 Thank you, Caspar. Hey, good morning everyone. Hi Yes, Caspar mentioned it's a very special moment for me to this morning here because I've been on the other side of this for the last five years and I'm actually enjoying work. I'm Europe really as An attendee and a speaker for the first time now. I understand why everybody was enjoying that I didn't get that before I was like all they're crazy So, yeah, I'm I'm very honored to be here with you this morning. My name is Paolo Belcastro. I Come from Vienna, Austria where I've been living for six years and Yeah, as Caspar mentioned distributed Teams and remote work have been in my life for as far as I can remember But today I would like specifically to share three experiences that I had in the last 12 years and these three experiences are quite different from each other But they have something linking them and I find that in what connects them there is a key to giving back to this Awesome WordPress community Some of the amazing value it gives us and at the same time grow professionally and personally this presentation is going to be a little bit different from what Usually you have a presentation then you have questions in the end, you know, so that you can ask the speaker some things now I like people who know me know I like to talk to people but They also know I like to talk with people and So I'd like this to be a little more of a dialogue instead of me talking to you And then at the end only you asking questions to me And so as in a dialogue, I'm gonna tell you some things about me And I'm gonna ask you a few questions so that you can tell me things about you and then all over the Time we have together you can ask me questions and we'll take a couple of breaks to actually answer them So how does this work? well You take your phone your iPad your laptop whatever you have with you and you go to that address WMNT.com and you use that code and for a little more precision here of the instruction and Then you will see a slightly different version of the slides We have on screen that allows you to ask me questions react to what I say or to Answer to questions that I ask you I'm gonna leave the Those details up up top for a little bit and by the way this works also from home So I know that we have a live streaming today. If you're home, you're free to please answer ask react the same way After all this is about distributed teams. So it's a distributed talk so the first experience let's Before going to the first experience, let's do a little bit of training I'm gonna ask you a few questions and you answer and so we see if this works. Well, so first of all How are you feeling this morning? It's the first day of work camp Europe second for those of you were at the contributor day Are you feeling energized and ready or? You're looking for coffee. Are you? Oh, nobody's wondering why they're here. That's great. That's good so Good, I see that most people are energized and ready and for those who need coffee It's totally normal at this time of the day. So no worries there Will I think there is coffee out there and tea by the way? So Let's move on with another type of question. I come from Vienna today But I lived in Switzerland before and before that I lived in France and originally I came from Italy What do you come from tell me? Oh Nice We have a lot of local members of the local community. That's amazing So see people from all over Europe. I like that It's what makes work camp Europe so special that every year we have dozens. Oh Sorry, the code went away. Let's put it back here. I'm gonna try to leave it there for a little bit So one once more people are coming from all over Europe and the world because I see many many countries there That are not actually in Europe And so let's see. Okay, of course work camp Europe is in English. I do speak English obviously I was born in Italy. I speak Italian and I lived for a long time in French speaking countries So I do speak French. I live in Austria now and I do not speak German, but that's the object of a different presentation I'd love to know which languages you speak beside English, of course that I assume Indy Croatian Bulgarian Russian see this is again the magic of work camp Europe to have so many different people of different origins With us and to introduce the first experience. I want to relate today. I'm gonna ask you one last question for now So for many of you that may Remind old memories Yeah, I like the third option for those who don't know what I'm talking about so This question hoarder alliance is about The fact that the first real remote experience. I had leading teams was actually playing World of Warcraft So this is my character back in 2010 Pretty proud of the mount by the way I started playing that game very randomly my wife and I just had moved to Switzerland from Paris and Well You move to a foreign country and you have two little kids at home The result of that is don't go out very much If you have kids, you know what I mean And if you don't have kids, you also know what I mean because your friends disappeared suddenly in a black hole And so we're far away from everything and we Randomly started playing this game to to have something different on watching TV to do But step by step we discovered that some of our friends were playing and they had a community and we start playing together And suddenly we're in a guild and Suddenly I am an officer in that guild and I'm leading raids of 10 25 people Trying to beat bosses in dungeons and things and back then I had no idea that could