 Good morning everybody. My name is Job. I've never been in a place as cold as this. It's truly frightening and I'm incredibly happy that it's very warm in here. So I was asked to talk about problem selection and when I thought about this, I thought, did I really ever think about problems? No, I had ideas and I think we've all been in a situation where if you've worked in a startup or maybe you're a programmer or your designer, you have a family member approaching you and say, I have this idea. It's going to change the world. I just need you to build it. You get 30%. And I realized that those ideas, and as you might know, are worth not very much. It's about what you do with those ideas. And so what I hope to convey to you today is how I stumbled through where I am today and maybe get you an idea of how to find that idea, how to iterate on it, and how to improve upon it. And so I want to tell you a little bit about my story. How did I get here and what have I done so far? As was mentioned, I have a background in neuroscience and the reason for that is I wondered how does the brain work? If we understand how the brain works, we can do a lot with that. Maybe we can build a computer that does something better. And so what I did is I studied neuroscience for many, many years and I started working in a laboratory specifically to understand how the brain processes the information. If we understand that, then we can understand everything. I quickly realized that we have no idea how the brain works. It's going to take many decades before there. And so I left neuroscience. And the reason I left neuroscience was not just because that realization that, okay, this is going to take a really, really long time. It was also because I realized that I want to start a startup. I want to be one of those cool kids that start a cool startup. And that's really all I really wanted. And my idea was, well, if you work on something that you love, then that's all you really need in life. Something exciting. And that's where I made my biggest mistake as of yet, which is I left neuroscience. I had no safety net. I had no money. I had about three months' savings. And I started with a really good friend of mine, Marcella. I started a company with the goal of helping people find work that they love. Three months later, I ran out of money and I had to find a job. It went nowhere. I did nothing. I achieved nothing. We started to build a product. I had a vision for it, an idea for it. We worked on it for three months. And that's it. Money was over. I had to find a job. I was very lucky that after that time, I ended up working at GitLab. And GitLab was an open source platform. And when I joined, I met the CEO. We were working together at a different company. It was very clear that we could build a business on this. There's hundreds of thousands. We estimated we're about 100,000 organizations worldwide that were using GitLab day-to-day. But there was no business supporting this. And so what did we do? We thought to ourselves, well, how do open source companies work today? And the way they all worked was they provided support to their customers. So there's an open source product and then there's a company to provide support and it can help them. And again, this is what we thought. We had no idea whether this was true. So we just started offering it. And at GitLab, we were in an incredibly fortunate situation, which is that the world's biggest company, I can't name the name, but you know it, the world's biggest company in the world was using GitLab. And they were using it fully unsupported. They were not paying for anything. It was open source. And so we said, okay, we're going to help you. We're going to support it. We charged them $1,000 for the first year, which was way too little. But it did help us get in contact with them. And what we learned was that, sure, they needed some support, but they wanted more than that. We always thought, you know, if we're going to start a company for this, we're going to build this amazing product. We're going to have this open source version and we're going to build a paid version. They're going to be the coolest features in the world. And that is what companies care about and that is what they were going to pay for. Turns out all they wanted was more audit logging, integration with our authentication system, and generally what I would describe as the world's most boring features you can imagine. But it was very interesting because it taught us that what customers want and what we thought was very different of what we imagined a priori. It was boring stuff. And so for the next five years, we built a lot of very interesting things at GitLab, but the things we made most money on was the boring stuff. It never ended. The boring stuff just kept coming. The larger the company, the more boring the stuff is and the more they were willing to pay for it. That's the unfortunate realization of building a company that sometimes you have this great vision and you end up building these very boring things. Now, that said, we also built very many cool things of which I'm very, very proud. Now, you might know that GitLab is a fully distributed company, so we never had any offices. I joined on day one. We were four guys or five guys in four different countries, no office that we could go to, and that's basically how we grew the company. We hired the best person we could find, and that was it. They didn't have to go to an office, they could work from wherever they want. We struggled with one thing. We struggled with, if we hire them, how do we pay them? How do we make sure they get benefits? How do we make that work? And we never really found a good solution. There were solutions. They were almost all universally terrible. The employees had a really poor experience because they were employed by local players that didn't understand what we were doing, and we as an employee were frustrated because it was slow and bureaucratic and above all very expensive. And so after five years at GitLab, I founded remote specifically to solve that problem. And so the goal of remote was very simple. We want to make it possible for any organization to scale up across the world effortlessly to just find someone great, Jane in Portugal, and just tell her, you can work for us, remote will take care of all the bureaucratic shit. And that was the goal. And it was very obvious from us early on that that is