Is Remote Culture, Actually Culture?

Welcome back to the episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joint as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com. Will, Schroeder will buddy for like, what, 20 years? You were 80 hour a week office guy. First in, last out, you know, that was the, the, the badge of honor. And I can't imagine that, that, that would've ever changed for you, and yet if I were to say, Hey, will. Let's go back to being in a physical office again. Now let's just try it.

Let's go back in five days a week. Let's just be back in office. What would your response be to that? At this point, I wanna point out that this is my dream job. Okay, before I give you my response, like, like, here's my dream job is everything I've ever wanted in a job and I get to sit around and bullshit with founders all day. It's like the best job ever. And if someone were to say to me, the only thing well is tomorrow, you gotta come in the office to do it.

I would put in my notice right on the spot right there. I would quit my own job if it meant I had to go back in an. Yep. We're winding it down. Why? Because we open an office.

Sorry. And to, to be fair, because I've got a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle on, on this whole remote work versus an office, it's not that, that I think in office is bad. I wouldn't be put, yeah. I don't wanna work in an office. Right. That's, that's different than me saying other people could thrive in an office. I did it for decades, right? I, I did my tour of duty. It's not for me. If you're opposed with the same question, how would you process it?

I think it would depend on a whole lot of different things. Like my, my initial reaction would be mm-hmm. No, I don't want to, I've really enjoyed remote work. I thrive in it. I think we've figured it out. I think it would depend on the work. Like if, if it was like, to your point, we have our dream job. Yeah, this does exactly what we want to do and we get to do it exactly how we want it to.

Yep. If the whole job changed somehow, like we were gonna do something completely different, then maybe I'd think about it. But I also don't want to do something completely different. So it's kind of a trick question. I don't, I don't see what the benefit would be at this point.

For me, it's funny having, having just moved to Madrid, this is a significantly. Different feeling, I think, than I might've had. Okay. I think I was getting to a point in Antigua, in, in Guatemala where I was like, I was so starved for like other founder interactions that I might've been like, you know what? That, that might actually be okay. Yeah, maybe let's do that.

But I had, I had breakfast, I had coffee with a, a, a founder, uh, from California this morning is Spaniard, but he was, he lives in California now. He was here, wanted to sit down and talk. We, we had a great chat and so like. I think I would've said yes, maybe for the wrong reasons. And now I think that I'm back and like I can get some of that proximity. I can get some of that osmotic effect where like things rub off without needing an office.

Because I think for me, and we've talked about this on the podcast a couple times, like it was draining me. It was like as an introvert who extroverts when he has to, and as an empath who picks up on every little thing that everybody says and feels like I need to help and fix and solve, holy shit, was that draining? Right? Like l let, let me give you a parallel. No one looks back on their college years with wild memories of how much fun it was to be in class. Yeah. Right.

Unless you're a giant nerd, did we go to class? But like, but you know what I'm saying, like college was a mechanism, right. That required work, most of which you didn't want to do at the time in order to socialize and, and be connected to all these people. Right. It was a means to an end. Right? And so the office worked as the same mechanism. Uh, I hear people say this all the time, they're like, I don't socialize as much. Like, like that does bother me.

Yeah. But I'd never hear people say, God, I miss conference rooms. Right. I never hear that. Right. Yeah. What, what they're saying is I miss being social said differently. If you were social every single day, if you were out meeting people and, and, and connecting and whatever every single day, the last thing on your mind, my guess for most people would be, I really missed my desk. I really miss my terminal.

It'd be great to have to circle the parking lot a couple times and try to find a space this morning. That's what's missing. Yeah, I think so, man. Yeah, I miss like fighting through traffic. What people are saying is that I miss talking to humans. Okay. Yeah, so, so because we have on the remote side of the remote work side, we have optimized for the other direction, like total isolation. It's, it's real. COVID messed all of us up. COVID messed me up, right?

Like I was so used to being around people all the time. And just an, an hour ago, uh, you know, we, we actually had a team lunch. I haven't seen my coworkers in six months, right? It's amazing. They live 20, 20 minutes away. It is crazy to think how isolated I've become. However, and, and this is, you know, what we'll unpack today, I don't necessarily think the cure is a conference room. I think cure is is more socialization. Yeah.

