 like I can see you lot. Don't know what anyone's out doing over there. Probably for the best that you can't see me, but you can see Georgie and Job, so that's the main thing. They're the stars of the show on this panel today talking about building products that people love. I reckon every single person here, investor, founder, even idiot journalists, think about product every day, the ones they use, the ones they love, the ones they don't love probably, the ones that cause them. The ones they don't love. The ones that cause them the problems we don't want to think about. I think it's probably important just to start by saying that between the two of you, you have such a wealth of experience that it would be kind of remiss of me not to start by asking you about some of the experiences you've had just in terms of, you know, we have FinTech, Transport, we have Git Labs, we have now Remote Work. These are four huge sectors that pretty much everyone has some experience in. So maybe Georgie, I'd like just to ask you about what some of the key lessons you've had just generally in your time now across so many startups, if there's like one thing that you would say is like the main learning that you take into every new role. Yeah, so my career is a bit all over the place. If you look at it from a vertical perspective, I've worked in advertising, I've worked in marketplaces, finance, transport, but the commonality has always been scaling products globally. And one of the things that I didn't realize going into multiple different verticals, I was always like, oh, there'll be a challenge of learning the new industry. And there is, you know, you need to understand the space that you're working in. But if you're building consumer products, consumers have a psychological attachment to the products that they're using. And so if you can actually think about when we're here to talk about product love, right, but what is love? And that can be different for lots of people. And so I think if you take a consumer first mentality and you put the product over here and you start with the user that's using it and you work out like, what are the drivers? What is the value that they see in it? And then you can work out what the product needs to be, which can be different. So I think the commonality is that if you always start from the psychology of what the user is trying to achieve, then the industry can shape itself around that problem. Absolutely. And you've basically gone from, we were just saying, you know, a team of just around 60 people at the start of the year to over 600 now, nearly 700 people. It's hard enough to scale a team generally, but a product team as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about how it feels to go from being, you know, VP of product to now running the show, but with product in mind? Yeah, it's definitely a different thing, right? Like I think one of the hardest things is that when you start a company, you have a particular vision and you want to execute on that. And if you lead products, you have this luxury of essentially controlling that, right? That's the one thing you focus on. And if you become a CEO, if you run more things than just product, it's very hard to sometimes have to step back and say, maybe, maybe I shouldn't try to do all the things at the same time. And I think that's definitely one of the hardest lessons for me the past year or so. Yeah. Absolutely. I know we're talking about love and you said, well, what is love? And that's a song that we could sing along to a little bit later, but or maybe last night if you're at back party. But I'm interested in sort of how you assess that from a product side of things like, you know, you have MPS scores, but I want to maybe just ask a little bit about customer and how you assess customer feedback, how important it is to listen to customers and how maybe over time you've iterated how you listen to customers and how you take that feedback on against what you believe to be the right course of action. Yeah. So I think that, you know, Henry Ford said that if he'd listened to customers, he would have built a faster horse, but and that's that kind of is grounding from a product perspective, because if you're building a pioneer product or something that is changing the way that consumers are going to do something in the future and that they're the products that I gravitate towards because you cannot rely on what people are going to tell you because they don't know how do they know what they want to do in the future? How do they humans are humans rely on things that they understand already, which is why spaces like crypto and and and biodiversity and transport are really interesting spaces to be in because we don't know how we're going to operate in the future. And from a tier mobility perspective, we're changing the way that people move around cities. But a lot of the time people are okay with how they move around cities at the moment. They have a car. It works. It's convenient. The pram is in the backseat. It works for them. But you need to connect that convenience with the other things that they're concerned about, which is the kids can't play in the streets because the cars are always there. Or the CO2 emissions in cities means that you're thinking of moving out to the suburbs or to a regional area, but you'd really love to stay in the city. And so you need to understand the holistic psychology of it so that you can then show people what life could be like in the future. And banking in 26 was was very similar. So people already banked. It wasn't something that we were reinventing. What we were doing was showing them that they didn't have to do it in the high street. They didn't have to do it in a store. They didn't have to have the constraints of open hours and bank tellers. But if you'd asked them, they would have said that I love my bank teller, right? When I have a problem, I go in there. Same with audible, with Kindle, right? If you'd asked a book nerd like myself 15 years ago, that I wouldn't have a library anymore and I wouldn't go to the local bookshop. I would have tell you dreaming because I loved going to the bookshop and getting the advice from the manager. And I love having