When we start debating more like people than ideas, so if someone says I have this much experience or why don't you trust me or anything like that when we're debating or reversing a decision or anything like that, that is really more about person than the work. I almost never want to comment about the person, like really, ever. I only want to talk about the work.
I only want to talk about the ideas, but often if we've worked really hard on something, it can feel like we're being personally attacked or personally reproached when the idea is reversed or undone or debated or were asked to defend it. So cultivating that detachment from it is just I think a lifelong process. I'm Ben Grennell, part of the early startup team here at Levels.
We're building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level. So it was 2003. Matt Mullenweg was 19 years old. He was a freshman at the University of Houston and he started working on this project, one that we know now synonymous with blogs around the world. It's called WordPress. And so this product ended up getting some traction.
Eventually he ended up dropping out of school shortly after this and by 2005 he moved to San Francisco to pursue this world in tech. Now he's got one of the biggest remote first companies in the world, a very large distributed team. The company is automatic. They're the company behind WordPress, WooCommerce, Jetpack, SimpleNote, list goes on. They're distributed to more than 2,000 people in 97 countries, speaking more than 120 languages around the world.
The common goal is to democratize publishing and commerce so that anyone with a story can tell it. What does this have to do with levels? Well as a remote team, Matt and his crew of automaticians as they call themselves more than 2,000 people, they do a lot of communicating and they're very much asynchronous in nature and the way that they are set up as a remote company. In an average week they might send more than 800,000 different messages, lots of different comments, maybe 15,000.
What do these numbers come from? Well on their website they've got this sense of ongoing work. Last week alone there were 845,933 messages with 14,756 comments. It's a lot of communication overhead. How do they manage it? Well when it comes to what we are trying to learn what we're trying to get better at, it has to do a lot with me async and remote. So Sam Corco, co-founder and CEO of levels, he sat down with Matt and they dug into this idea of scaling teams remotely. How do you coordinate?
How do you provide information and maintain the sense of being async? Well, you can be as async as possible, but no more. At least that's the way that Matt says it. Anyway, no need to wait. Here's a conversation with Matt and Sam. We're just over 50 people now. We've been fully remote from day one. Most of the questions are related to us, gambling remote teams and I know you guys are really some of the OGs of remote work.
I'm curious to learn to see around some of the corners and see if there are any questions or any sort of any solutions that you figured out that we could address some of the problems that we have right now. I will say it's a historical document, so not currently accurate. I think there was an author named Scott Berkern who joined automatic when we were around 45 or 50 people, wrote a book about his next one or two years. Oh, no kidding. I got to check that out.
It's called The Year Without Pants. All of the stuff is not as relevant now. We were definitely a little more of a culture of that. Hang out and drank a lot. That's the thing. I don't even call it bro forward back then, which isn't us now, but just for a point in time when we were literally an identical spot that you're in. This is more about tactical questions. We have found that the concepts of remote and async are pretty strongly intertwined.
My exposure to other companies that try going remote but don't also embrace async and ends up being just a lot worse. You just spend a lot of time. I think you mentioned this on a podcast that I listened to of like kind of get the worst of both worlds. This hybrid intermediate stuff is pretty brutal. How decent is automatic? As async is possible and no more. I think that synchronous is really beautiful.
When I say that we try to be as async as possible, I don't mean to downplay any of the incredible value of what we're doing right now. Because if this were a lot around network architecture, like if our ping times, like Ryzen Jewish Center and ACK, and that took five minutes to come back, that would slow the rate at which we can iterate on our ideas together in this conversation.
Let's make sure that we focus that sync time to create something that's really valuable like this conversation or that we both have the information that we want beforehand so that our conversation isn't just catching up, it's more like the debate or discussion. For someone like this is actually good because the information you want is essentially my life I have lived and your questions are all the life you have lived. So we're both like fully caught up.
But let's say this was about some aspect of our product and you knew it really well and I didn't. It wouldn't be as a productive of a conversation. If it was this widget over here and I didn't really know that widget that well. I think getting everyone to the same baseline understanding sounds simple but it's actually really, really hard. It's worth checking in. I heard you say XYZ, that means Z or whatever. And then going back and using that sync time for when it's most useful.