be a useful to me later but I Played from roughly 20 2006 to 2010 and Suddenly you realize that how you have to organize those people and you need a diverse set of skills to Defeat a special boss So you need to recruit the right people and you need to train them and they need to have a certain level and equipment So you need to give them assignments to do during the day and then teach them strategy record videos prepared text presentations and Later Working at the dramatic it hit me that that was actually the one experience in my life. That was the most Similar to leading a distributed team in a company. It's a bunch of people sitting in front of their computer in their homes and They bring those very different skillset and different characters and they train together the established strategy they Try again and again and again and finally solve a very complex problem that in a game is called a boss in work is called a project, but it's not very different and More importantly, I learned something that was crucial in my later year, which is in a game people are seeking pleasure they want to enjoy playing the game and If they don't have fun, they leave there's nothing holding them back. There's no Responsibility, there's no commitment. There's no contract. There's just I come to play the game and I need to enjoy it every single night And so that was when I realized that a distributed team Can be a really powerful But one condition is that everybody needs to take pleasure in what they do Even more so I think than a team that is all together in an office because we're all separate all in our own home offices or co-working spaces or living rooms or whatever and so Having a bad day can have a much bigger influence when you're isolated and you can just go and Grab a beer with a few colleagues afterwards. So that was the first thing for me was Playing with all those people Remotely, I had a responsibility to make them enjoy the game I see there's a couple of questions. So the way it works as you can see is that questions On the right, there's a little number We can see what is there. Oh, what was your first business? So a very long time ago That was 1994 I started Working in a photo studio that were was working a lot with the fashion photographers and the very first thing we were doing was Photoshopping photos preparing them for ads and things and we realized very soon that there were already tons of people doing that And so, you know, whenever there's tons of people doing something. It's boring and competitive So we moved into interactive CD-ROMs because that was the big thing back then But then we also realized that that was already an old thing like interactive CD-ROMs were already stale and And we discovered this internet thing and we said, oh, look at that websites. Nobody's doing that So it's gonna be much easier and that's how in 1994 I started doing making websites as a freelancer and Then later I joined a team that was building Hotel guide in Paris. So that was my first Business, let's see. I think we have a second question here What was the most memorable red boss you killed well because I stopped shortly after it was definitely the leech king and Yeah, then I we stopped playing for a number of reasons that Go way beyond the time we have here, but you can come and ask me. I will be at the happiness bar just later Let's see what we have what was my gear score. Oh my god memory This is a hard one. I don't want to give a random number what I can say is that we were an amateur guild So we have no first skills at our Leaderboard we may have the first kill on a Saturday night at 1055 something like that But no, no, we weren't very good We were just a bunch of adults with like day jobs and kids and and stuff. So we were playing two three hours every night We weren't by any stretch Overstaffed What's the next city country you'll call home so that's interesting because I I moved us to Austria thinking I will be there three to five years and The idea was well the next place will be an English-speaking country Right now I have to say I really like Vienna. So we don't have a project of a New place for now Yeah, Vienna, you should visit Vienna. Whoever has not been to Vienna you should go and whoever has been to Vienna for work I'm Europe 2016 well done So to talk a little bit about my second distributed experience, I'd like to ask you where you work from As a general thing, do you work for a fully distributed company? Do you work for a normal office where you go every day or are you somewhere in between where you do have an office? But you also work remotely when you wish and you're You have flexibility so that's interesting. That's very very evenly spread. I Think it's a great great thing because a few years ago The same question would have had very few people working for a fully distributed company. This shows that Something that was sort of new and exotic ten years ago is becoming mainstream and so The second experience is my work at automatic. So this is my office atop the day. I joined automatic back in 2011 Automatic was company of a little more than 70 people back then and So I joined automatic knowing it was a distributed company, of course That was one of the reasons why I applied but what's really interesting is that about a Year and a half into my time at automatic somewhere in 2012. I Still didn't have a real grasp of what it meant to be fully distributed I know everybody was working from home, of course, and we had meetups where I would meet people every once in a while But one