my books there, but I move a lot. And I've, you know, now we have it's more likely that people are going to read a book on a Kindle than they do with a real book. But we couldn't have predicted that those things are going to happen. So when you're building love products, you need to think about like, what are the drivers of love in the industry? Because depending on the industry that you're in depends on what people are going to love. I think I think one of the interesting things is and I think this is what you alluded to is that there's this big difference between the things that your users that your potential customers tell you that they want and the feedback that they give on the thing that you've built. Yeah, and this is such a big difference. Like, I think love can be expressed as someone saying, I love what you're doing. It doesn't necessarily mean that you should build whatever that then tell you, Oh, I would love it if you did add 13 more buttons to this interface, which is something that I encounter very frequently, which is that, Oh, yeah, I want to have all the options and everything in all the checkboxes. And we're like, yeah, maybe it wouldn't be the best solution, but we're happy that you like what we've made so far. And I think this is one of the big learnings from my side. You know, I've been working in B2B things, which many people consider very different, right? B2B, you're building for businesses, they want boring things. Everybody has a strong association that business software has to be boring and gray and complex. And in my experience, this is the opposite. Because who uses those that software, it's the same people. It's the same people that are your users. It's the exact same people. And if you make something that's truly delightful, a simple and accessible, they will give you that feedback. And that is the love that I think at least I see when people use my products. That point around simplicity is actually a really like nice jumping off point for one of my pet peeves, which is when companies do something really well. And then for an inextricable reason, they add every bell and whistle you can think of, it becomes clunky, it becomes unusable, it's probably inefficient, it probably causes many long hours and long nights for developers and others to actually put it together. I wonder how you kind of almost how that works from your experience is like resisting that urge to just do more because an investor or a customer or someone says it's a good idea. This is to what you just said, right? And I think that we get caught up in solving problems for everyone, right? And we talk about this a lot at here, which is that you cannot build solutions for everyone. It doesn't work, right? What you'll end up with is a solution that no one really loves. Because if you're trying to please everyone, then everyone is going to get a watered down version because love is a strong feeling, right? And if you don't hit all of the elements of it, then you don't get there. And so you really need to focus on who is your target user. And I have a lot of conversations with founders about, yeah, but if we want to be mass market and if we have a target user, how are we going to grow to the level of scale that we need to to be successful at our mission purpose investor pitch? But if you don't have a target user and really focus on building for them, so that first product, right, that you loved, that they then kind of watered down because they wanted to make everyone like it. The problem is, is that while you loved that product, you're an advocate for that product. And you were telling people about it. And in this world, we talk to people, we look on social media, people don't look at brand anymore to work out what products they want to adopt. They talk to their peers, they talk to social networks. And if you don't have advocacy represented for your company in those networks, then you have a lot of trouble acquiring customers and it costs you a lot of money. So you really need to make sure that you're like, okay, this is the target user and I'm going to make that user like adore me to the point where they're going to go and tell people that they need to get this product. And then you'll get auxiliary benefits associated with that. But you need to win the hearts and minds of that particular user that you're trying to achieve. And I think this is probably more relevant for you in a way, you're because, you know, two years ago at Slush, it was certainly warmer than it was this time around. But, you know, the the dreaded C word wasn't on the horizon in anyone's minds. And we didn't know that we were going to be working remote and maybe even using remote. So you're building this transformational product. And I suppose there is an argument that says that, you know, you could do more things in the future, obviously, but you have to build the initial thing to get people to come in the first place. So to that same point around adding more things are like, how do you stop yourself from doing too much at once? Yeah, I think I think it remote brain and really strange in a way luxurious position where the thing that we're trying to solve is so immensely complex, because part of our solution is the fact that we are everywhere, every country in the world. And way more so than we thought it would be when we started out. That's really hard. That's really hard. It's hard to not to get even to get to the point of lovable. It's hard to get to the point where it just works. And so every time we feel the itch that I think many product leaders have, or people building new companies, like, maybe I could do that as well. And I see this thing there and I could probably do it better. We are reminded by the fact that, well, for one, we're not everywhere in the world yet. And that is the core thing that we're trying to solve. And second, it's not there yet. Like we're not at a point yet where we believe that this is the thing that we set out to do. This is solved to the degree that we feel like, well, we can actually move on because we've done this better than anybody else. We have such a long way to go in that sense. But how do you balance? Because that's interesting, right? Because you're