But more importantly, over the past couple days, we've had some in-person meetings with our coworkers and one of the things that that's occurred to me in those meetings is that for the longest time in Ryan, I think since you and I have been. Going through this, this remote work journey, you know, post COVID like a lot of people, I think we kept trying to take the old fundamentals of an office and make them remote. Yeah. And I think that broke quite a bit, you know? Yeah, it, it did.

I think there was a lot of force functioning. I mean like the Friday office parties on Zoom. We tried this once. Oh, so sad. Remember we were like, and feel free to bring a drink. And I remember like, as we said that, I was like, did we just encourage people to drink at home by themselves? Sort of on a Zoom call? I was like, that doesn't even sound fun. Like even if somebody was like, yeah, that sounds okay. It was bad.

So our big thing just including in, uh, folks in the audience on Fridays, we used to have a happy hour, uh, every Friday at three o'clock. You know, uh, we'd sit down, we'd all get in the conference room and everyone would have a drink. Not everybody, a lot of people, uh, would have a drink and uh, sometimes even ran a little bit longer. People just wanted to be there and bs with folks, et cetera. And that me, we run the grill on the back porch, like, yeah.

Yeah. It was like, it was fun for those that wanted to be there. It wasn't obligatory also important. Right. For those that wanted to be there. Right. Yeah. Because not everybody, in retrospect wanted to be there. The other part of it was, it was a bit of a, like a payment for having to be in the office. It was, it was like, uh, well get some not office time so that you can enjoy yourself versus being stuck at a conference room.

And I thought to myself when we first went remote, just like you said, we tried to do the Friday, uh, happy hour on Zoom, which was sad as can be. Yes. But that was our first instinct. We tried to take the old world and force it into this new world. Just recreate it. Right? Yeah. And it, it broke horribly because I, I think part of what we wanted, we wanted those spontaneous moments, right?

We wanted those basically be able to get everybody in the same room and have some laughs together, which is great, right? Yeah. But it didn't quite translate. And also at the time, this was COVID, everybody's getting zoom fatigue to begin with. And I think we've learned that there's a lot of things you cannot do over Zoom and Slack in the same way. We've learned there's a lot of things you can't do over social media. Or text message.

Yeah. It just, it doesn't land the same, like you can do exactly the same things, but because of the digital separation, it just doesn't land the same way and it's just time wasted at that point. Right. Yeah. I think that it's, you know, we, we learned the hard way that you can't just copy paste office traditions into remote, right.

The, the answer is trying to find and build new rituals that actually fit for how we work now up to, and including just admitting that maybe socialization isn't part of what we do. Through the digital channels with our team. Right. Let's talk about that.

Yeah. We've moved to a transactional electronic environment, right? Yep. Again, via slack, via zoom, via social media. We have, as a society moved to this transactional nature where when I post something on social, the transactions are like. Our comments are in, in some cases, subscribes, et cetera. Like literally, my interactions have become this binary switch, right? Where I like, oh, I got X amount of likes. I must have done a good job. Yeah, I got no likes.

What's wrong with everybody and what's wrong with me? Right? Like. It's very transactional and I think that where that's changed a bit is we weren't used to only having that at work. Now, I'm sure some people did. I'm sure people, some people had to go wildly transactional work environment like almost too professional. Yeah. But we didn't, and. As I've seen that kind of stripped away from us, it's presented. The question for me in a remote workforce, what is culture?

You have to go back to that first because if what you're trying to do is support and feed culture, you have to actually understand what the new culture is before you can, you can do that. I think we were trying to nourish a brand new baby culture with the same old steak and potatoes that we'd been feeding the old one, it just didn't work. Right. Put it, yeah. Yeah. It just did not work. But I think it's important because I, I think there is a, a big kind of macro question, which is like.

Is it possible for a team to stay motivated and engaged long-term in, and maybe that's the question is like, is that actually what we need in this new environment? Right. I think, again, that's part of what we're trying to recreate. We're saying, okay, well if the culture can't be the same, but we still want that motivation, we want that engagement. But can that still exist when work is purely transactional? And then I guess.

Does it need to or is that still just something that we're holding onto? Is that a relic as well? Let's build on that. I would say, Ryan, if you and I were starting a new company tomorrow, I would prefer we were in office. Okay. Yeah. Now, now the, the reason I say that is because I do believe at that, that very formative state, there was a tremendous amount of value to basically, uh, just talking and having all of these chance discoveries. Okay. It's just the O osm, the the osmosis, right?

