 great to be here in Helsinki. You guys are here in person, but our conversation is about remote work and people communicating with their bosses remotely. So we were talking a little bit about this on the call the other day and about how things have shifted a little bit. Maybe last year people were, a couple years ago, obviously people were, you know, fully gung-ho about working remote, but now we're seeing a little bit of a change. What are you seeing? Are you finding some people want to go back to the office now? Well, I don't think remote was ever the right thing for a hundred percent of people out there. Nothing is right for a hundred percent. I think forty percent of the people they like remote, forty percent they like to be in the office, now they can do that, and twenty percent they'll go to whatever company appeals to them and they don't really care as much. So it's that forty percent that, you know, we as an all remote company are going after. What about you? I mean, your business kind of revolves around people being remote, right? Yeah, I disagree with that a little bit. You know, I think, you know, we do ideas, we help companies globally hire and globally expand, right? So I think post-pandemic there's definitely some people that feel the need to actually go back to the office because they feel like they'll have more control over that and hopefully the tools that we're building will help even more people feel the trust in their team. But I think it's a matter of finding the right balance and, you know, going back to the office, like Quincy said, is a matter of like the founder, the culture of the company. And I think what we'll end up having is a mix of different companies having the right setups for themselves, right? Flexibility is going to be a big thing over the next few years. And so are you finding that there's there's a geographic difference between attitudes towards remote work? I mean, I guess since you have, you know, so many international clients, maybe you have some visibility into that? I don't think we see geographic differences. I think we see vertical differences. So if you look at like larger banks, for example, you know, they feel the need to have people in the office while startups are a bit more flexible on that front. But I think it's what's going to happen. The way we see it is most companies understand that they need to adapt to the world of today, right? Like you can't force people to go into the office. It's not as efficient. It's not about a nine to five nine to five anymore. It's about building a structure that is focused on the outputs of your team. And yeah, it's it's really not been about geography, right? Because you have companies like Quincy in the US that are fully distributed and let people work from wherever they want. It's always been for us about the larger companies, the one that feel unsafe about their workers, not their teams, you know, not actually being working when they're at home. That's the main issue we've seen from most companies. And those big banks, they're so big that they have so many different locations. So any employee at one of these big companies is remote with respect to most of the people at their company. So even if they're in an office, they may be working with five percent of the employees at their company. I love it when people like force you in the office. And, you know, the main thing I love to tell them is like, well, when you have a building with 10 floors, you probably not seeing each other anyway. So what really is the difference there? I do get that there's some roles that like need to be in office, right? They need to be next to like the trader or things like that. But in general, the way we've been thinking about helping companies go global and helping companies like embrace the right flexibility for their team is just understanding their needs. And I think there will be some form of clawback over the next few months over the next few years, but it'll go back eventually to just being more flexible. And so you mentioned that you're hearing that, you know, maybe 40 percent want to be in person or 40 you had to break down of different needs for different people. So how do you reconcile those differences? You know, maybe some people want to be home, but their team wants them in. How do you have it? You navigate that? Yeah, well, you find people that like doing whatever your company is doing. So we're all remote and we build tools for developers. You know, we we have code intelligence and I'm a dev and I know that the times as a dev when I was coding, when I was most productive is when I could get in this total flow state and no interruptions whatsoever for like eight or 12 hours. That's when devs are most productive. So I know that and that's why I wanted to build a company that was all remote to there's a lot of other devs that feel that way. But there's a lot of devs that don't want that and they're not going to lie in the interview process. No one's going to interview with a company that works in a completely different way from how they want. So I think you just got to be up front about the way that you work. We have this public handbook. We're inspired by GitLab in that. We talk about how we work and what it means to be all remote and how there's freedom and how we're async. And then we find those people that want that. And if they don't want that, then I don't think they're even going to come and talk to us. Yeah, we found a good middle point for us. We basically, you know, I wish I announced that recently. We did a pretty big partnership with WeWork where what we do is we give global memberships to every single one of our employees, our internal team. And what they can do is they can go to the office to any WeWork whenever they want around the world. And what we've seen is there's like clusters of people within geolocation. So for a context where about 1,800 people so you have like the London office and I think there's a couple of people from there that would just say, hey, I'm going to the Covent Garden we work today and then suddenly you'd have 30 people from there going to that WeWork. So there's a good balance between like when does it make sense to have a separation from home and to the office and when do you want to go there? You