And then asynchronous, the other nice thing about asynchronous is that it is usually recorded. Like asynchronous is usually around forever. So that's P2 WordPress.com. It's like a blog chain, you could call it where I like every comment is the organizational blockchain of every decision that's been made in the company. Including like offhand ones and really long essays and treatisees.
And they're all permanent, they're all dressable, they're all composable if you will from a programming point of view, which is really, really useful, especially when you're trying to figure out why something happened a certain way years later. Which if you're successful, you will be. There will be a bunch of new people who weren't there and they'll be like, hey, why is this door red?
Because nothing else in this room is red and you don't have to like be it's nice to have an indexed record of how that conversation happened and why that decision was arrived at. Yeah, that actually neatly ties into two of the other topics that I wanted to cover. One is around context, collapse and information filtering and the other is around communication mediums. I'll start with the context collapse problem where I think we started to really feel this around maybe 40 employees.
That was the time when it was no longer possible for everyone to know what everyone else was doing. And you could just spend all day, every day just reading up on what other people were doing at the company and not doing any work. And it started to get really stressful for people. And we had a good conversation with Darren Murph from GitLab who he reframed it as a new one. Do people ever complain about there being too much information on the internet?
And the answer is no. That means you don't have a volume of content problem. You have an information filtering problem. And that was a helpful reframing. But we still haven't solved that problem. I love my reframing. By the way, go Darren. I'm curious as you're in a much larger scale than we are. So I'm sure you've come up with some mechanisms and systems. So understanding how do you figure out what information should be available to each person, push to each person, discoverable by what teams.
When somebody writes a 5,000 word memo, how do you ensure that the people who need that information get it effectively in a synthesized way? Or just starting to bump up against this problem. And I imagine it's only going to get polynomial-merely worse as we have more people. Yeah. Blessed be the curators. Right? Yeah. So I think that it becomes really important. The greatest gift you can give to your colleagues is great summaries.
And we have a few people in our organization that do just for fun. They read a ton of stuff and they make a weekly newsletter. They collect their links. So things that people do on the internet, you can do within your company. And if someone has a prior election to that, that is both an incredibly helpful and incredibly powerful position in the company to be the one that reads a ton of stuff and then like this stills it down and saves everyone else a ton of time.
Because in terms of its accessibility, I like for it all to be fully accessible. So if I want to go read that 5,000 worth thing, I should be able to click on it and get to it. So that was a powerful control. I tend to err on the side of within the company. Every link always works. Right. But, you know, I've definitely clicked on those and loaded them. And sometimes see like a long post with like a hundred comments on it. I'm like, ooh.
So we have a we have two sort of sort of abbreviations that we use a lot in automatic TLDR, which is very common, you know, too long didn't read. So that's a nice thing to put at the top. So we do that as like a convenience or sometimes we'll summarize a thread and pin a comment to the top of P2 that says like this was kind of like where this all ended up.
Sometimes I'll ask people to reply to something at the very end because I often scroll into the bottom as good to see like what the latest thing is and just say, hey, this we ended up XYZ or here's the latest version of this. Just so there's always a path to the latest information or the best information. I call this yellow arrows inspired by the commino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage trail, a couple hundred miles, I think there's a lot of different ways you could take.
But like it's going through cities and countryside and everything. So it's like lots of road turns you can take. And so just over the years, people painted these yellow arrows on trees, mowl and everything. And so those you'll turn someplace and the yellow arrow point the other way. And so there's never is not like a committee that painted all these. It's literally been, you know, hundreds of people walking, hundreds of people taking one turns.
And so if you overtake a one turn, you know, you can leave your little yellow arrow, which is usually a link to the place where you found out you were looking for. And that's what I love about hypertext versus like, it's not like you can put a copy of your keys every place you look for your keys. You know, right. But online, if you look five different places to find this like particular metric, like you can link it from all those places pretty easily.
And no, we're trying to, you know, remind people like if it's just texts, like that's updated frequently and make it very easy to update. Yeah, I think redundancy in text and digital medium is something that is underappreciated. There's no cost to adding a link. And so it's really easy to keep things redundant and just linking things together as a ton of value. We were talking about context collapse and information filtering and the synthesizer or a cheerleader role.
