more and we really try to tighten up that timeline so that it's the best experience it can be for them. Yeah and then carrying that experience through when somebody's hired too. So making sure the same experience that they had with over communication or communication as an applicant you have as a new hire through onboarding process. So onboarding remotely for some may feel lonely if it's not done in a way where they have resources that are useful for them to feel connected. We use coffee chats or first day sinks with your manager and things like that but making sure that that's also a seamless handoff and it's not lost in the middle somewhere and they're in their home office with their dog wondering what to do next. I got a quick story about the Zoom interview. I was interviewing a woman and her three year old daughter ran up and looked in the mirror and she was mortified like this was the worst thing that happened and I laughed and I said this is so common. This happens every day. We have people on my team that literally are holding their baby or their dog or cat walks across the screen and it's just normal. Life happens where work happens for us, right? And right at the end of the interview my daughter ran into my office. She's 11 years old. She's like dad I got an A on my math test. And I said see. She's like you texted her. I'm like no, no, no this is how it works. So I would also say for super early stage folks think about the candidate experience. Probably you're not thinking about the candidate experience. You're thinking about like so many things and you're dealing with candidates in one off but you're not thinking about there's an experience behind all those one off interactions. And so taking 30 minutes just to jot down on the back of a napkin, design it. Give yourself a time box 30 minutes say what I want the candidate experience to be and by mapping that out you'll start to empathize more with your customer in this sense and you'll map out oh yeah I should put all those meetings in two weeks or maybe I could do an aha moment like not only am I gonna pitch them over Zoom I'm gonna get one of our board members or advisors to pitch them over Zoom. When I interviewed it at Miro they set up time with me and a general partner at Excel who did our series A and I was like whoa this is a serious thing. That was an aha moment for me. So how can you bake in a couple of aha moments? Even just 30 minutes is gonna unblock a lot of pain points and add more value. Great. I think we are out of time but thank you so much. These are great insights. Thank you.