in this unique position where your market is being created before your eyes, right? And everyone needs the solution. So you have this commercial opportunity to scale insanely. How do you balance taking that, grabbing that commercial opportunity and going into 100 different markets with making sure that every market loves what you're doing? It's honestly very difficult. I think one of the things that we did really well, early on is we had these fundamental principles that we built upon. One of them was we are going to build in a particular way. In our case, it meant foundations up. And in a payroll space, it means owning everything, running operations ourselves. And we're not going to make exceptions to that because we've seen other people make exceptions to that, which are always disastrous. And so as long as we stick to those principles, we essentially have like this almost a forcing function to restricting how fast we can roll this out. We can go only as fast as we can build it. No faster. There's no shortcuts that we can take because that's the principle that we build everything upon. Within that scope, we're trying to go as fast as possible. And that means that we scale the team. In the last three months, we hired more than 300 people for a team. Where did you hire them? Well, I mean, that's the mission that we have. Where did we find them? Well, everywhere, because great people are everywhere on the planet. We get more than 24,000 applicants a month. That's crazy. It is crazy. And that's actually my next question. Very good segue in guys. We now are in a time where, you know, we talked about people working remotely, but there is probably seemingly every article I read a war for talent, you know, this kind of hotter than ever market for the best people in startups be they in, you know, Boston or in Boston Lancashire, perhaps. And the weird sort of dynamic that causes is that everyone can compete for jobs. Everyone is very well funded. I'm just interested between the two of you when you come to like finding team members and people you really want to back to like deliver that product. Like how important is it that they are on board with that? And can you maybe just talk a little bit about the composition of teams? And if that's changed as a result of the experience we're having now with the job market? Yeah, for us, when we built a company, we said these are core values. And we make sure that anybody that we hire aligns with those values. Your team is everywhere. Your company is just a bunch of people together. And so if that group is not good, if you're not happy with that group of people, yeah, that's it's not going to go anywhere. It's the most important thing. The highest leverage thing you can possibly do when building a company is building a really strong team. And so that's where we focus all of our energy on them, making sure that's good that we reward them well, right? They get paid well, we provide a great experience for them. That is fundamental. And then they are structuring the team. That's an ongoing exercise where depending on the size of your company, you have to change things. And one of the things, and of course, we discussed this briefly backstage is like we want to bring people together so that they collaborate. And in our case virtually, we don't have any offices. But we do make sure that people from different departments, from different disciplines, work closely together to build great things. And that makes it more fun to do work as well. Yeah. It's people often ask me what are my product principles? Like what is my foundational product? What are your product principles? I don't have it. I only have one, to be honest. And it's not I'm not going to write a book on it. Let's just say that. But in the end, people build products. And if you don't have the right people building your products, and this goes to the love as well, then it doesn't matter what framework, what system, what process you have, if you don't have the right people building them. And that also goes to diversity. Like if you're building a product for a global market, you need that representation in the people that are building that product. Because a group of people that look and feel the same, there is no way that they can build a product that is representative of the diversity of your audience that you're trying to achieve. But also, I think that it's difficult to scale. Because if people build products, and like you said, you focus on making sure that you get the right people into the team, at the same time, you have commercial opportunity to grow as fast as possible, or you have numbers that you need to hit which require more engineering teams and more performance marketing managers. And then you add this warfare talent on top of it. And you can start to panic a bit. Because, you know, you need the people to build the thing, to deliver the outcome, but you can't get the people. And then the price goes up. And then, you know, and I think that as an industry, we also have a responsibility not to feed this situation. So we try very hard not, I mean, we're very transparent about the prices, or not the prices, the salaries that we offer in roles. And I don't go over them, right? There can be some adjustments in things like ESOPs and other areas. But I think if we end up in this price war for talent, no one's going to win, right? Because it's not sustainable. So this is the other thing, like we're going through an insanely, insane era of funding. That's a Berlin where I'm based is insane, right? The company's just raised billion dollars in cash, right? Two. I mean, my old company N26 just raised 800 million dollars in a funding round. Gorillas raised almost a billion dollars. This is not the amount of money they've had in their existence. This is just the last funding round they had. And so, of course, they can go out and buy talent. But then we need to keep the idea of the industry in mind and how do we want to grow and how do we want to grow people and grow talent and not just buy developers or engineers that are coding for us. Because that will work for a year, right? And then someone else will offer them 15 grand more to do the same job and they will go. And it's