Is that there are companies like I know Amazon, they have many, many more internal comms people than you see at other similar technology companies. I think the reason for that is their culture around externalized ability in the EWS. So my guess is that they're in general, coms people sort of also function as marketing people to some degree because they are effectively when you write up PR or FAQ, it's kind of the same thing as your marketing function.
But I wonder, have you ever formalized this role of curator or has it just been something that happens organically? We do have various reporting that bubble up. So they naturally kind of feed into each other, almost like tributaries of information, feed into a larger river. You can just watch the river and get a lot of the gist of it. So some things that are regular cadence is for us. Is that we ask pretty much every team to do it every other week update. Oh, actually, so weekly Thursday.
We call them Thursday updates because we used to do them all Thursdays but then we naturally spread them out throughout the week. Sure. It was a little intense. So some do them on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday but they still historically call Thursday updates. And this meant to be a summary of your group's work that's relevant for the rest and jargon free and understandable for the rest of the company. So someone who's not working on everything every day, can they see what you did?
Our design group has been leading something they call SNAPs, which are basically visual versions of this. So showing like a before and after, which is also really great. These also bubble up to like monthly investor updates, which we share with the whole company. You know, do it for external, do it for the internal. We also share our board meetings and other sort of external communications to stay cold.
So with them, when internally and that process, the nice thing, if you do it right, it's not always perfect. But if you do it right, these things, the small things make the big things easier. So like the summaries get easier and easier because you can look at the summary of the summary essentially and say, OK, of these 30 things, here's the 10 net remote is interesting.
Yeah. And one of the other topics related to the kind of cultural transparency and communication, I've been thinking a lot about how different media affects the way that people perceive information. I had a really good podcast with David Perrell, who's the writing guy. Yeah. And he thinks a lot about writing. And I also had a conversation with Vene from Lume, who thinks a lot about video as a medium.
We've been doing a lot of experimentation with writing versus video versus all these different mechanisms for communicating in an asynchronous way. And we find ourselves increasingly gravitating to video for things like updates and the TLDRs and certain types of communication.
And there's a certain degree of interpersonal, I really think it's something lizard brained about seeing a human face and somebody's tongue that really goes a long way towards building that trust and confidence and other people. So your company's been around for a long time since before a lot of these video tools were common. I'm curious how, if at all, you embrace some of these tools and if that's something that you thought much about. This is an area where I'll say that we're also evolving.
I would say that we are very text heavy, oh, and to an earlier point, writing ability. It's hard to screen for reading ability, but you can screen for writing ability quite easily. Sure. And right now, the fantastic thing to screen for and hire. There's almost no downside to looking for good writers in your hiring process. We are starting to use loom and short videos. In fact, this has led me to push our internal video product to have like captioning and easy speed up and stuff like that.
It's a 100% agree with you. The only downside I personally experience is that if I'm like trying to catch up on things on my phone, my gun line, if you don't have that audio, if you don't have the AirPods, it's not as accessible. Accessible. Yeah. Other than that, and maybe with auto captioning, that'll all go away.
But it feels like one of those things where as long as you can speed it up, I think it's fine because it is true that I think we can consume information faster than your eye naturally talk as humans. Oh, yeah.
First of all, there's actually, I've seen data on this that I think where typical audio book and speed at which the average person reads when that converges is around somewhere between three and three and a half X speed of watching a video, which is much faster than most people can input information. If you watch your mind blown, there's also people who are blind, apparently parts of their brain to reassign to the audio processing.
And they can understand, sped up audio at things that are totally illegible to your eye at like 20 or 26 syllables per seconds. And I'll send you a link to this. You can share with the team later. Yeah, yeah. We can do because it sounds, you can read the text that they're speaking and they hear it and you're like, wow, but people can actually totally understand that, which is probably what like if we played a 3X podcast to our grandparents, they'd be like, how are you?
It's kind of like training. Yeah. The brain is incredibly valuable and they do amazing things. Yeah, definitely. I have one other, another tactical question, managing organizational complexity, specifically related to decision making. This is something a lot of founders that I've talked to who reach this scale of around 50 people, decision making processes start to break.