A hundred percent right. Just being able for things to just random collisions that lead to some sort of spark that goes somewhere. Which happens a lot in the formative. In other words, like we are, like, everything is changing by the second in the formative stages. That I think having that goes a long way. It allows us to talk about things that don't have to have a meeting called for them. We just happen to be like, like catching a concept together. I remember so many of these moments.

I remember some of these moments where I, I remember walking past the, the door of the sales room and hearing somebody. Pitch the, the, the idea in a way I hadn't heard before and all of a sudden I was like, oh my God. Like I've never heard it said that way before. That's so much better. Right. I remember like literally sprinting down the, the, the stairs probably pissing somebody off who was in the little quiet call booth on the right.

Yeah. And, and running back to my desk to like write it down before, before I lost it. That kinda stuff doesn't happen when, when you're remote. Right. It's also really hard to quantify what the value of that stuff is and to say that like, we're doing it for this really like tertiary reason of random particle collision. That's why we're doing this. It's hard to justify it. I think a couple things have happened here, which, which I think is interesting.

One is, I think we now have, you know, I talked about this before. New generations that have come up where this isn't unusual. Okay. So, you know, we have to, we have to step back and look at our own bias and say, look, we came up through a di very different generation, uh, for us in the, the eighties, nineties, and two thousands where being in the office was a hallmark of your career. Like it, it's, it's where you got a lot done socially, you know, politically, you know, things like that.

For a younger generation, certainly post COVID that has never seen the inside of an office, it's hard to say. I, I miss those things if you never had them. When we tell, uh, somebody younger, let's say 22 coming into the workforce, that after work, we used to all play hockey together. I'm sure they get that. Like if you like hockey, right? Yeah. They're like, oh my God, that sounds amazing. You mean like N Hhl 2025, right? Right. Exactly.

But we also had to, uh, get up at, get up for work at, at eight of the morning and fight traffic every single day and then fight it all the way home. Yeah. And we're usually sitting in our car for an average of an hour per day, uh, every day. There's no version of like, oh, man, the good old days. Like, how, how do I get some of that? Right?

Or you sometimes would've an office or office a a boss that would walk around desks to desk, just bullshitting with everybody just to make sure that they, that they were there on time and they were doing work. You're like, well, well, I don't think I missed that either. I mean, like, yeah, there's so many things that if you had never experienced this, you'd never wish upon yourself. Wouldn't, and I think that there are, are far better ways of doing those things.

I, this is one of the, the core points you and I made is we, 'cause remember we took our teams remote well before the pandemic. We were a mostly remote company by the time the pandemic hit, and then we became fully remote. But we were, we were already rocking that. And so I, I think one of the, the pieces of pushback that we got was like, you know, people are working, how do you know they're doing this? And they're like.

The only way you are measuring your team's work is by seeing that their butts are in chairs in front of monitors. Like you're probably already non-productive. Let's put a pin in that for a second. Yeah. 'cause Sure. I wanna devote like a whole section on just that I, on autonomy of folks and everything else like that. Yeah, let's definitely get back to that one. I wanna circle back to what you said before around the fact that there are, there's a generation of people who are.

Are working now who never experienced an office. Right? Right. They, they started digitally. So I think that's part of it. That calls into question two things. One, would they even expect there to be a company culture? And in the same way that I think you and I look at it and go, well, whatever version of company culture you create digitally is gonna be some watered down version of that. They may not feel that way either. They may go, well, but this is, you know, maybe.

We having come up through a very different beginnings, uh, in, in having an actual office culture. Maybe they have an ability to seed culture and grow culture and be satisfied with the culture. That's just pure digital. They're like, no, this is what we do. And I'm like, no, this is exactly the type of culture that we form in our, our subs. This is exactly the kind of culture that we form in our discords and my gaming community and whatever.

Um, and so part of me just goes like, maybe I'm just wearing the Fogy hat here. I don't know. I think so, and, and again, let's look it up from two different ways. Let's, let's agree that, that clearly we have bias because we saw something before. It's the same way, like when we talk about social media and we're like, oh my God, everybody's just on social media staring at their phone all day. When, when I grew up you just had to talk to somebody, et cetera.