just need to build the right infrastructure to support your team on how to do it. And so are you finding that sometimes companies are listing jobs by time zone now instead of by location? I heard that that might become a trend. We try to, at least on the PNN side, on the practical engineering side, we try to have like, so we're built in a way that we have like micro teams, engineers and product managers. We try to put them on the same time zone just because it's easier for them to work. I know you're a big fan of async. It's a little harder for us, but like maybe that's an interesting perspective as well, right? Yeah, we hire without respect to time zone. We don't try to get teams that are all in the same time zone and that's because we feel it's important even if you're in the same time zone to have a working culture that supports being asynchronous. And that again means if you're working async then when you need to get a lot of work done, you can get in flow, you have all the contacts you need, you don't need to bug someone else or wait on someone else for all the information. If you make it so that people have the contacts that they can work, that's what it means to be async and then you can have people from any time zone. I wish I could work like that. I don't manage. Async is too hard for me. Like, there's so many things happening at the same time. It's like, I think there's some roles that work better async, right? Like, engineering works pretty well. But for us, customer support or sales, no way they can go async. Like, they have to be in the time zone of the customers all the time. Yeah, and that's right. I mean, async is not perfect. But you also got to balance it against, if you're async and you hire in any time zone, you can find the best people in the world no matter where they live. And not all the best people live in the Bay Area or in Finland or whatever. So it's all a trade-off. So do you do anything to help employees bond because sometimes if people are only communicating over a slack, maybe tone can be misinterpreted and what have you. So how do you make sure your employees get to know each other? Yeah, so we went all remote right before COVID. So we... But before it was cool. Before it was cool. About a month before it was cool. And everyone at the time was like, you're making a huge mistake. And then we looked like geniuses about a month later. And I think a lot of people got the wrong idea of what it means to be all remote in COVID. Everyone was forced to be all remote. And everyone was essentially anti-social. You couldn't actually meet people in person. Now we did not go all remote because we're anti-social. I actually love meeting up with people. Our team loves seeing each other. And we actually have more quality time. So we will fly the whole company together to meet up twice a year and we'll have a lot of different team meetups. And when you're with your team you're not hunched over some laptop in a co-working space. You're not just seeing them at the water cooler. You're actually spending quality time with them for two or three days. I think that can build stronger bonds than just sitting next to someone at the office or having them be three floors up in the office. So all remote does not have to be an anti-social and it should not be anti-social. Bringing 1,800 people is gonna be hard in one place. But I think like we built a lot. We actually built products to help people connect. So for example, we have a plugin that you put on Slack and you'll match people every week. We've crossed the company from different departments so they can spend some time together. Obviously for example, it's the end of the year. So allocating different budgets so people within the same city can spend some time together for nice dinners and things like that. So what we found is similar to Queen, people travel like within teams. Last week I was in Amsterdam for work and suddenly there was 25 people because 10 people from the customer success team decided to be all together in Amsterdam for that weekend. So I think people find ways to connect with each other and we need to do our best to enable that as a company. What do you do about talent that maybe, what if they don't live in a good home environment for being productive? I mean, do you provide WeWork memberships or maybe not WeWork but some sort of office space or are you just operating on the assumption that everyone has a quiet workspace at home? Yeah, I know you said you have that WeWork partnership. We offer reimbursements for co-working spaces for team members and all of that stuff is so much cheaper than having one centralized office so it completely makes sense. I think there is a valid concern around if you are very early in your career, are you gonna get all of that interaction with other team members? And so I can totally understand if a lot of people that are very early in their career choose to go to an in-person company but what I would say even there, that's, you know, when we talk about that we're thinking of someone who's in the Bay Area or in Paris or Berlin and if you're a young person there, yeah, maybe go work at a company but most young people in the world who are really talented don't work somewhere where there's a lot of tech companies around and they don't have the option of going to an in-person company. And so for those people, it's great if they could work at a world-class company anywhere in the world, that's an awesome opportunity for them. But what can you do, you know, for the people that do join your company and their entry level, what do you do to help them have a better onboarding experience and, you know, a real, I guess, apprenticeship? Yeah, well, we have to have team members that genuinely want to help them onboard. We have a lot of stuff written down. We also spend a lot of time with them. We get them together in person, not, you know, in an office all the time but we have all those touchpoints. And also, you know, it's a self-selected group of people that do want that and overall we have less, you know, junior, new-to-the-workforce employees and other companies and I think that just the, you know, the reality of an all-around company. It's not good or bad and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. So, I mean, there