In the call it pre 25 people sage, the decision making process was basically people come to me as CEO with an idea and then I decide whether we do it and then that's the whole process. And we are now at a point where I am no longer the person who has the most context on making decisions and so we need to push that decision making up the tree to more of the edges so that people with the most context can make the best decisions. So I'm curious on a very tactical level.
I think philosophically I've read a lot about how you think about as you're making as an organization where you want it to be as close to the edge as close to the edge as possible and we're very much aligned with that. So this is less of a philosophical question and more like a practical question. If one of your PM on the team has an idea for a thing, what happens next and how do these decisions get made, how do conflicts get resolved and how do resource trade-offs get handled?
Yeah, I think the important thing there is to break down the word decision into different types of decisions. And particularly I like to talk about reversible versus irreversible decisions. Right. And in the realm of irreversible decisions taking an investor. And the truth is it's a continuum. Like if you took the wrong investor, you could buy them out. That's a hard thing to do.
Versus we can all think of easily reversible decisions like many things in technology, like changing the color things or multivariant test. So all on that continuum you want to, I think, have a speed. And I think where organizations fail is where they make reversible decisions slowly. So right. Or where they make reversible decisions without a feedback loop.
So if you imagine yourself making these reversible decisions quickly and with some sort of feedback loop, you're in the best possible place for getting to the right answer. The hardest thing about this I would say is reminding yourself of it and to identity. So it's nice still struggle with this today, especially in the open source side of things, is that when we start debating more like people than ideas.
So someone says, I have this much experience or why don't you trust me or anything like that. No, one word debating or reversing a decision or anything like that. That is really more about the person than the work. And I don't, I almost never want to comment about the person like really ever. I only want to talk about the work. I only want to talk about the ideas.
But often if we've worked really hard on something, it can feel like we're being personally attacked or personally reproached when the idea is reversed or undone or debated or we're asked to defend it. So cultivating that detachment from it is just I think a lifelong process. By the way, I think that's a mistake too. Just do it because I'm the CEO, you know, still happens. 17 years later, it's not perfect, but just keep that in mind.
And if you ever find a discussion is going off, it's a good question to ask. Like, oh, did this switch from being about the idea to maybe being about ourselves? And if so, how can we reverse that and say like, hey, we're all in this together. We all work together. We're all good to paycheck from the same place. We're all the same team. This, you know, let's just figure out the best thing for customers or users or process or efficiency or whatever.
Yeah. One of the problems we're doing better at it now, but I don't think we solve this is we have had situations where we had agreement on whatever the decision was in terms of like, yes, we should do a thing. And I'm thinking of one project in particular that went off the rails because we gave the person the thumbs up to do the project, but we didn't resource the project explicitly. And so this person have this mandate and this expected outcome, but not the resources to deliver on it.
And it just created incredible frustration and conflict between them and other business units. So how do you, when it comes to that kind of decision-making, I imagine do we want to do the thing is something you have to decide what are the resources needed to do it and are we allocating them? Are there any other things that we really need to take into consideration to make sure these things are done successfully? I'm sure we have also made that mistake hundreds of times, literally.
So don't beat yourself up about it. It's probably going to happen regardless. Yeah. I think that's just a function of communication. So if you're saying yes to this, this means x, y, z. I personally avoid the term resourcing or resources because I feel like that level of abstraction sometimes allows us to not really think about what's needed. You know, is it resources or is it two people working mostly full time for two weeks?
You know, I kind of get nitty gritty about it and like really describe what is going to be needed and then just the more sometimes even just like describing it like to a five year old, like really being descriptive on the process, the people, the time, the sign-offs, whatever it is, can fill silly but is remarkably helpful because even at the most senior levels or people with decades of experience, you can spark so many people.
Sometimes everyone around the table is nodding because they think they agree, but they're all have a slightly different version of what they're agreed to in their head and that might not be apparent, especially if you, you know, you sign off and then you're checking like a month later, you find out the month later and that was built was not what we thought we all agreed to and that still happens with the less two. And I see why that's frustrating.
It's frustrating for me, like as maybe the person who agreed to something that's not with his built, I bet it's also frustrating to the person who built it. Definitely. Or done that too, if you just had a clear understanding. So almost every organizational issue is some subset of a communication issue.