day I was invited to a hangout Where that well the hangout up and every two weeks, but I didn't know that at the time I was inviting for the first time and I was supposed to give a summary about the state of our sales in our in our shop where we Sold upgrades to users and I was ready prepared all good When suddenly 30 minutes before the hangout starts I Start freaking out. I have like a panic Almost a panic attack and the reason I have that it wasn't about my summary I was ready, but I suddenly realized that everyone else in this hangout is actually leaving a few miles around San Francisco and So immediately I picture myself in a TV screen with everybody else around the meeting room like a classic situation that I Really hate because it's one of those moments where there's a lot going in the room that you don't get because people talk Very softly and there's body language and you're just prisoner of these two-dimensional screen and And so I start freaking out, but then you know, I just I breathe I count myself I log into the hangout and there the amazing thing happens that no one is in the same place Someone is at home. Someone is in a co-working space Someone is in a coffee shop one person was in an airport and that's when it hit me What it is to be a hundred percent distributed, which is that you really really Do it even when you're nearby even where when you're in the same building sometimes You really privilege the connection through the same tools that allow people from very far away to participate Because that now evens the field so you don't have those sort of apartheid or those side conversation and Along the way, I learned how it was important that everything is documented in a written form so that anybody whether they're able or not to attend a meeting for example because of time zones can actually participate to the conversation and Automatic has grown since from a little more than 70 people to a little more than 700 people so 10 times in those seven years and The one thing I think I learned from working there is That there is no real limit to what a distributed company can do and for a lot of time You could hear always people saying that the next Symbolic threshold the next round number would be when it would fail You know like oh, it's gonna work up to 10 people or up to 25 or up to 50 or to 100 But it keeps working and actually there's no reason it doesn't because when you think about it the bigger a company becomes the smaller the difference between Distributed and collocated company in the sense that if you look at large companies with thousands of employees Well, they happen to have people everywhere in the world. They happen to have people in many cities So it's special to be in 62 countries when you're 700 not that special when you're 60,000 Now the the biggest difference that remains is that often people located in the same cities in regular companies do work together When well we for example share an office in Vienna where three or four of us go depending on the time of the year But we don't work together like we just work at automatic. We don't work in the same team So there's definitely still some differences, but I think there is really no limit in what a distributed team can do when you Learn those ways to communicate and when you bring in that little piece from the first experience which is to keep the pleasure going because again one of the strength of distributed workforce is also that the whole world is Your oyster both as a company you can hire everywhere, but as an employee you can also work for anyone And so when the choice is Broad the pleasure becomes a pretty big factor. You're not constrained By where you leave Let's see. It looks like we have a few questions So maybe oh, how was my first year at automatic the first year at automatic So that was 2011 I joined in February 2011 It was it was amazing. It was very intense. I started Full-time on the day before my team went to a meetup So my first day working there full-time it was flying to Vienna where I actually didn't leave back then to meet a bunch of people who so far I had only met in chat It was Yeah, it was a very rich year I think it's probably the year of my law of my adult life where I met the more people at once in one year not counting school years, but those are Or different and it was and I was impressed all the time because everybody was so nice and so It was that time where you don't know anything and you're learning and you're asking stupid questions and you're trying to find information and And you feel like you're useless because Well, let's face it for a few months. You kind of are But everybody was so so patient and open and nice and Was answering questions. So it was a pretty amazing year. I have to say yeah What platform do you use to connect everyone that is distributed around time zones? So today we use slack for real-time conversations and Sort of a synchronous conversation even though it has limits for that and then we use P2 a team You may be familiar with for the real asynchronous conversation We still have IRC as a backup and also because our systems guys love it But yeah, it's still there as a backup and many of us just log in once every six months to check it still works In case slack went down But slack has pretty much taken over the real-time conversation now We used to use a mix of IRC and Skype back in the day those have been mostly replaced and And then P2 contains all the information like everything we We do is documented there What's the most challenging thing