 Thank you so much. So I struggled a lot with the keynote topic for today. Essentially, I wanted to write something that I'm not sure I'm supposed to write, some like gatchitan or how to deal with shit of building your company. It always will end up with like a crazy weird word. So I just went with a safe option, like focus. Nice. The clicky thing works. My name is Marcelo. I'm a CEO and co-founder of Remote. And the only reason I'm sort of entitled to be here is to talk to you about my experience as a founder, someone building stuff and what I've done as well. Remote is a company of a thousand people. We're all across the world, all distributed. We don't have an office. We started in 2019 and we built very big, large organization. And I'm not my first time being a co-founder, let alone a leader in a company. So today my talk is going to be, you know, not to tell you exactly what to do, but what shit you should avoid. Because, you know, advice goes, it's very free, but it doesn't mean it's good. So I'm going to talk to you about two phases, two things that usually go when you're building out a product or building out a company. For one, let's talk through how you build a company and then we'll talk a bit about how to build a business. And why that is somewhat different. As far as building your company goes, there are three important things. Ego, mutation, and outcomes. One of the things that I learned at my own expense is that throughout the years, the one thing that is not needed while you're building a business or a company is your ego. It adds nothing to the table. If anything, it actually detracts. You're leading a lot of people. It's a bunch of people, either small and you're very small, very young as a company, or quite big. So if everyone brings their ego to the table, you're probably going to double the amount of people in that room as well. So ego is often confused as being proud, being happy, being deliberate, or even pushy. There's nothing to do with business at all. Ego is typically a manifestation of our own intrinsic instinct to win above everything. It's almost like a survival mode. But it most often detracts from the end game. So I've never seen a case where the ego actually adds anything to the discussion, to the success, or the role of the company. Then it goes through mutation. You know, as people, we're not yet robots yet. Big emphasis on that. We change quite a lot. We learn, we grow. Companies go through the same process. And what we know from building a company is that companies, as far as culture goes, they change drastically every 12 to 18 months. If you're in a company building a product, you understand it. If you look back where you were 12 to 18 months ago, it's probably a completely different place too. So when setting out to build 18, hiring, growing, this is something that has to be very well-defined, even with the expectation of your own employees, your colleagues. Because that means that either the company is going to outgrow a lot of the people, but also that the people will outgrow the company. And the odds are it will happen quite a lot. And so if the rules of the game are quite explicit, you avoid situations like, you know, someone trying to get on to a job that they are no longer fit for, or they actually are fit for something bigger, more impactful. And that if the company is aware of this, it is fundamentally true that your chances for success together are a lot better, but at the same pace, if none of the parties realizes this, then you get to a point where you're in a company for three, four years, and maybe you feel that your career stalled, or maybe the company feels that you're no longer suited to do the job that you're doing. And often is the case that it's a good thing that you both part ways, because you decide to leave the company out, that the company decides that, you know, you're great at what you're doing, but not to move forward with the company or in that role that you thought you'd be taking. So let the expectation of that, even writing that down as you hire someone, you know, make sure that you're both set up in a sort of employer-employee relationship that is quite transparent. So ultimately, the last item that is super important, in my opinion, is to understand what matters for every company, for every business, for any project, product, project, task, is what comes out of it. It's very easy to get bogged down with the details of, you know, the task of doing the thing, of the meeting about the meeting for the meeting, or even the bike shedding of the meeting. So ultimately, what you get out of things is the only thing that matters. If you go through, you know, several processes of discussions, you know, goals, milestones, roadmaps, discussions around any kind of topic, the outcomes are the only things that matter. Yes, you can look at all the work that went through it, all the investment that went through it, but if you achieved nothing, or if you achieved half of what you wanted to achieve, that doesn't mean that you were successful. That means that you were a busy bee, but probably you didn't go where you wanted to go. So these are the three main things that as far as building your company goes, it is important to keep in mind. Like, of course, there are many situations, you know, hurdles, problems that you're going to face throughout the whole process. And, you know, it's fine not to be fine in several situations that you will not have the answers. But at least if you realize that these three things are core to how you run a business, you understand that without ego, you can look at things pragmatically. You can analyze your data and make the best decisions out of it. If you understand that both