Yeah, I've seen really good engineers quit companies when they work on a thing for three months and then find out after work said it was different than what needed to be built and like nobody wants to burn three months of their lives on something that doesn't get implemented. It's just not a fun position to be in. Three. Yeah. Or unless. Well, that's different have some mistakes. So if you burn three months and then you learned that as a bad path to go down, that's great. For sure.
But if you burn three months and then you learned that that wasn't what was intended in the first place, that hurts. Yeah. So it's, yeah, you want to do it. I think the former, you want more of even, you know, your closing off pass of inquiry, but the latter as few as possible. No. The next big push that we have really this month and August is we've come to this recognition that we need to be more, we need to take performance management more seriously. And it really is in both directions.
The thing that surprised me about this was how the, I have always heard of performance management from like the top down management side of things, but the people who have been requesting us are actually the employees like are like on the ground engineers. They want to know how they're doing. And in a lot of the, the one on ones I've done with people on the team, the problems that we need to solve are things like people want to know, are they performing? Are they advancing?
Are they at risk of being fired? People want to know that. And I think that's a reasonable. Basically right. Yes. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's also, there's a degree to which it is our responsibility as leaders to set people up for success in their careers and their career growth and help them reach their goals. So I have other questions around performance management, but how it seems like almost everybody has their own approach to it. I just, I got a high level.
How do you approach this topic? It's so huge because it's basically performances the entirety of the job. Right. I'll tell you things that we avoid. I don't like the whole company evaluating things at the same time. We've got whole teams. So what we try to do is spread it out throughout the year. Kind of like I said, we used to do all Thursday updates on Thursdays and that was too much. It was pretty.
It's kind of like what how we've designed our internal HR systems is that does not like a evaluation, we garr anything like that. But everyone is getting asked about one of their colleagues in some 360 like a colleague, a manager, a subordinate, periodically throughout the year on a rolling basis. So let's say, say Sam, you're a middle manager in the middle somewhere. Hopefully I'm getting some feedback on you like maybe like every one to three weeks from someone you work with.
And so let's say you work with 10 people regularly, they might be asked three to four times per year. How Sam doing? And maybe a specific question each time. Like how Sam's communication style or how is Sam? We had the questions. I don't want to add a little bit. One's we've thought of and that's right to be sometimes they tied to our creed, which is at automatic dot com slash creed, which is kind of like a values thing.
And that I find that really helpful as well because it also helps you catch faster. If someone's struggling, that can happen for a variety of reasons, some of which the company can help with and some of which it can't, but you want to be aware of anyway. And the company can help maybe by removing some responsibilities. If someone's going through a different personal, such a difficult personal situation or health situation or something like, you know what?
If someone you love is facing an existential health crisis, guess what, you're not going to be productive. You all know that. I mean, you could try to, by the way, you're going to try to, but it's not going to be there. So let's just be aware of that. And let's make sure that that is an open communication. You don't have to share even what it is.
If you're not comfortable with that, maybe with HR, but you don't have to share with everyone, if you don't want everyone asking you about it or something, but just so there, there's a knowledge that that's possible. As an aside, something we actually ended up with there as well is a way for people to move to our showtime employment for partial pay. We did some experiments in the company on like four day work weeks and other things. Yeah. Honestly, we didn't stick with it. It's there.
It does obviously have a division in margin return to work. Our adherence, so that's more work, means more stuff gets done. Yeah. It's not like a perfect 40 hour thing. Yeah. I actually think most of the data indicates the opposite of that of diminishing margin over turn. I think it's, most of the evidence that I've seen shows an increased marginal rate of return after some number of hours.
People who work 10% more hours, different between 40 and 44 hours per week, make about 30% more in terms of compensation. I think this is maybe two in the weeds on this topic, but I think there's like a deadweight loss of communication that might be 20 or 30 hours a week. And so any time above that deadweight loss is actually very highly leveraged. And so I think it's actually that opposite.
I will also posit that really effective asynchronous distributed organization maybe has a smaller deadweight. Exactly. I have observed it even with myself. I'm 38 now. I've gotten COVID twice. I definitely feel it sometimes where I just feel a little bit slower towards the end of the day, or before I might be able to do really great. Night time coding sessions. So for myself, I've seen managing, aligning my task with my energy levels is really important throughout the course of the day.