Now a huge, massive part of that is my bias toward, you know, how I grew up and, and what I saw. I honestly wish it were the opposite. Sure. I wish these online interactions were so genuine and authentic that I could do more of them because I love talking to people. That said, when we look at and we zoom out and we say, we wanna build a culture in this company that stands for something.

And, and, uh, people feel a part of something that's really hard to do, I think, in a transactional environment or, again, everything's is, is comments and likes, right? Yeah. Like everything is disconnected. You've got Right. Some Zoom calls from time to time, but everybody's in their pajamas on a fake background. Like it's like, it just like none of it feels nearly as real.

And again, I understand that, that I'm comparing my own bias, but none of it feels as real and as natural as having someone next to you. So I think if, if you believe that, and I think a fair amount of people do, you just step back and you say, okay, that is what it is. Now what? Yeah. Instead of trying to get back to that. Right. Take it off the table. Yeah. So that's, I guess that, so that's the, there's sort of two big questions in my mind, it branches down from the first.

The first is, do we need culture at all? Right. At this point, is it, are we just moving to a purely transactional model where it is, you know, you're trading outcomes for for dollars, right? And right. And so is it just purely transactional if we say. No, there does need to be some level of culture, right? Because it's important to the business, and we can get into why that might be or might not be. There might be certain types of businesses where that is true.

There might be certain types of businesses where there aren't. I certainly feel like for what we do and the amount of kind of heart and soul that gets put into the work that we do with founders, it would be hard to do that on a purely transactional basis. But hold that aside. Let's assume that, let's, let's go with answer, answer one, which is yes, there does need to be some, some culture.

Do you think that there are any aspects of the in-person culture that we should try to replicate or do we have to let it go entirely and rebuild new digital first? Culture. You know something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it, but that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do.

We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do. Let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it. I think we need to recognize the limitations of a digital first culture, right? Mm-hmm. Again, I, I, I think, I think there are, are some hard limitations that if we try to fake it, uh, ergo our, our zoom happy hour with a drink. Yeah. It's just inauthentic.

It, it's, we're trying to make something that, that isn't, you know, uh, what we, what we want it to be. Yeah. I also think that you, you mentioned something earlier that culture has always had an implicit sense of buy-in. That everybody wanted in on the culture. You and I, you and I remember our times of playing hockey or NBA jam Oh yeah. Or whatever, like, you know, in the office very fondly. I can think of some people in the office who did not think of that very fondly. Correct.

They were, they were less bought into the hockey part of it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Or NBA jam there. There were somebody that sat right next to the NBA jam arcade cabinet that would get up and leave and just go home every single time we started playing. Right. Well, yeah, I can't, you were either playing NBA jam or you, you weren't working. No matter what, even if you weren't playing, you weren't working because the amount of noise. Yeah. So, but that's my point, right?

Like the part of that culture always assumes that everybody else is like down with that culture. And, and I always think it's fascinating because like even places like Google that try to build this like other worldly level of culture. Yeah. And by the way, whenever they say like, this is such a cool place to work, what they're always talking about is how much stuff doesn't involve work. Yes, it's the free lunches, it's the foosball tables. It's, it's, it's such a cool place to, to not work.

Yeah. Correct. Right. That's essentially like what it always was. But I guess my point is, if we're gonna go back and, and we're gonna try to like define like what culture is to us, it could have nuances. Culture is about respect. Culture is is about recognition, culture is about, uh, communication. Like those are all very important values. But what we're really talking about here, like, you know, a lot of what we're talking about is community.

Yeah. The, the sense that, that we belong, that we engage with each other, that we have this, this non-work. Engagement that we're fostering and creating right kind of friendships. Right. Although, you know, we're work friendships are always a little bit tenuous as far as like, are we friends? 'cause we work together, kinda like having a neighbor, right? Are we friends? 'cause you're my neighbor. Are we friends? Could we actually friends?

I think if we look at, if we look@startups.com, at what culture is to us, it certainly has the respect side. It certainly has the accountability side. Here's a twist. I think maybe our culture over time, the last couple years has kind of evolved to where it is comfortably transactional. Meaning, I know my job, you know your job.