from working inside a distributed team? I Would say that the most challenging thing for me is how hard it is to celebrate wins like there's There's no equivalent online. This is something we also experience in gaming by the way There is no online equivalent to popping a bottle of champagne or sparking for juice or whatever and you know be together in a room and And be happy and I don't know dance and celebrate like this is this is the moment. I don't miss the sort of Presence so much in day-to-day work. I think celebration is the place where I miss it more and On the other side of the spectrum and luckily that doesn't happen very often but when something doesn't go well at all when you When the situation is very emotional where when when someone is very sad or a bit depressed There are also you miss like this opportunity to I don't know give a hug to someone or even just share a moment of silence and Yeah, I think this is one of these little things where a moment of silence face-to-face is very very valuable a moment of Silence online is just a moment like it's not a moment of silence. It's just So that is why I love traveling to meetups and meet teams, please don't hesitate to ask questions But we'll make another break later So yeah, the thing I learned automatic is essentially this fact that if you're really entirely distributed There are no limits to what you you can achieve and I insist on the fully distributed because It's hard to do it partially and I'm sure that everybody who has tried knows what I mean when part of the company is distributed It's hard to be on the same level of involvement of people who are in the sort of main office So to move to the third experience. I wanted to ask you very simply and you can check several these answers how you Contribute to war press and I group that just in three categories organizing meetups organizing work camps or Being part of any of the different teams in make war press. It doesn't have to be just writing code but translation documentation accessibility design all of them and The reason I'm asking this question is essentially to show off this nice chart because I I'm not gonna say use something special based on these answers, of course, but The third experience I want to relate is the one of Helping work camp Europe so It's important to me because it was a very very big series of surprises It started in 2013 when a bunch of people decided to Europe deserved a big work camp like America had with San Francisco And so they convinced the foundation work on central that that was a good idea and they started and a few months in They Pings me saying hey, we would need some help. Can you jump on board because? We are a team were the team was fairly small back then Anyway, some someone needed a little bit of help and I say, yeah, okay. I had started The WordPress meetup in Vienna a few months before and we were just getting started with Luca who is actually sitting there And so I was my idea at the time was I Want to give something back to the WordPress community and giving some of my time to organize community events Seems like a good thing to do so that was the the beginning of it and I so I helped wrangling volunteers that year in Leiden and I did the same thing the next year in Sofia and then I went on to wrangling sponsors in Sevilla in the next year and Then we applied with me in the meantime Vienna at their first work camp. We organized it in 2015 and so 20 we applied for 2016 work in Europe. We got work in Europe in Vienna in 2016 and then 2017 it was Paris and I was leading the team and and I For a while along that journey. I was thinking about what can I give to the community? So okay first you give your time just by doing stuff. You're all your sleeve you help people and then I thought well I'm leading distributed teams in automatic and maybe I can help work in Europe by bringing some of it to the to the camp and I realized one thing Which was people burning out people working way too much like this is a big thing to organize You may not realize it as an attendee because it's very smooth and because that this team is doing an amazing job But it's hard. It's a lot of work It's hundreds and hundreds of hours of work and they go Basically for 11 month a year. There's maybe one month off between one work camp and the worker for the next So as we were thinking about Paris I said well, what if we increase the size of the team a lot and We create sub teams and so instead of saying are you two people are in charge of this and you two are in charge of that Well, we say we have groups of five six people in charge of every hour And so if someone you know life happens work happens Sometimes you don't feel like you can invest as much time as you would like in your volunteer role but That is normal that is that happen You should be able to step back for a little while without Feeling guilty of living one single other person in charge of all your tasks And so we try to organize those things a little bit and we The team ramped up. I think that we we ramped it up to more than 50 people as we were starting organizing Paris now knowing that We were overdoing it a little bit because we wanted to leave people comfortable to actually Step back and abandon along the way if they wanted So I was this was my my sort of train of thought at the time. It was okay. I in addition to giving time I can try to give some of what I learned before and What hits me what hit me along the way is that I was actually learning a lot too It wasn't just about me bringing