In the morning, I'm really great at reading and understanding, especially long things. And towards the end of the day, I find that I can still read the long things, but I retain a lot less of it. And so I've just tried to shift that work. And morning is when I try to close a bunch of tabs. I even got a tab counter thing right now on this laptop I've got, see, 150 open. So I just, my way, I peak when I started counting them, but I have two laptops. So I had like almost 500 per laptop.
I was like, my life is a mess. I think that's the thing now. And I realized I was trying to do it at the wrong time of day. So I think there is something to that. And I also wonder like, if you're consuming things and getting more context, more is better. But there's a generative part of work that I do feel more energy kind of in the morning. Or when I first get up, then I do, you know, when I'm tired, however you define that.
So that, but the partial work, partial day thing was just that, and because we don't track hours, so I don't think part of almost anything, maybe support roles, there's schedules. But so, but we say, okay, if you want to move to like an 80% expectations, so you're there about 80% of what someone working full time is doing, you can do that for 80% pay. And you can move between them, not every day, but like weekly essentially or something.
So that way some people might want to work a little less and make a little less during the summer. And that's a real freeing thing to them. And it's also really nice because they know that at any point they can turn it back up for a 100% and they're not going to lose their job or anything like that. So that was something we introduced in COVID, particularly when people had a lot of like home care or schooling or something like that. And we've kept it.
It's not used a ton, but people also appreciate knowing it's there. And I have seen people also use it. We also have an unlimited AFK. So it's like, how does that interact with the like, but it's more about expectations of accomplishments. So we have an unlimited AFK. And we kind of have expect what someone working full time produces in a given week, month, quarter year, you know. So those are all kind of complex interplays between those programs.
And one of the other questions around performance management that we've been. We've been struggling with. And I know our company share a lot of similar philosophies. I'm curious where you ended up on this. We on the on the concept of transparency for performance management. There are. We ultimately landed for compensation. That compensation data is confidential and it's not shared. Like Buffer is one company where everyone's compensation data is public.
I think there's actually a public spreadsheet. And you can see it. But even some of the most transparent companies like Bridgewater compensation data is confidential. Performance is another one of those concepts that's on a spectrum of transparency. At Bridgewater, they have baseball cards. And you know where you stand and where everyone else stands and what everyone's strengths and weaknesses are. You know who the under performers are.
It's like it's like visible to everyone at the organization. And at most other companies is confidential. How you're performing is confidential. And so between basically you and your manager. So I'm curious where you ended up on this concept of performance and how you got there. How many? We have some areas of work where the feedback loops are public. So supports are a great example. And it was everyone can see everyone else's how many interactions they had and the ratings of those interactions.
That's maybe the thing in our company that's closest to like sports and that's for the on the field off the field off the field contributes to on the field and on the field I think is pretty representative of our goals, which is like a great customer experience. So it's not perfect because sometimes people give us low ratings because they're unhappy with the product, not the support, but you know we we know that. Almost everywhere else though, it's so fuzzy.
And I think that's why a lot of companies don't have an equivalent of a Bridgewater or like a baseball card, you know, because the high performance is a culmination of a thousand interactions that you have with your colleagues with external partners with everyone else. I'll tell you the things that are most on my mind for performance management right now. One is we hired a lot last year, 700 people last year to cost about a thousand.
Like many companies, we're facing some headwinds and we don't want to do laughs. We invested a lot in hiring folks. And so we've explicitly said that, but we're not trying to grow a lot this year. We want to maintain our revenue per employee is a bit low compared to others. And also everyone who works for the company would love to make more. Like who doesn't want to make more? But like fundamentally that is limited by our revenue per employee.
So I think it's both good for the company and good for all the employees if we can kind of increase our revenue per person and our output. And of course that's you know, breaks down per role and other things. So part of what we're doing as well is saying that if you let someone go for performance, that replacement hire can happen maybe even when that when the performance of boom plan or PIP starts, not even at the one the person is let go.