Yeah. And we're just good. Right? Like you show up and I'm not saying specific to you and I I'm saying with with everybody in the company. Yeah, yeah. No, I understand. Yeah. Everyone drops in, they say, I did what I said I was gonna do, and they're out. I can't remember the last time I asked anybody where they were or what they were doing or like, you know, any of the stuff that used to be the tropes of in office. It doesn't even occur to me.

Doesn't, yeah. Well, why would it at this point, I think I'm gonna echo back to something that, the question that you asked though, which is, or what you said is if we were starting something new. Would we still take that? Would we still accept that same approach? Would we say, I guess said differently. Is it possible to walk into something new, to begin something new and to walk in feeling comfortably transactional? Does that exist or, or is comfortably transactional?

This best of breed blend of, we used to have a strong in-office culture, team culture, and now we have a strong digital. Work ethic and mechanism. And so it's a mashup of those two things. But can you start with that? I, I'm, I don't have an answer.

Let me build on this. Okay. Uh, build this concept because I actually, it's kind of fascinating. I, I feel like, like we've kind of reached this new culture and I really like it. And, and I guess what I'm saying, it's, it surprises even me now, again, I'm, I'm an extrovert. I love being around people. I was always the guy at the company, let's get the party started, kind of, you know, whatever. So again, so I love being around people.

However, one of the things that are kind of, I'm gonna call it transactional, which, which sounds so hollow in, in, in without personality, but I consider it just a strong understanding. And again, it's about responsibility for me. It's like, I'll do my shit. You do your shit. Like, yeah. Yeah. We've got each other's back. Like we can no look past to each other and we know it's gonna score every time. A lot of that comes from the fact that we've been doing this together for a very long time.

Yes. That's why I said if we were starting from scratch and we basically we had other needs other than just the company's needs, emotional support, brainstorming, letting the idea develop, we just have a different set of needs right now@startups.com. We've been around for 14 years. We are just running a business. We're not forming a business. Correct. Coming with new ideas all the time, but we are running a business so that we have fewer question marks.

Now that said here, here's what's fascinating to me. Because we've evolved to the state where everybody kind of knows what their, what their position is, and knows what they're doing.

It creates a level of autonomy that we've never had before. Sure. Like I can say, Hey, you know, whomever, just do your thing. Let me know when you're done, because we've been around forever. I know exactly how that's gonna go or not go. Yep. So what that's done for me, I'm just gonna speak personally. It's allowed me to pursue other parts of my life, my family, my social, et cetera, and just leave work to be work. Whereas before work was like 16 hours of my day, dude. Right, right, right.

And it was all consuming. And here's what I'm saying. Everything else came at the expense of work. It was, it was a trade off, and then it was a very apparent one at that point when everyone else is in the office, when everyone's there together, if you're not there, it's very obvious when somebody hops off a Zoom call or a chat or whatever. Now I assume they go talk to their spouse for a minute, or you know, like, play with their kid for a minute, whatever. Like, I expect that now because.

I know that, that they're good at their job. They're gonna get their shit done. Back in the day when I had to basically lured over everybody to get every minute of productivity, in my mind it was draining and it wasted a ton of my time that I could have been spending with my family. Exactly. Or doing other stuff, right? Yeah. Just the mental overhead of, yeah. Okay. Actually, uh, you hit the word that I was gonna use.

It's reduced so much overhead for me that I can now invest in other things that I never had the luxury for before. And yes, it comes at the cost of, you know, developing some personal relationships. Like, like, again, different than if you were, uh, sitting next to somebody. It comes at at, at the cost of maybe like this. This sense of belonging with within everybody, uh, at the company.

Yeah. But it comes at the payoff of me and likely everybody else I know that I work with Living Better Lives, which, which I think. It is sort of one of the core goals. I think maybe that was always there in the background, but I think that's one of the interesting things is that some of this stuff, you know, remote just stripped away things that, you know, were, were perks and left us with some of the real stuff, which is like, are people aligned? Are they trusted? Are we clear on why we exist?

And why we exist is to, to do something good. It's to make lives better, right? We're trying to make lives better for our clients, for our staff, for each other. And so I think to some degree it, it stripped away some of the bullshit and, and allowed us to get more clear.