your business, your projects, the changes that, you know, the market pushes on you or that you push on the market, make heavy changes on your business and your company, then you're ready to adapt to it and you're not clinging to the status quo of what a company is or should look like, or used to look like six months ago. And ultimately, how that together drives the outcomes, the success of that company. So ultimately as a baseline, it enables you to start building your business. So as long as you have a baseline to operate internally, you can start building and addressing your needs externally. One of the things that I've learned, you know, is building a business as big as remote and as challenging complex as remote, is that it's super easy to, you know, follow the rabbit, right? Go down the rabbit hole, especially when you think, you know, you have all the anxiety if you're, you know, pumped with all the, you know, that need and drive to get stuff done and, you know, you have this pool, 10 customers saying they also want that feature, another 20 customers saying they're super keen to sign if you add that one thing. But all this data, all this information means nothing because if you're not able to hyper-prioritize, it means that you're going to half-ass a bunch of things rather than, you know, focus and actually deliver one. It's a very big difference when you get to the end of a quarter, semester, whatever you want to measure, and you say, well, actually, we have six half features all in a way. Great. How many customers are affected by that? None. How much revenue can you drop by that? None. So hyper-prioritization comes when it's painful to go through the motions of every day and say, yes, I will not do that extra thing that I think it's important. And as leaders, it's very easy for you to say, well, yeah, but I really need this. Like, my customers really also need that and I could be really good and it's going to take less time that I'm going to, as many as capacity or resources. Odds are, you're always going to need more time, always going to need more people, and you're going to end up distracting you from the main goal. So hyper-prioritization is one of the things that I've found is super common across all founders that you say, hey, are you prioritizing? Yeah, absolutely. So how many things are you doing? And then comes the shopping list. Of all the things that are super important for your business. Like, yeah, my business can survive without these 10. Now, the fact is that probably from those 10, only one will drive your business forward in the next year or in the next six months. And what you're doing actually is adding more stuff to your plate and you're not going to complete them all at all. And so it's important to understand how hyper-prioritization happens when from a grocery shopping list, you can pick only one to two things or three tops if you're really good and really big and you have the money for it. And the rest is just slated to be reduced. If shit hits the fan, you know that all those things can go and you're only going to focus on that. And so you apply relentless iteration and dedication to those items. And yes, you're not going to deliver 10 things, but you're going to deliver three and then more three and then more three and then more three. And you can measure your progress and you can start capitalizing on that progress too. And as far, you know, we're bombarded every single day with customer requests, customer complaints with internal ideas. And especially, you know, all founders have great ideas in the shower either because, you know, they spend too much time on that or just they take their time to cry a bit in the shower. And so there's always going to be room and source for inspiration across all what you do, all that you do. But then how do you decide how to prioritize? You know, I've spoken about, you know, the things about building a company on the three motors, but, you know, how does hyper-prioritizing help you go through, you know, picking from that list? So this is what I usually call taming chaos. Well, it's sort of a fancy name, but I needed to put something there. I didn't really know what. And so mathematically speaking, you can look at this from a very well-known, very old mathematical issue, which is local maximum and global maximum. Local maximum, local maximum. So on local maximum, this is usually what we reach when we have a big set of problems, a huge set of things that we want to tackle. Because the noise is so big and so loud that your quality of signal to noise ratio is very poor. That means that because you're not really able to hyper-prioritize, that you're going to be left with the things that you think are the best for you to do. Now, the problem is when you're blindsided by what you don't know that you don't know. And this is what leads you to the global maximum. The global maximum tells you from the whole universe, what is that one thing that you could be doing to propel your business forward, your team force, your project forward at the best available speed. So this is typically done when you're able to read the whole universe in a way, section how you read it, and also understand it. And hyper-prioritize helps you do that and also is fueled by that process. And there are many ways and many frameworks that you can read about it. Through experience, I managed to get through something very basic. You'll probably not read about this anywhere. I made it up. It works for me. If it doesn't work for you, well, it's tough to view. But to be honest, it does work very well in a matter of simplicity. So if you think through a capacity pipeline, a processing pipeline, you get an input, you end up with an