not scalable and it's not sustainable. So I think it's something that as an industry we really need to think about because it's very detrimental to what we're trying to achieve. I feel pretty strongly there's a solution for it, which is to just hire people from anywhere. We employ many people, hundreds of people that their previous job, they earn maybe $10,000 a month a year, sorry. And now they earn $10,000 a month. That's not uncommon. We literally have hundreds of people that have gone from such a situation because the reality is that if you live anywhere but Berlin, London, New York or San Francisco, you're probably not earning these massive salaries. The opportunities are there and the talent is the same. Incredibly talented people. And this is the democratization of access, right? I mean it's happening. I invest in a company in the UK called Sudo, which is a fitness platform. And one of the cool things about it is that personal trainers in London can charge 100 pounds an hour, right? But actually if you have a Zuber instructor or a dance instructor from Brazil, I promise you it's a better class, right? And they're getting three pounds a class. And so by making it removing the need for location-based, which is what remote is doing, you're really equalizing the world. But then what are we going to do with the people in Berlin and London who are on these insane salaries? It's a market, right? It will resolve itself. If there's the same talent elsewhere, delivers the exact same thing for less, then that is what the market is going to move towards. For those people there, if you live in Mumbai, for example, it becomes more competitive in Mumbai. You can't afford to hire a developer for $10,000 a year anymore. You're going to have to pay them $10,000 a month. And it's a good thing. And then, yeah, if the people in London are going to earn 20 percent less, that's 20 percent less of a lot. There's still a lot. It's okay. Yeah. Georgie Smallwood, killer of the UK Zumba teachers. You heard it here first. If any Zumba teachers here at Slush, you know where to find her afterwards. I feel like it's interesting. We talked earlier about like, you know, being in a transformation industry. And I feel like N26, more or less, was the same thing. And tier is much the same for you, Georgie, as well. But one of the things that I guess we were able to do now that, you know, when I think about if I was, you know, not that I ever would, but if I was going to build a product, I would want all my team members in the same room to see the, like, probably terrible design that I had and tell me how bad it was and critique it as a group. But you don't have to be in the same room anymore. But I am interested just in how you communicate across teams now when you are using different platforms. And also, you know, if you have any sort of almost practical advice of, like, how you think about managing teams remotely and making products great across geographies, time zones, all of those things. Yeah. So I joined tier in COVID. So I joined as the first CPO in November last year. And my usual style, although I didn't realise it until I couldn't do it, was to walk the floor, right, and join stand-ups and try and understand context and feeling. And I couldn't do any of that. In hindsight, that was a good thing, because, you know, anyone can go and join the stand-ups and learn context and learn the work that's going on. But I had to step back and say, OK, well, what am I going to do first? And so I asked what I could add that would make things easier. And it was really work on the company strategy and make sure that that was consumer driven. But I think what's really interesting is I had to learn how to build relationships without being able to go for coffee in the kitchen with someone. And the only way I knew how to do that was to use technology in the same way that I do things in person. So I set up like a million 20-minute coffee chats. I did some with empty coffee cups because no one can drink that amount of liquid. But it was the only way I knew to to form those connections. And I think the length that COVID has gone on for now, and I'm interested in in your thoughts on this, because we didn't really go remote. We just sat at home and did the same things that we did in the office. Right. And I spend eight, nine hours a day on video calls. Right. And you can't do that. Like it's impossible. And I personally am a very observational person. So if I'm in a meeting in a board room and there's 12 people there, I'm kind of I'm watching you and your body language. And then I'm watching you and I understand that you're not that interested. But OK. And on a screen that completely overwhelms me because I'm looking at 12 people at the same time and I'm going I can't focus. I can't concentrate. So I think what we're going to start to see now is actually the change in way of working because we can't you can't sustain what we're doing. Right. People need to work out. We need to work out. What are our boundaries at home? Right. How do we know when to switch off? When do we close the computer and how do you not look at slack when you're trying to order your dinner? But from a tooling perspective, is that changing? Is that something you're seeing from customers as well? Yeah, you know, I feel about two ways about this. One is that we've had the tools for many years to do the work that we're doing today in the way that we're doing it today. Right. I think the main thing is that you have to start working asynchronously, write things down more. If you are just sharing information to record it or write it down instead of having a meeting and having the overhead of all of that. The other side of it is that the part where you have to be really intentional about bonding and getting to know each other and coffee chats, I feel the same way. I don't want to be on Zoom calls all day, but you still want to form a connection with people. And so I think, you know, it's not going to... There's not going to be a major shift in the next year, but I think it's slowly we're going to see ways that we can connect with each other beyond just Zoom and Slack. And I have good faith that in, you know, tools like VR and AR will slowly