I want to, I wanna stick on the, the, the value of culture. And I, there's a lot to dig in around like this, the autonomy piece here, because I think it's changed a lot about even things like, like how we hire a hundred percent, how we manage, how we lead. But before we go there, I wanna go back to just the culture piece for a second. At what point does it not feel worth it, right? Like there's some things where like if you do. 80% of a job, you get 80% of the outcome.

Yeah. There are some things where like if you do 80% of the job, you get none of the benefits. And I feel like culture can be one of those things where it's like, yeah, oh, we still have cocktail hour. It's just virtual now. To me, there's zero value. It's not like, oh. Virtual cocktail hour is half as good as as regular cocktail hour. No, it's, it's zero. Good. Right. To me, it's, it's zero. Good. It was like, it did nothing. Right.

Right. And so I'm, I'm curious, like thinking back through what you were saying of like, you know, if we were gonna start something new now, you know, there would be some, some difference in Delta in the approach of how we would do it. And we would, we would have to recognize the limitations and at some point I'm going. I wonder if I would even try, like, and, and what aspects would I, oh, would I actually try, right.

Or would I just feel like I get that no matter what we do, the version of this thing that we're gonna spend, time, energy, and money building, meaning just the culture piece isn't gonna be worth the, the investment at any level. I get that and, and think of how, how many billions of dollars a startup company spent on the concept of culture and to make themselves feel like they were very well connected, whether they were or they weren't. And I'm not anti-culture, I just wanna be clear.

What I'm saying is, in a remote world that culture looks very different. It's, in my experience, much harder to maintain. Um, whereas before it came natural, and again, you have to ask yourself what is the value and ROI of establishing, let's say, uh, an in-person culture, uh, that you can't get elsewhere? Yeah. But let me say this.

We talked earlier and I said, I wanna get back to this concept of people being independent and autonomous, et cetera. A couple weeks ago I was doing job interviews for a role, and one of the folks asked me what the total compensation was, and I said, I tell you what. The total compensation is just a number, but the most valuable thing we pay you in is autonomy. Yeah. And I said we pay well, uh, we pay well here. But that's not really the, the best part of working here.

The best part of working here is total autonomy. And here's what I followed that up with and I said, and depending on who you are, it could also be the worst part of working here. Right. And I said, uh, and here, here's my theory of which I did not share in the interview.

I said to me, remote work has amplified who people are. Yeah. It percent is given. People who are, are self-directed and autonomous. The freedom they've been lacking all along. Yeah. But it's been given to everybody else who needed, you know, discipline or management or whatever, a free pass to fuck around if I'm trying to be. Honest with myself as to how I divide the world.

It's like 90 10, I think like maybe, and I'm probably being generous, 10% of the world has the, the, the merit and the discipline to be self-directed and autonomous. Yeah. Everyone wants to be left alone, don't get me wrong. Right. Like the, the, the need is is probably universal, but the, the ability to manage that discipline when nobody else is pushing you or nobody else is telling you day to day to show up for work and do job. Yep. Not easy.

I think it's a massive ask, and I think that was wildly overlooked when people went into remote work. It's one that we overlooked, and I think it was one that once it became obvious, I actually saw that as a huge benefit. Right? A huge, it was a force function because it was also you. You couldn't, you didn't hide from it. It wasn't like we couldn't see which were those 10%. It was really obvious. And so I guess it makes me wonder like how much time, money, effort did we waste?

Knowing now that probably 90% of the people that that we're, we were working with or around at some point, were those same folks. And, and I guess, well, another question, were they actually different in, in office culture or were they just hiding? Like was it just possible to hide. I can timestamp this to the frigging year. Okay. I remember E exactly. When all this went out the door. Here's what I'm saying.

I remember to the day exactly when the concept of I go to the office to work, Uhhuh went out the door. It happened twice. It happened once when I saw the first person on Facebook at at work, which sounds Oh yeah, I remember. I remember that. Silly now that, right? Yep. And and, and I was like, huh. Because it wouldn't even occurred to me like that you could do that. Right.

Yeah. And the best one was when I walked by a gal's computer who was an intern at the time, and I looked over and she was watching Netflix at work, Uhhuh. And I was like, what are you doing? She's like, oh no, don't worry about it. It's on a, a second monitor. I'm doing work on the other monitor, Uhhuh. Yeah. Like, and I'm like, it doesn't even occur to you like Right. I'm the fucking CEO o of the company and like, you don't even lie to me and, and tells you not to worry about it.

