 Hi, guys. Thanks for your time. My name is Haseem and I'm co-founder of Give.Asia. It's a crowdfunding platform which is used by different charities across Asia to raise funds. We've raised about $30 million for different causes. It was started in 2009 when I was studying in NUS. The other company which I started is called Givola Labs, which was actually a byproduct of the first company. I think I've seen this trend that generally when you start companies, you start companies as byproducts of other companies. When we started Give.Asia, we were essentially a social enterprise. We didn't really have a very strong business model. In those early days, it was quite hard for us to hire developers or designers in Singapore. We did what a lot of startups would do. They started finding out-so-talent. They started finding people in other countries which might be a little bit cheaper. In that process of working with software developers in Eastern European countries and places like Poland, Vietnam, Russia, we got good at remote work. Last year, we started getting approached by a lot of companies, a lot of startups who were like, hey, it seems like you guys know how to do remote work. Can you help us with something similar? That's when we started the company. Just in one year, we had been quite fortunate to work with a lot of companies. That's why I just want to share experiences of how we have seen remote work do work. Hopefully, you will have some ideas or things that might be useful for you. Just before I get into it, I just want to get a brief idea of the audience here. I'm just going to ask a few questions. How many people here work in startups? We have a couple. How many people travel every day to work, let's say, half an hour in aggregate? One hour? Two hours? One hour is the place. How many people here think that when you are working at your workplace, sometimes there are people who tap you on the shoulder or say something and bring you out of the zone? We have a few hands. It takes time to get back into the zone once you are out of the zone. The other thing is, how many people here really believe that you can do, I guess you probably do eight hours or nine or ten hours of work every day, around eight hours? That's what we say. How many of you think you actually do eight hours of work? These are just some of the insights. You take that insight and then you try to crystallize it and you say that, okay, here's what I know. I'm traveling maybe half an hour to one hour, maybe a couple of hours every day. There are some places where people travel one hour to work, one hour back from work. It's not productive. You're losing that time. Second thing, you're not really working eight hours. If I were to be asked how much do I work, I'd track these things, so I probably work four hours a day because that's the real amount of work I get then. The rest of the time is thinking about where to go for lunch or it's like, okay, it's about to end or someone talking to you about their social problems or whatever it is. The third thing to think about is the whole fact that I talked about, you can put your headphones on, but if someone has a question, they will come in and they say, hey, I have this idea. I have this perfect idea which is going to change your startup or change the organization and then you kind of think to yourself, no, I've thought of that. I don't really think it's that game changer of an idea, but you can't say no to the person you have to listen to. You take that into account, here's what we found. Remote work is good for a few reasons. First reason is asynchronous communication. What that means is when people say something or they talk something, there are a few things happen. First, it gets written down somewhere. This could be slag, this could be an email. Here's the funny thing about writing. When you're writing, you just can't write without thinking. But when you're talking, you can talk. That's what I'm doing. You can talk without thinking. You can just say whatever it is. But when you're writing, you know there are consequences. You know that people can keep you accountable for it. You can go back to it and say that this is what you said. This is super important. What we see in remote work is that it forces clients or it forces developers, it forces everyone who's involved to think through. That's good. You need blocks of time for you to think, for you to think about hard problems. I'm assuming all of us here or most of us here, I think all of us here are knowledge workers. We are not doing things where you increase the amount of time our output is going to increase. It's knowledge work. That's where you want to have zone of time where you can work on creative stuff. I think this is pretty big, which is just having asynchronous communication, which is a big deal in remote work. The other thing is feedbacks. I'm sure most of you are working in office. Let me ask you this. What is the structured feedback process that you have in your workplace? Some people call it performance management system. Some people call it feedback. They have these things every one year, every six months, every quarter. Let me ask you a quick question. How many people here get feedback every week? How many people get feedback every month? It can be either. How many people get feedback every month? How many people get feedback every quarter? One, two, how many people get feedback every six months? One, how many people get feedback every one year? The rest of them probably don't get any feedback. Here's what I found out working in office culture. I realized that the fact that you only have your performance management systems probably every year, it's a big problem. Because you spend that one year thinking that you're kicking ass. You're doing amazing things for the company. After one year, you find out that actually people think you were not doing your job. You're like, really? Is that true? I thought I was a superstar. Then you told, no, you've not been doing your job. You say, okay, and why didn't you tell me earlier? It just doesn't make sense. You pay someone lots of money. You get them to work and then you don't tell them until one year in that they are not performing to the level you want them to perform. This is a little bit of a counterintuitive point. I think when we are in the same location, we just assume that feedback is there. But if you don't have a process, it's almost like you are a fish who's in the water and you've got so accustomed to water that you just don't realize it's water. It's almost like in office you feel like feedback is there, it's omnipresent, but it's not present because you're not doing it. What we do at remote, like what we are doing in our