was a talent crunch for a while and that might be changing a little bit as unfortunately there have been a lot of tech layoffs lately and I'm wondering how that could impact all this. I mean, maybe, you know, people were more demanding before about, you know, having precisely the right work environment and I don't know, are you seeing anything change in the interview process about remote? It's interesting for us, right? Because as a company that enables companies to hire, right? Like, we've been, you know, I believe a pretty good partner to help those companies in downsizing, right? As they need to just solidify their business. Yeah, I think that in general, we're gonna start in a couple months because people still have a lot of money in the startup world and if the market doesn't pick it back up on the fundraising side, I think you're gonna start seeing a bit of an employer-driven market. It definitely was an employee-driven market over the last few years, which is, you know, it's great for employees but when such downsizing happened and companies need to tighten the bet a little bit, you know, you need to start cutting some parts. I was talking to, well, Lindsay couldn't make it today and, you know, as they developed the company, you know, they rolled out a lot of great perks but some of them were not used at all but still removing things that are not used is very complicated. So, in general, we're definitely seeing companies kind of rethinking where they're gonna spend their money. Maybe not all the benefits that they rolled out are being used properly and might not be as useful. So, yeah, I'm definitely betting on more of an employer-driven market over the next few years. But I think even in an employer-driven market, it's not as though all remote is just a perk to employees. Yes, it's very employee-friendly. A lot of employees love it but it's also good for business. I mean, if you wanted to pitch it to Elon Musk who is moving away from that, you could say, well, Elon, what if all of your employees had an office at their house that they could work at 24-7 and they have no excuses to not work? Now, that's not our pitch for all remote but that is one way you can look at it and it's very employer-friendly. So I think it's win-win. I don't think that all remote is some fad that, you know, employees demanded and now it's gonna go away now that it's a tighter market. It seems like some of the large companies are, you know, either encouraging or demanding people go into the office more and I wonder, you know, is that gonna benefit companies? Like yours, where they are more flexible about remote work and people say, oh, I don't want to work at, you know, giant company X anymore because they're forcing me to go in. It's just, right? Like the reason why they need people to come back is because they feel they don't have control. They feel like people are not working as hard as they should, right? So if you build the right infrastructure, in our case, we're very KPI and output-driven, right? Like people need to deliver on X and Y and Z as long as they do, I don't care if they're in office or not, right? But those companies feel like they have more control when they have those people in office, right? So I definitely think that a lot of people, and I've seen it happen and I've seen people working at those large companies being very frustrated, will leave their job if you don't give them the flexibility, but more importantly, the trust, right? Like if you're a very talented person, you can work anywhere. Might as well work in a place that feels, like where you feel trusted, right? And empowered. You mentioned earlier something about how, you know, you're getting different kinds of employees who maybe didn't live in a major city and didn't have access to this kind of opportunity before. How are you going about finding these people? I mean, is it just through online job postings, or, you know, if they're not in your current city and within your network, I mean, how do you find an interview talent remotely? Well, usually they find us. Our product is for devs. Any software developer can use it. It's code intelligence, so, you know, it applies pretty much any dev is working in a big code base. So if they've heard of us, then hopefully they find their way on to see that we're hiring and see how we work. So we've got an advantage in that way. Are you getting open source on some parts? Yeah, we're open for that. That's such a nice trick. Like to hire great people, being open source for engineers is like one of the best thing you could be doing. Yeah, it helps us hire people that have used our product at their previous company. So what we're seeing sometimes is other companies are laying people off or downsizing. Then they're like, well, what are the tools that I loved using the most? And then they'll think of us and they'll see us and no matter where they are in the world, they can apply. So you just cast the net so much wider and it means you get the best people from all around the world. So is your interview process fully remote? Yeah, it is. In a few cases, candidates have asked if they can come and meet up in person. And yeah, that's totally fine too. Because again, we're not religious about this. We're not anti-social. That's not why we're all remote. We're all remote because we think it's a better way to get really focused, great work done. It really helps you hire faster as well, right? When the word is your playground, when you're hiring people just based on their skills, when you're able to set up interviews in such a fast cadence, not having to fly in and all of those things, it just makes the experience really nice. If you have the right team, the right process, you can really give a great experience to people which I think is better than making them fly for 20 interviews in one day which some big banks like to do. And so, how do you go about assessing how productive your employees are? I know there's been some very controversial stuff like employee tracking software for remote workers and what have you. I mean, hopefully you're not invading people's privacy but how do you measure someone's productivity if you're not able to see them? Well, even if you can see them, it's hard to, if you're in that mindset, to measure