output. These things are typically what you see in a shopping store. You have someone processing your shop, your stuff. It goes beep and then pass it on. You can measure all that goes around from speed, capacity, and efficiency. How fast can that person process that? How many things can that person process in parallel? And how well does it get done? Well, if you look at, you know, any project, any company, any task, from these three angles, and they can take completely different aspects. Let me give you an example from engineering perspective. You have a team, and you need to understand how good that team are doing. Because you need to understand, like, if you've reached a local maximum, or if you can improve how that team is doing, right? Maybe you have a hunch that that team is doing well, or good enough. Maybe you think that they're not really good enough. So you need to understand if they've reached a local maximum, or if they're already in a global maximum. So the way to declutter information is to try to match it. So find the one thing that maps speed. Speed could mean different things across the business. For an engineering team, it could be how fast you ship features. How fast do you fix a bug? How fast do you fix a first ticket? Capacity is essentially how many things can you process at the same time? How many features does this team ship in a given cycle? How many things get tackled in the same cycle? And efficiency, how many bugs are created? How many technical escalation do you have? Or even downtime do you have? So ultimately, you can spin this around for different aspects in different timelines. But ideally, you're going to single out the three more important things per stage of your company, be it revenue, be it customer success, or wherever they are, and you balance them across the three edges. And so by doing that, it paints a very good picture of overall how your business is doing. And so doing this, you can get whatever data you want, but it forces you to hyper-prioritize on these three parameters. And you can absolutely be certain that if you look into the three, you know, top things that you could be doing at a certain point in time, you're going to focus only on that and, you know, by the theory of optimization, if you focus on the three biggest problems and you eliminate them, your system by default is optimized. So applying a very short, you know, efficiency model like this, it allows you to propel quite forward in completely a hyper-optimized way. Now, of course, this matters nothing. If you keep doing it, try to apply that to 10 different things. And that's why hyper-prioritization is super important. So ultimately, at the end of, you know, a quarter, it's fine to look at this and say, okay, now I've eliminated, you know, my biggest problem with speed, I'm actually going to change this into something else. You'd be amazed at how fast, you know, this can propel both your team or your projects because of how much focus can drive a business and how much efficiency it can bring onto what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. You know, I can promise you that this will work 100% in all the cases that you have, but I can promise you that it's going to be how you do better than not knowing, because when you don't know what you don't know, then you're going to be completely focused on a local maximum, much rather than a global maximum. So on the last topic, you know, how do you know if hyper-prioritization and taming the amount of chaos that you have is working? Well, it's quite simple. For one, you keep the main thing the main thing. If you ask anyone around your team, your business, they should all say the same things. If you have three priorities, if you have one priority, if you ask anyone in the business and you can do this today, maybe you take, well, my company is pretty much hyper-prioritized. We all very much focused on delivering what we need to deliver. Easy. Do that exercise. Walk around. There's a very old way of doing business, which is walking the floor. You talk to all your employees. Ask them the same things. What is the main thing for you? And if you see the disparity and the responses, that means that you're super far away from what you think you are. And I can bet that, you know, all of you that think, well, but we're super hyper-prioritized. 99% you would not be hyper-prioritized. Even, you know, we try to apply this as much as humanly possible. And to a point that is painfully simple and painfully simple. I mean, if you're a leader, you're always thinking about new things, that extra thing, that thing that you also want to nail, that new goal, that new business line, it's going to hurt when you wake up and then you think, well, I'm doing these things, but I should also be doing that and also add that. So at the end of the day, it's going to be painful for you because you have to remind yourself that you cannot expand upon that and that you're going to get stuck. But when you see the results of your discipline, then you understand how success looks like. So these have been the things that I've been following the last few years. It's a very simple approach. There's no magic to it. There's no secret sauce. There's no rocket science behind it. This is not behind any 300-page book. But this is something that we've put together across a lot of different iterations, different models growing many different teams and learnings that resonate across an entire organization that spans across the world. It is about keeping things simple. It is about hyper-focus and reducing chaos to its minimum form. And only that you get a glimpse of what focus means to your business. And that's it. Thank you so much. I'm going to be here.