I've been working a lot to I found some areas where we've had a lot of feedback inflation. What does that mean? Where someone had like really good peer feedback. And I was speaking to a leader and they were like, this person is not even shown up for work. Like it's some baseline things were not being met. And I was like, huh. So then I went to HR was like, it sounds like we should move faster to offer this person as severance. And their response to me was, but wait, we just gave them a raise.
Well, feedback. And I was like, wow, the company has utterly failed at this. But you know, because what makes signals, by the way, it's not fair to that person at all for sure. And so just at every level, there was a failure there. So we have to go and look at positive feedback they were getting. When was it? Was there some inflation there? What are the incentives are people like just giving everyone positive feedback because there's no skin off their back if they do. Right.
So how does it reflect back on them? Their performance that they gave positive feedback to someone who wasn't actually doing that well. Yeah. So you kind of have to work your way through the whole web of interactions there. And that's something we're doing. And the final thing that's on my mind a lot is areas where the entire team is rated as doing well, but we're not meeting our business objectives. So how can we have a high performing individuals on a low performing team? Sorry.
They're radically possible. But especially over the long term, you have to at some point redefine performance for accomplishing those goals. Like it's great that everyone's working hard, locating grades, like a model colleague in so many ways. But if we're not working on the right things, we should take a step back and readdress.
And part of what we're doing there is some in some places in the company, again, we're taking people, we're taking the entire team and just saying let's work on something else. And then that allows us to see, like, or we just work on the wrong thing, which is my actually what I think it was, or we worked on a problem the wrong way. Maybe we got to stuck in like a certain path.
Sure. And well, let's work on something just totally different and see how this group of people who already know each other really well, who are already really well aligned to have the very talented, can apply themselves to a brand new problem. And kind of sucks because like your idea is attached to this thing you've been working on. But I hope that it also reveals where the problem is or if there's some other hidden performance issues on the team.
Yeah, that's a really, those are some interesting things for us to think about. Those are, I can see how we could run into those at some point in the near future. On the transparency side, let's say you have a team that seems to be doing well, but they're not hitting their goals. How I'm reminded of a podcast that I had with Mark Randall from Netflix. And he says that he had this line, this really stuck with me, which is that people notice what you tolerate.
And if you tolerate poor performance, oftentimes many people on the team know this before you do. And it's really demoralizing when you're working really hard, but the people around you are not performing. And it's not, it's not a super strong motivator to perform yourself when you notice that the company tolerates people who don't really show up. And where I've struggled with this is that the one version of the culture is you hold these people up as examples and you shame them.
And when you fire them, and that seems like a very bad way to go about it. But the alternative is these people just sort of leave. Because nobody knows what the performance expectation is. And so I don't see a good solution here on how you handle that. I don't know a good solution either. Okay. We do not publicly comment when someone's let go for performance. In fact, we allow people to do their own good buy post and things. And yeah.
And that's just kind of like respect and dignity, I think is important on the way in and out for folks. Hopefully the ones on their team realize that the immediate team and your whole company is probably small enough that maybe that's most of the company will realize. But you don't have to be mean about it or public about it. We occasionally will post the whole company about something. Usually without we're doing it right now, which is still one of few days ago.
We let someone go because of expenses. Just a, you know, so to me, when it's an opportunity to both just really restate that that's not okay. This person actually doctored some expense things, which to me is like very clearly like almost fraud or mouthy and so that's a no brainer. And also reaffirm our culture of trust. Like we're not changing our policies because of this, but we're going to remind everyone this isn't okay. And you know, it's a trust and verify this.
And this is how this is what happened. We, you know, finance raised that this was unusual. HR looked into it and then we let this person go immediately. Just so folks know that like as well, because we have had it before, the same thing you said with performance.
You see someone ordering something really, really expensive at dinner and you're like, oh, I'm going to get the burger and they're getting, you know, the porterhouse or like some a $200 meal or something on the company down like that also can be corrosive for trying to save the company money. And so I think those things are important. Also things that everyone in the company can set an example of, particularly managers. You know, if we're at a restaurant.
I'm very conscious of what I order, the price of what I order. I know, I don't even know if someone even knows this, but I think they do. And if we're going to celebrate something or like entertain a client or something, let's be very explicit about that. Right. Hey, this client is paying us $4 million a year. We're going to take them out and we're going to let them, we're going to order the nicest wine on the menu for the, you know, we're going to say that beforehand.