their productivity. In fact, if you can see them and if they're friendly over lunch and you really like them as a person and all that, that can actually bias your judgment. And ultimately, you want a company based on trust and based on results and yeah, that's really hard to build but it's not a problem unique to all remote. Yeah, being very based on results, doing a really full jobs on OKRs, KPI, defining everything so that, very unbiased you can say, well, there's some rules that are easy, right? Like sales is a bit easier, our support is a bit easier to quantify but generally having either binary or like pretty interesting KPI and making sure that you follow through and make sure you actually do your performance review and assessment on those KPIs is what we've seen the most productive, right? And I think it's worked pretty greatly for us. And something else that has always struck me is a lot more roles are remote than we actually think. There's so many accountants and lawyers and people that travel all the time, people who play basketball or football, they're all remote. You travel all the time, you don't maybe call it all remote but that's essentially what you are. My first job out of college, there was an office but I was traveling to visit customer sites basically 100% of the time. And so way more companies are actually making all remote work than call themselves all remote. I mean, do you feel like you're a remote worker? Well, Bloomberg requires three days a week in person and we even have a Helsinki office that I'll be visiting while I'm here. But do you feel like you need to be at the office to actually write quality content and meeting good founders and writing about deals? Sorry, if I put it, you can also skip it, you know? Well, yeah, I'm getting interviewed all of a sudden. I mean, with the reporting kind of job, they understand I'm often at conferences and what have you and so we view that as in-person work accounts. But yeah, I mean, you know, I'm curious if you guys have seen any data or any information that shows how remote first companies compare to in-person companies in terms of performance and productivity. I have not, that would be very interesting of you. No, we, you know, now we just serve companies remote or not so like we, and we, you know, we don't really look at productivity data, like it's more about helping them grow but again, for us it's, what we're seeing is companies just finding their fit, right? It's not about being all remote or all this, it's not about all in the office, it's about, you know, based on like the leadership team, the C-level team, like what fits us better. But I think you can run the experiment in a couple years, right? Now that you have fully remote companies like ours or Quinn's, right? Like, let's see which are the best performing ones per cohorts, I guess, that's one of the ways to see it as of now, no tangible data, let's say. Well, GitLab is doing okay, right? They crushed their last quarter, didn't they? I think so, I'm not sure. There's a lot of great companies out there that are all remote, that are doing really well. I don't know how you'd perform that experiment though. That'd be very interesting. You need to, you know, make it randomized or something. That would be very interesting. Well, maybe if you're a public company and you measure quarterly results based on when the employees were in the office versus at home, I don't know. You do hire faster. If that was out there. You hire faster, I'll say that, right? Like, when you are, it's just much easier to not only find great talent, but just move across the different departments at the company that, well, think about it, right? Like, I'd say you're a San Francisco-based company. You want to hire for, you know, 100 roles over the next two months. You're still competing with all the startups around. You're still, you know, it's very expensive to hire there. And you're limited to like who can come to the office, which is very, like, it's quite limiting radius, like 30 miles radius, right? So I'd say, like, if the market is favorable for high growth, which I don't know how it is today, that is definitely a strong advantage. And so, since you deal with a lot of companies that are doing hiring themselves, are you finding that companies have sort of a one-size-fits-all approach, either remote or not remote, or are they saying, okay, certain departments, we want them in, you know, for weekly meetings, or what are you seeing on that? It's funny. It's like, I talk to two different founders. I think that even spoke today, or they are speaking later today on stage. You know, one of them told me, engineers, I want in the office, I want them together, but salespeople, they can do whatever they want. And the other founder told me they straight up, as engineers, they can work from where they want, but salespeople, I want them all in the office, like talking each other up and selling together. So I think the answer is the same, right? It's like, everybody builds a company and hires people to a culture that they're kind of like building as a team, and that culture shapes up to be a mix of whatever feels best for you, right? And if it is engineering in the office and salespeople outside or vice versa, you know, it develops the right, most successful company, they build a model that fits really well for them. And so since you were one of the first to be remote first, I mean, were there any sort of growing pains in making that switch? I mean, obviously everyone else started, I guess once the pandemic happened and there was the whole stress of that, but before even dealing with the stress of the pandemic, what were the hurdles you faced? Well, I mean, it's all trade off. So before we went all remote, we were remote first, and that was because when we were starting SourceGraph in 2013, DevTools were not cool. Everyone would say, oh, you can't sell to Devs. And so it was hard for us to hire in the Bay Area, which is where I live. We saw our friends going to Facebook and all these other, you know, many generations of trends have come and gone in the time that we've just been at this. So it was, we didn't really have a choice. Definitely we've seen that async takes a lot of thought to make it so that you have all the context written