help us cross the threshold. It's going to take a while and you're looking for a skeptical journey, but... We're edging to the meta world and I'm not sure about that. Everybody that joins our company gets a VR headset. And that's not because we're working in VR. That's because if you hang out with someone in VR, you can play a game together. It removes the thing that you're looking at your screen, you're looking at yourself the whole time. And it gives you a sense of presence. And so we might be playing a game together and we can chat and it removes the context of work as well because I'm not getting notifications. And so essentially we created a way to want to connect better because there's more sense of presence because you can see each other move. There's somewhat of a body language there. And the other part of it is that, yeah, you're sort of forced to disconnect. You're forced to stop thinking about yourself and seeing yourself in a little Zoom window. It's really nice. And no, we don't use it for work, but that's OK. Like we used to connect and that's part of like working in a place. Isn't it interesting that we're going to adopt this new technology so that we can we can form. And I think that would be great, right? Like if we... Because you don't play, right? And one of our core values that tier is play. And we... I mean, even at the end of every exec meeting, we have a think on how we went and the values that we think we need to work on. And play comes up a lot. And we do silly things. Like, you know, if you could at the start of the meeting, it's always like, what's your holiday destination and who would you take? Just so you can start to create these connections with people. But so that's interesting, right? So we're not moving as much anymore. And I think about this a lot, right? So if we have a VR office and we're sitting at our desks all day and we don't get out and then take the other kind of world of love at the moment, which seems to be an obsession with convenience. So we're not going even out the door to go to the supermarket. We're getting everything delivered. Is the next wave of products that we're going to need to love? Health tech. Because, like, we're not... We're not moving. We're not... We're not engaging in a face-to-face environment. We're not going to shops. Ecom is booming. You know, you can even get your medicine delivered these days, right? So which is probably the only one that you really should get delivered. So what is the next love product? I mean, you observe. So you're not talking. I know you're the speaker, but you observe everything. What are the trends that you see? Wow. Throwing it back on me. Day two of Slush Guys. Real, real party on stage. I mean, the main thing that I see is just, like, the crazy amount of opportunity that people have now to start something and build something, you know, anywhere in the world. And that previously would have taken you so much longer. I think it's just the speed of iteration has completely shifted. Companies that, you know, people I meet at a conference, you know, three weeks ago or a year ago who were sort of, you know, bumbling around or two years ago, bumbling around, like trying to figure out how they would do one thing or another. And then now, you know, they've grown to huge scale in such a short amount of time. And that allows people across industries to think, well, why wouldn't I do that? Well, you know, I think this product is terrible. I could definitely do this quicker and easier. And the technology is being built at such a speed as well that some of those barriers, perhaps, that, you know, maybe would have caused an issue before being eliminated. And it's really great to see. I mean, it keeps me going. More to write about. Yeah, more to write about, which is always good, keeps my editor off my back, which we love just finally, because we are sort of ambling towards the end of our fun. I just wanted to talk to you just briefly about some of those points around the technological challenge, but also just a little bit about how you see going forward, this kind of growth at all costs, you know, kind of build, you know, go fast and break things, kind of mentality. Is that changing slightly, do you think? Because I wonder, you know, we talk a little bit sometimes about, you know, you go fast and break things, then you have to go back and fix some of the things that got broken along the way, like, do we think that that as a hack is kind of changing as a mentality? Is that maybe a European thing that you're noticing more? I think that this obsession with growth is, is it's not, is definitely not going away, right? We're very obsessed with growth, but it's also being tempered. I just did a presentation on product market fit, right? And desirability is is a huge element of that. And growth is in that desirability, right? It has that virality that pushes things. But the reality is that we have gone through some cycles where we see companies that just haven't hit product market fit, which also includes viability. So I think investors are asking more questions about you can move fast and break things, but you need to know what you're doing. And I think if you don't know what you're doing, there is a light being shined on those companies. I think the market is ruthless. If your company is well funded and you're running at negative margins for a long time, eventually it's going to end. You want to bring your company public. You're going to attract investors. At one point, people are going to say, this is no longer functional. And if you're an Uber, you have to raise prices at one point. And that's exactly what we're seeing. And so I think there's a lot of delays that we removed. You don't have to open an office anymore. It's much easier to expand across the world. It's much easier to build infrastructure. IT is getting better. So we can build companies significantly faster. So if we attract more capital, we can do things faster. But eventually the market is going to make or break it. Fantastic. Well, that's what we've got time for, guys. We could have probably done this for another half an hour, but we won't. Please give a big hand to Yorba and Georgie. And thanks for all coming.