Right. Like, I'm pretty sure the job description says I'm allowed to pick what we worry about. One, two. Okay. But yeah. But just the fact that it didn't even occur. Right. That was the thing that generation, I, I know I, I remember this situation quite well. Yeah. Um, because we had a, we, we had a lot of talks about, we were like, we pull up in the country and we're like. How do we even begin to process this, right?

That just happened and now we have to accept that like this is the environment that we work in. Now this is part of the culture, right? It's the beginning of the end. Yeah. So as soon as people had mobile phones at work, like that was the, that was the end of anybody doing work. Oh my gosh.

And, and, and I say that to say like, you could basically be messing around on your phone the entire time and kind of be present now, let's stick with that for a very long time, like thousands of years just being present. Was a massive part of your contribution to work. That's it right here. Here's a good example. If I wasn't that good at my job, right, but I showed up before everybody and I left after everybody. Yeah. And I was, presence went a long way.

I was wildly uh, charismatic with everybody, et cetera. I could probably keep a job for a fairly long time. Right now, take those things off the table if no one has any idea. When I show up for work and no one, actually, I, I can't charm anybody or tell 'em how nice I am. Right. Your emojis are mechanism I have Charismatic is the next person output. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, like all of a sudden we're all laid bare.

Yeah. And so I've had this thesis that says that remote work has amplified. Best and the worst if you were bad at what you do. Yeah. Remote work has shown a spotlight on it. Okay. Yeah. Again, it's managed properly and if you're good at what you do, remote work just worked like it. It just worked because you were the kind of person that was already working on your own schedule. Right? You weren't showing up for work and being a top performer 'cause your boss told you to.

Yeah. You are gonna do that anyway. That's why you're a top performer. So what, what's happened here@startups.com over the years since, uh, since COVID and, you know, full-time remote work, is we've shed a whole bunch of people and we've added other people. But if you look at the balance of who's here, they're all the autonomous people. Hence when the person asked in the interview, you know about compensation, I said, the top compensation item is autonomy.

Like we wanna give you a freakish amount of autonomy because if you need to be managed at this company, you're not gonna last very long here. Yeah. Which was music to most people's ears. The problem is it's music to good people and bad people's ears. Good people are like, this is how I wanna work, and the bad people are like, this is how I wanna work. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's a, it's a siren song for, for everyone. Not just the, not, not just the capable.

There was a, there was a loose thought forming here around like the idea of going back to like, you know, the, the charismatic show up early, stay late person. I would argue that back then that person actually had a value based on just those things in an environment where people were forced to come in. Having the person who showed up early, stayed late. Help to set the goalpost for what everybody else should be doing. Right. They were a bit of a, they were a bit of a compass, right?

It sort of defined like, okay, maybe this is what we're supposed to be doing. Sure. The charisma piece helped to keep people satisfied enough to keep showing up. Right? Because you know it. As much as like, I don't know that being in office benefited anybody. There were definitely downsides to it. There were definitely downsides, and you can definitely have toxic culture.

You could, if you don't have somebody charismatic in the room, it can become a really shitty room really quick, and it can become really shitty output really quick. And so I think those, there, there was some sense of, of actual value, not necessarily that it was a, a, some sort of big benefit, but it limited some of the downsides of in-office culture. But. I think that went away entirely in, in remote for the most part.

I think one of the things that, you know, we touched on, but we haven't explored too much, is for a certain number of people, the social aspect of work Yeah. Was a massive negative. Yeah. It's interesting 'cause uh, when I talk to founders who, you know, would otherwise seem like, like they're extroverts, a lot of 'em say, actually I'm not. I'm more of an introvert and like being able to like, kinda like hide in my hole for a while is kind of what I prefer.

And so, uh, for a lot of founders let's, you know, talk about founders. A lot of founders were forced to be the hype man, so to speak in a company when all they wanted to do was the work person just show up and get their job done. I am a developer at heart that just happened to become a, a, a founder. Right. And I just, yeah. And I'm supposed to giving speeches, prefer to stay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I get that.