exactly what we wanted to do. But we also knew that this was going to take a really long time to build something like that. It would be incredibly complex. And I can tell you right now it took us almost 18 months before we could even sell a single thing to a single customer. Today, remote is in a very different place. We're a large organization. We have more than 600 employees and thousands of customers. We have a really cool booth there. You should definitely visit after this. And for the rest of this talk, I want to talk you through what I've learned doing that, building that company, and finding the right problem to solve, rather than something abstract. And just to be clear, all of this was done without an office. Remote is a really big company. We've never had any offices. I never met most of my colleagues. I met a few here today. And that's about it. So the very first thing that worked extremely well for us was that we started talking with customers or potential customers on day zero. This is not the day that we made our first sale. This was the day that we started the company. I still vividly remember we started remote January 25, 2019, that same day I had a call with a customer. And one of the first things we did was just telling them, look, we think you have this problem. Tell us more about it. This is what we're planning to build. This is how we're planning to address it. And for the next year, I did almost nothing else. We built a product. We started building something. But for the most part, I was spending the majority of my time talking with potential customers, understanding what is it that they're doing. When I mention this to friends that are building companies, they often ask me, like, how do you do this? Like, how do you find these companies to talk to? My advice is to just email people. People are extremely, extremely willing to talk to you and be friendly. You might get a few rejections, but that's fine. And that's exactly what we did. We spoke with, of course, GitLab, my previous employer, because they had this problem. But we also reached out to very big organizations, random people there, maybe people in the HR team in our case. We reached out to small startups, and we found that it was very easy to talk to people. And that helped us incredibly, because by the time we had a product to sell, we just had to tell these people, look, we built that thing that we were talking about. And while we were talking with these companies, we started to realize a few things. When I started the remote division, it was very clear. I want to build a product that solves global employment. Independent of where the person is that you want to hire, let's say you want to hire a person in Germany and a person in Portugal, we'll just take care of it. You just give us our name, how much you want to pay them, we'll take care of everything else. And when we are doing this, we always imagine that this is going to work for everybody. If we make it super easy, we abstract away all the difficulties, this is going to work for every single organization, every single person working at those kind of organizations. In having these conversations, what we learned is that what startups want, what scale-ups want, and what enterprises want was completely different. It was not the same thing. And in fact, even more so, what we found was that what tech companies want, and what maybe traditional manufacturers want, which yes, still employ people remotely nowadays, which is really cool, is again completely different. And so we started out with a simple problem, which is we're going to solve global employment, but very quickly we realized we had to scope it down. And we had to realize, we had to be realistic about what is the problem that we're exactly solving. Because the problem that we're solving can't be, we're going to do this for everybody. That is not a way to launch your product. No product is going to work for everybody on the first day. And if you're very honest about this, if you're humble about this and realize we can build this for a particular type of organization, you have a significantly better chance of actually converting those companies to customers. And so for us what we've learned was that very small startups, they cared very little about making sure that they're compliant. They should be, but they cared very little about it. And so our product was very expensive for them. Very large organizations, they were very interested in that, but they also had existing processes and everything had to be highly integrated with everything they did. It had to be completely aligned. And I don't know if you've ever worked with the purchasing department, but it's hell and it will take you months to get anything in your bank account. And so what we realized is that for us, the sweet spot for customer was the mature startup, the startup that had tens of people. And that is specifically how we started out. And that's exactly the first customer that we landed in the second one and up to the 10th, they were all identical. And that was because we were realistic and we learned, okay, the problem that we're solving today is not for everybody. Over time it might be and we might get there, but for now it's not. And so I asked around and I asked on Twitter, what is the problem you face when doing this? And a surprising amount of people told me, yeah, I built something before I validated the problem. As you might remember, I left neuroscience and I started building something and it was a complete disaster. Yeah, I did exactly this. This is a mistake that so many people make where you are so excited, you fall in love with the idea, you fall in love with a particular problem and you just start building away. You're like, let's go. The first day we should all be have a giant canman board on the wall or digitally and we should be coding away on a problem. And I want to encourage everybody to work really hard and get excited about things. But what often happens is that you fall in love with whatever you're building and it might not be what you should be building. And you should be talking to those customers from day one and this solves exactly for that. Another thing is that when you're working on figuring out what to build, you have to falsify your assumptions. You have to figure out what are my assumptions? What do I assume about this problem, about the space, about the customers? And then once you've