organization is that we are getting feedback every week. Every week you will find out from your clients or from people you're working with, what they liked about you, what they disliked about your work, how can you improve it? That is a huge, huge reason that keeps people engaged because they are satisfied. It's not that the feedback is always going to be positive, it will be negative, but that's what you want. That's the feedback loop that keeps you engaged at your job. That's something which we feel is very important and that's why every week all the people who are working in our teams, we have about 25 people all across the globe, they will have to do a self-evaluation. They have to talk about what they did that week, are they happy with it? What are the things they can improve? Then there will be a performance review by other people who work for them who will get the same thing. We find out that this has been a huge, huge advantage to people. The other thing I would say is autonomy. When it comes to knowledge work, I think autonomy is a really important thing. When you are doing your work and there are people always watching behind your shoulders, always intervening, it's not fun. When you are working remotely, you're making the decision on your own. You are saying that, okay, I'm going to be working for this many hours and this is what you can expect at the end of the day. It's a very clear contract. Then you build confidence. I think it's something which you have to do over time. We have engineers now who once they say that they're going to get something done, let's say in a week's time or in a month's time, we have worked with them enough to know that they will somehow manage their time and they will get the job done. We don't intervene. We let them do the things the way they want to do. It's not uncommon where people, we have guys in Russia who will go to Bali with their family or with their kids or with their wives and they will have complete autonomy. We don't really care where you are. You can be location free. One of the problems with working in office is that people always think that if you're in office, work is getting done. That's why a lot of people, there are a lot of people who go to work really early and they put their code or they put their bag there and then they go to Starbucks just so that if anyone looks at their desk, they know that the person is at work. He's working, his stuff is there. It's not that he hasn't showed up. So I think there is the cultural aspects and also I think in Singapore I've heard from friends who mentioned that you can't really leave until your boss leaves. So you're at your office and you've done your work but your boss hasn't left because he just takes so long to get his job done and because of that you have to stay there. So in my mind that's a waste of time. The other thing I would say is it is very important to have mastery in whatever knowledge work you're doing and what we have found is that this feedback is a huge reason for you to get the mastery because you know if you're doing well or not and also you can own your learning. I think another thing which a lot of organizations don't get right is that they under invest in training. So you know that's training is absolutely I would say the number one thing which any company could be doing to improve outcomes. If you are training your staff you are getting better and better. So remote work does help with that because you know you're saving those one or two hours every day that you were you know spending on travel. What if you could spend those one or two hours you know into you know being on Coursera or like you know reading a book about you know what you're interested in. It will show in your work in your craft getting improved. So that's another thing we really highly value and that's something which everyone in our company needs to do. The last thing I would mention before we just open it up you know for Q&A is essentially this whole idea of how we are competing at a global scale now. So if you're talking about you yourself being a developer you're no longer competing with developers in Singapore you're competing with developers in Ukraine and Russia. And once you start working remotely you realize that the world is your oyster. If we were to talk about the kind of clients and kind of you know remote workers we are working with we are working with people are all across the globe we have we have developers in Russia, in Ukraine, in Vietnam, in India and you know all over the place and I think sometimes I or actually a lot of times I like working with them more because they are hungrier and you know they put in more hours they are very autonomous because they have that's the culture they have known they've been doing remote work for almost like five years ten years for clients across the globe so they have seen more things they have been exposed to more problems and that's that's what they understand they understand the future of world is project-based. It's not specifically a company-based profession you don't go into a company and you stay with the company for the rest of your life but you hop from projects to projects and your learning is optimized when you take part in different projects so last last one year our team has worked on fintech we have worked on e-commerce we have worked on logistics and we've worked on so many different projects and that's where you know the learning has been and you find that these people are really fast at taking these learnings from one project and applying to other projects which in certain organizations if you're just in one organization you might not have that because you learn what that organization knows but the growth stops because you haven't seen other projects so with that I'll just like you know I'll just open the open the floor for any discussion any feedback any questions that you might have. So for example, when I go to fintech, this is a place where I work and I have this interest to be a instructor and that's where I get work done and it's like it's a daily process that gives me into that zone and maybe you can distract me but office layouts can be arranged in the way that the access is a problem. But what I want to say is that there's component work and I think that offices are pretty good. So how do you so like in terms of getting, in terms of instilling and discipline in the work I think how do you suppose like getting your work to reach that level? Sure. What I've seen, what I've seen with the people who work against remote workers is that you know they're two types. They're one type who are like having sandwiches like who don't follow that work ethic and they're not following it and there's other ones who are really broke. So we go to the boards and they would have in their place a room which is their workplace and the door is closed, babies can't walk in or pets can't walk in. They have like high definition cameras so that they can have the Skype calls and they have to eat with them. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. The fire alarm has been activated in the building. We are investigating the situation. Please remain calm and stand by for further instruction. Thank you. Yeah please. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. The fire alarm has been activated in the building. We are investigating the situation. Please remain calm and stand by for further instruction. Thank you. Now is the time. Go. You always work with individuals so you sometimes work with small teams, remote teams. Yeah so what we've seen is we have sometimes teams, it's again going back to the same question, you want these people who really have work ethic so not thinking of you know working remotely as you know there is some bullshit out there which is like you know I'm your I'm my own boss I can do whatever whatever because you know I'm a bit more than all that. I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about people who are serious about their job. When we form a team of these guys we like to we like them to be together because you know they have they have an indoor chemistry so we do work with some teams as well. We take from a team, a team I mean like a physically team not remote. We are focused on remote so we all the people we have are on remote. All workers are remote. Yes. What are some downsides of remote? Sure one of the downsides that we find is that it's maybe a little bit harder or you want to like you know figure out if this person is going to perform or not. It takes a little bit longer because you know when you meet a person face to face maybe it's easier for you to to judge it but for us it's always been like we have to work with the person for at least a couple of months and then we know if it works or not. The other downside is sometimes you create human connection so you feel like you know I would love to be in a place where there are other people who are working on the same thing and the way we come the way we saw that issue is that we do like an annual get together so you know once once a year you come to a same location and then you meet all the people you work with so that would be the downside. Another other upside just came to my mind which I forgot is that when you're running a remote organization your office or it's not a physical space it's online which forces you to document everything and that's a that's a huge advantage if you walk into a traditional organization onboarding can be really tough because nobody has really documented the things so the person who just joined the team has to find all this information from hundred different people but if you if you join a remote organization everything will be documented so you can go back and you can kind of get these mini case studies of what that organization went through why did they make certain decisions and you know that's fairly helpful. What project management software or what kind of team collaboration software that you guys really use and what do you think looks really well for you guys. Yeah so we've tried it done and finally finally like you know we do a lot of like our issue management and stuff on GitHub so it's we have started using that as like the project management rule because for us almost like you know finding base camp or a sauna or all that for us it was a bit too complicated like there were so many features out there that we just couldn't pick it up so we really like you know go on to the basics and we're just doing everything on that for our knowledge management there's a new product we're using it's called Nuclino. Nuclino is a very good it's a it's a very new tool by community startup so that helps us with the knowledge management so all our documents everything goes on Nuclino it's a it's a biggie like platform where people can answer. If you've heard of this startup called remote here. Yeah yeah so there are a lot of there are a lot of companies which are writing this way for remote work so you know there are startups like remote here where in one year you go to six different locations and you you go with like 25 people and there's another one called jobbatical where you go for a job less sabbatical to a new country for one year and you you know work at something so there are a lot of remote focused organizations are is more focused on people who you know are pretty professional in what they do developers designers and we link them up with companies who are looking for top tier remote talent so we don't have a talent here. It would be software development it would be like design it would be content so I think you know remote work can be I would say for something like sales you have to be on the ground if you're doing like face-to-face sales if you're going inside sales it can serve you. What we do we use remote augmented reality for remote work but actually we are doing much more physical in that sense. We are scaling up experts, technicians for maybe taking a whole lot of alarms on them so actually we are doing remote work but bringing the idea of remote work to real support for people using augmented reality in a lot of other sense. It's like in Singapore we are confused now. Do you have any comments on the team sizes or on a specific project? We are not as big yet so we still work in very small teams we have like you know four or five people maximum working on a project but if you are interested in how this model scales when you're bigger companies you can look at automatic which is about 450 boys all over the globe. You can have a lot of innovation but you still may want to focus smaller teams focusing on specific area. For us I think we can follow I think it is Jeff Bezos who has this thing about like if you want to build something you have to have a team you know big enough or small enough that it can survive on a pizza right so so probably like two pizzas okay yeah so so like you know maximum four or five people beyond that it can be quite difficult. Ladies and gentlemen your attention please we have investigated the situation there has been a false alarm we apologize for any inconvenience caused thank you you have to give it to them they actually tell you ladies and gentlemen your attention please we have investigated the situation there has been a false alarm we apologize for any inconvenience caused thank you I like the feedback loop it's pretty good all right thanks you ladies and gentlemen your attention please