something. I knew by by leading those people I would I was learning a ton of things because I was faking it facing situations that were not really the same as that I had at work We had different constraints The pleasure dimension was also very strongly back in once again because sometimes working together for a company You have that little buffer, you know when someone has a very bad day They will hang on because it's their job They have a commitment and they also have a rent to pay at the end of the month and they have a family and they may Not be willing to find something else. So that you have that little extra Buffer that allows you to go through you can't take advantage too much of it, but it's there in a volunteer Organized event you go back to the fact that people need to take pleasure if people feel stressed out if people feel like they're burning out Well, why would they do it? It's it's not fair and so So what came out of that for me in work in Europe was oh That's very interesting because I feel that this participation to these community events is actually feeding my Professional career. I'm learning things. I'm learning to be better at my job And I think this is the key of the connection. I wanted to make today which is that on the one side you focus on the idea that working distributed You can achieve anything you can achieve events like these that are made by a bunch of people all across continent or even more than one and You add to that that you're giving Something to the community that probably gave you a lot because if you're in this room It's very likely that WordPress has brought a lot to your life And so giving back is a great thing to do but in addition of that It helps you actually build a career in this world that is more and more distributed And we're the first step to work in a distributed company may be scary and so doing it through the participation in a community project or a work camp is Actually a very good sort of first step a very good ramp to get to learn a New way to work So this is basically my point tonight before concluding though. I would like to go see the last questions because there's a couple Can you recommend a book that every remote team manager should read? So that is an interesting question because I found something in the last few years, which is That the best books that I mean the ones I found the more important to me were not specifically Focused on remote management. I just realized that management is not very different remote or collocated Personally and you're totally okay totally okay to disagree But one of the books I enjoyed the more and that brought me the most value is managing humans by Michael Lopp I will only give one suggestion because The question was singular, but Yeah, that one is really good, but it's not specifically about remote Workers, have you been in a burnout or how do you prevent it? I think I Managed to dodge one very very closely last year And how I did prevent it is that last year at the end of work camp Europe 2017 in Paris the day after work and Europe was the first day of my three-month sabbatical and Yeah, this is something I think that that was the moment where Had I had to go back to work the next day Would have I was at the beginning of a sleeper slope So how I avoided it with a three-month sabbatical so If you work for a company that gives you something like that, that's amazing If you work for a company that doesn't go tell them they should Because I came back three months later completely recharged and full of energy and So, yeah That has worked. It was a little bit of luck, too, but Am I happy? Yeah, I think so. I Hope you're happy, too so before we before we part ways we have a few more minutes and I Would like to ask you something because You know often you you get out of a presentation and you Either you learn something or you heard something inspiring or maybe you were just amused or maybe you were bored I hope not but But then you move into the next presentation and then the next presentation and then the next one So what I'd like to ask you is to take a couple of minutes We have two minutes and think About what is the one thing the one step the one action you could take next week or next month or by the end of the summer to contribute to the WordPress community that is of course something anything if you don't do it already or something new if you do it already in other ways and Something that would put you in this situation of contributing to a distributed team that you could use to Help the community while at the same time learn new skill set and Yeah, just two minutes. I give you two minutes write it down in your phone Tell it to your neighbor write it down on a piece of paper at the back of your hand or your arm, whatever And in two minutes, I'll ask you something else. I'm gonna stand there for two minutes not talking We are put back the code in case there are some last-minute questions And if you feel if you feel like telling it to everybody feel free to put it as a question and we'll see it on screen, too so if you have done that the last thing I would like to ask you is Tonight at the parties or tomorrow during the day or at the after party tomorrow Whenever you have a chance and maybe you meet someone you have never met before you want to break the ice Don't hesitate to tell them what you just decided to do or ask them what they decided It's a nice breaker first of all and it's a tiny commitment that will help you To get to do it. That's all I got this morning. Enjoy the war camp