done that, try to get to the point that customers tell you, no, you are wrong about those assumptions. And so for remote, our vision was very crystal clear. We're going to abstract everything away. Dealing with local labor laws, dealing with local contracts, it's a pain. Nobody wants to deal with that. And we assumed this was the right solution. And when we talked with customers, we didn't explicitly say this. We said we're going to make it easy. We're going to make it fast and we're going to make it affordable. But we never falsify the assumption that they don't want to see all this detail, that they don't want to be aware of this. And this is incredibly painful for us because once we started opening up for customers and we started onboarding more and more, we realized that the very large part of the companies that we work with actually did want to know. They wanted to know how does it work in France when someone goes to maternity leave? How does it work in Portugal if I want to pay someone a bonus? How is it text? And our assumption has always been you don't know that. That's crazy. You're going to have 50 people in 50 different countries. There's so much to know. And so we built an entire product that basically assumed, well, this is all going to be abstracted away. You're never going to see all this detail because that's a pain in the ass. And I tell you now, about 80% of our customers want to know every one of these details. They want us to solve it. Sure. They want us to be the expert. They want us to tell them this is how you do it. But all of them told us, yeah, no, we really want to see. We really want to understand what's going on here. And again, this was incredibly painful. This was a really hard lesson to learn at remote. And then again, I can't overstate this. If you fall in love with that problem, if you fall in love with the solution you're trying to build, it shouldn't be static. This is not the end state of where you want it to be. When we started remote, our vision was very simple and a problem that we were solving was very simple. We want you to be able to employ anybody from anywhere. And that was totally reasonable. That was a problem that was unsolved or it was solved but very, very poorly. And we thought this was going to be our company and this is what we're going to build on. But as we were doing that, and as we started to employ more people around the world, we realized that there's far greater problems that stand in the way not just of finding and having access to opportunities than an individual, but also with everything else. Making sure that people have benefits. Benefits are not the same everywhere in the world. Making sure that you can receive your money on time but also that you have access to it. And then if you live in a country with highly volatile currency, that's a problem in itself as well. And so one thing that we kept doing and we do up until today is we keep iterating whatever we are working on. And then is there a point at which you have to pivot? And again, this is something that I hear a lot from startup founders that are working on something for a very long time. When is the time to pivot? And my only feedback to this is that if you talk to customers, you listen to them, you falsify your assumption and you keep iterating, a pivot doesn't have to feel like a pivot. It's you're slowly taking a turn and your company is slowly going in a different course than you expected rather than making it feel like I've been running against the same mall for a very, very long time. Because ultimately, whatever you're doing, whatever you're building, it's a marathon. It takes a really long time. When you're building a company, when you're trying to solve something, there's no end states to that. There's not going to be a magical point in time in which you have done it, in which you feel like now I am done. If you have the most amazing idea for a product, you visualize it in your mind, you create mock-ups and you build that product, you still have to sell it. And then you sell it, and you have great success, then what do you do? You need to do something else. It's a marathon. It is never done. And it's very important. And again, I can't understate this. You have to take care of yourself in all of this because it's stressful and it's very, very difficult to build a company. And then when will you know that your problem is the right one, the one that you chose, the solution that you built or whatever you're working on is the thing that worked. It's money. It is money from customers on your bank account. It's very good to remember that someone can tell you, I will be willing to pay for this, is something completely different than someone actually sending you money. Remember me mentioning the purchasing departments? We've had so many customers that we spoke that said, this is the best. I'm definitely going to buy this. This is amazing. We were approaching lunch. When you're alive in this country, I'm going to work with you. And then when it came to it, a purchasing department, a lawyer or someone else tells, no, sorry, this is not happening because your contract has 4,000 lines and one of them I don't like. And we're not going to work with you. This happened so many times. Your problem, whatever you're thinking about today, whatever you're working on today, is going to be infinitely more complex than it always has been. And the best validation of you doing something right is money in your account from customers. And those are the customers that you will want to target. The ones that are willing and able and actually end up paying you. And that's it. The real world is incredibly messy. And so if you are now working on a startup or you're thinking about building something, take that into consideration. It's going to go very different than how you expected it to be. I mean, I can speak for myself, it's been much harder, much, much harder than anything I've ever expected to do. I had this great vision. I thought if we build this, then it works. We scale it up. We'll never have any problems. And it's basically the opposite. It's so messy the real world. There's so many complicated things that you will encounter. And that's part of it. You have to be patient and you don't have to get discouraged. Assume that things will go bad. Assume that things will get hard. That's the journey that you're on. Thank you very much. Find me at the booth there.