down and so that you've got those cultural relationships built beforehand that let you just get in focus. But all of that, it seems like you'd wanna do all of that even if you were in person. So it feels like it is a forcing function to do async well, but that's all a good thing to do. So, you know, they're growing pains in a sense, but I would not attribute them to being remote, per se. What about you? I mean, are you seeing any challenges that some companies face when shifting from in-person to remote? I mean, luckily for us, we were remote from the beginning. I've never worked in an office, so I don't even know what it feels like. So... Never worked in an office? Never, no, so. So I can really understand the gap or the difference, but I think the shift is hard, right? Like if you go from an all-in office, everyday together culture to suddenly being alone, like you really, and that's why, you know, I think people in HR over the last two years were such the glue of companies. I mean, they always are, but specifically in those times because accompanying people into 316 to how they're set up and how they work and their day-to-day was a big deal. So I can definitely see how companies have failed and try to go back to a model that they know and they understand, specifically if your executive team is a bit more comfortable with that model. And, but again, I think it'll be a matter of balance, right? Like what we're seeing is some companies that went back into the office are starting to lose their talents, so they need to adapt their policies again to something that makes more sense. Any last thoughts on the remote work? I would just say it's not one-size-fits-all. Some companies should be all remote, some should not, and, you know, same for employees. Some people want all remote, some people want to go into an office, and that's okay. And if you're one of those companies that is all remote, that's 40%, maybe even 60%, because it's a 40% of the people in the world that want all remote, plus the 20%, they could kind of go either way. You just want to make it so that you attract the best people in that group. You guys are in how many countries already? We have, I think, 34 countries, about 225 people all around the world. And no specific cluster anywhere, right? Like, really everywhere. Well, the clusters were not intentional. We have clusters in Berlin and Paris and London and SF, and then just a lot of people all around the world, too. That's kind of like the beauty of it, right? Like, the ability to bring such a diverse group of people, and I don't know how you're hiring processes are, but just the idea that you are able to say, hey, we just want the best talent, we just want to be able to hire the best people, and you might want to open offices in those locations and just look for the best people in those local countries, but the mindset, one of the things we kind of came out of a deal realizing through helping all those companies is, sure, there will be discussions on whether you go for a hybrid model, full office model, but the concept of, I've broadened my horizon when it comes down to building a team, and now I'm just looking in general, albeit I might prefer to have 80% of my team with me, I will take chances on people and give opportunities to more people around the world. I think that's kind of like the beauty that came out of remote working in general, apart from the flexibility, and this is one of the trends we're the most excited about, like being able to tap into the hundreds of millions of amazing people that are as talented as your barrier people or others, and just giving them the opportunity to work for the best companies in the world, that's something we're very excited about, and that is not going away, right? That's what we've seen. Yeah, that promise is just so motivating. I mean, personally, when I was learning to code, I was, I don't know, 11 or 12, and I loved that growing up in Chicago, Illinois, right in the middle of the US, I didn't know anyone else who coded. Chicago was not a big hotbed of tech at the time, but I could go on the internet and no one knew that I was 11 years old, and also I could work with the best people building code out there anywhere in the world, and that was so magical. And then the Google CEO came to town and gave a talk and I happened to attend it, and I go up, I was in high school, and I'm like, hey, I think Google's really cool. I know how to code, and he's like, oh, we don't hire high schoolers and we're only hiring California, and that was such a letdown to me, but I love this new world where, no matter where you are in the world, you can go and work with the best people in tech, and you can go work at the best tech companies. That is so inspiring for me personally to have some small role in creating that kind of world for all these young people out there, and also I love as a CEO that we can hire those amazing people that have this crazy talent somewhere in the world where we would not have found them if we were just in the Bay Area. Do you hire high schoolers? Yes, we would. I think we don't intentionally do that, but we have because, I mean, I also work with this nonprofit called Hat Club, which is a kind of global, high school age coding community, and the kind of things that kids can build, it's amazing. And I think like, wow, I wish I could not have a job and kids take care of sometimes to just go and code and you can get a lot done, and there's so many kids that have that so much freedom and time, and they can build amazing things. So yeah, we would. There's one time we actually had to check the age on a candidate, and it turns out his parents were down waiting in the car during his interview. Look how different the world is gonna be. If you think 20 years back, you wanted, even not that a long time ago, you wanted to work for the best company you had to move, now that you don't, now that you can just hopefully find the right opportunities, I think just generally the word dynamics, the immigration dynamics are gonna be super interesting and I'm excited for this new word and I'm excited for what economies are gonna profit from that and how the world is going to develop. All right, well thank you so much. Great to hear about remote work. Thank you so much. Thanks.