It's not going to be on the flight thing or something. We're all going to know this is going to happen. We're all going to really enjoy that as like a celebration. So those are important too, but just like, you know, casually or on the fly, not premeditated, I think that that can send the wrong message. Yeah, for sure. Very, very frugal on expenses. And it's so hard to maintain that frugality as you grow.
And I actually really appreciate this kind of like economic turbulence is kind of the third we've been through in the history of our company. And every time we've gone through it, it's made our company so much better. As much as I can say, hey, we need to be efficient. We need to be frugal. We need to be at all these things. Well, you're hiring 700 people in a year. You know, you know, you definitely, you, you pick up some extra in terms of processes and efficiency and everything like that.
And perhaps tolerating some low performance in areas you just are noticing or didn't pay attention to. So, times like this are really, really good to just loop back and it's something I'm doing with all of our teams now, just going through kind of every project and saying like, hey, is this contributing to growth or revenue? Sorry. Yeah, engagement or revenue. Or is this like paying down technical debt or maintenance and something we need to do continuously?
If it doesn't fall into one of those three buckets and we should have a sort of proportion of each, let's, let's re examine it. Right. Yeah, we've hired 30 people in the last year and that's been its own set of struggles. I can't imagine 700. One of the other questions. This is something that we have hired relatively senior to date. I think much more so than it's typical for a company at our stage. And so things like mentorship and personal growth has not been as much of a priority.
But as we've continued to get bigger and hire more people who are maybe earlier on in their careers, we're starting to notice that. Basically we can't assume that everybody is a self-driven auto-died act anymore. Now we're struggling to figure out mentorship just tactically seems a lot easier in a co-located team. You're physically next to the person. But not everyone wants to say more junior people, but it's like people who are not very senior in their careers need some guidance and mentorship.
And we haven't really been able to do that. And I don't think we have a good process for that. So I'm curious if that's something you've thought about and how you achieved that. We try to break that up into a few different things. So we have a coaching program. So people can get reimbursed for coaching. We actually at this point have like, I think 30 coaches that are kind of like pre-prove, we have a contract with them, et cetera, et cetera.
So if you want to get coaching, you need to do this like month-long course, essentially, that's a self-star thing. And then once you complete that, you can interview a couple of coaches, pick your favorite one. And that's all reimbursed. And I think it's expensive like these coaches are typically a couple hundred dollars per hour. But I think it's one of the best investments we make because they're all familiar with automatic because they work with a man.
So they kind of know our weirdness and our quirks and everything versus a one-off. I think there's an advantage to a coach working with several people in a company. And they're totally outside of the management structure. So these folks are just for you. They don't determine your performance. They don't give feedback on your conversation. They're just like, so I think it's even better than a manager. And if they're good, hopefully they're good. We do two-way ratings on them.
And we try to get rid of the coaches, they get low ratings or show up late to meetings or something like that. They're going to push you. And you can bring your problems to them. And they'll like a naked coach. By the way, every great performer you see in the world works with coaches. Right. LeBron James has like eight coaches. He's like a coach for everything.
Not literally like a pinky toe coach, but I'm sure some equivalent where there's like something maybe like a fast twitch coach or something. That's awesome. And then on the other side of that, I find meetups really important. So getting people together in person, especially now that that's much more possible than ever, is a worthwhile investment. And even as one of our e-commerce business, we saw e-commerce payments slow down a lot this year.
I think just this stuff started to shift from online to offline. And maybe brought a macroeconomic trends. So that was like a, I think that's coming in like $30 million of revenue below plant. So of course, we looked at all of our budgets. And the one thing that we were like, we're not going to touch is our meetup budget. One because, by the way, we saved the time money during COVID by not doing it. We were about 10 million a year pre-COVID.
And that too, I just feel especially in a situation where perhaps half the company has not been to a meetup before, especially the bit started the year, it's just a really great investment for people to get together. And it's also okay for this to be informal, could just be two people getting together for a couple days. It could be just a co-working situation. You can definitely do it virtually with some screen sharing and everything.
And you should do that too, especially for new people who might not be able to travel. But to stint your able to get people together in person a few times a year, it is invaluable.