Uh, but within that, think of how many folks wanted to work at the company, enjoyed the work, but ha the the culture was foisted upon them. Yeah. And it was something that like, they, they were like, like forced to fit into. Yep. And now all of a sudden you're like, Hey, look, you don't have to deal with any of that. Like, be who you're gonna be. We don't care. Just, you know, push the work under the door when you're done with it. Like best thing ever for them.

Now you could be an employer right now and say, those are exactly the people that I don't want. Right. You know, those people that, that, that aren't part of the team, aren't part of like the, the, the mission. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. I get that. Right. All I'm trying to say is many of us had many of those people on our staffs and those people never had the opportunity to opt out. Yeah. And now they do. And, and you know what, I'm fine with it. Like we do a company event. You show up.

Cool. If you don't show up, I'm also cool. Oh, side note. I hated doing company events. I hated company events. Now, now I didn't hate my company. Okay. Let me just be, be clear that I love people I worked with. When I say I hated doing company events, w what I hated about it was feeling like I forced everyone else to come to the company event. Right. A also funny side note, just 'cause I, I, I think maybe some people, the audience can appreciate this.

Once a year at the Christmas party, I think I've told you this before, we get a chance to meet everybody's spouse, Uhhuh, and, and I would joke to people from time to time, you've heard me say this before, I said, prepare your spouse because within the first three seconds of me shaking hands with your spouse, I'll know exactly what you say about me at all times because I'll, I'll know the look in their eyes.

Yes. When they, when they meet the villain of their, uh, uhhuh of, of their spouse's, uh, life. Uh, I know exactly what, what that looks like and I joked about that, but like, it's all, well, it is true, but like, I hated like these company parties where everybody felt like it was an eighth grade dance. They were forced to come to, and we had great parties. I mean, to be fair, like these, these weren't like stinkers of parties.

Yeah. It always felt like 50% of people really wanted to be there, 10% couldn't wait to be there. And the other were like, I'd literally rather be doing anything else. Anything's kind of like how you feel at most weddings. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, it can always feel a little forced. I mean if, if you feel like you have to be anywhere, even if it's somewhere. 'cause I think there is, there is that even if it's somewhere I want to be otherwise, and I'm told I have to be there.

I automatically wanna be there less now, right? Like, you know, like, yeah, exactly. You have to go do this thing now and like, I was gonna do it anyways, but now that you told me I have to, I kind of wanna do it less. Right? That's just, it's nearly every wedding I've ever been, uh, invited to unless I was in the wedding, or even then. It's not that I'm not happy for the person or whatever, most times I don't even know who the person is.

'cause like my wife's, you know, family or something like that, right? And I'm like, why am I here again? And, and I guess what I'm saying is like, I felt like we were pushing a marshmallow through a keyhole. Like we were trying to like force this idea that everybody's, everyone wants to have fun, right? Yeah. Like 20% of you wanna have fun, the rest of us would rather be doing literally anything else.

And so some of those events, uh, for me felt forced as the person organizing them, it made it even worse. And I think back to like. 20 to 30 years worth of like Christmas parties, et cetera. I always had a good time because I was generally hiring all of my friends. Right. So like for me it was great, but I'm also like fairly self-aware enough to be able to look around the room and be like, you know, not everybody else is feeling the same way I am. Right.

And not everybody's a spouse is feeling the same way, or, yeah. And so I, yeah. Yeah, it's tough. I think, again, anytime you force something and then I think it puts you in this other conundrum, which is then, okay, so then do we. If we see that only a certain number of people want to partake in this type of event, do we try to create another event for the other camp and the other, and, and does that actually build team culture?

Or does that just draw stronger lines of demarcation that that separates them? And it just becomes really complex and I think part of me is relieved that that's largely gone away in going back to like the whole overhead thing, right? These are things we just have to think about. I haven't thought about planning a work Christmas party in what? Eight years. Seven, eight years. I love Christmas parties with all the people that I actually would normally hang out with. Right.

And, and, and by the way, if, if, if a bunch of those people I happen to work with as well. Awesome. Yeah. The fact that every year I don't have to drag a bunch of people who I know don't wanna be there. Yeah. Out to an event and then try to make small talk. It it like awkwardly. Yeah. Um, that I know makes them as uncomfortable as it does for me. I don't miss any of that now. Now that has nothing to do with saying, Hey, let's go remote versus otherwise.

I'm saying that for our culture, uh, you know, as far as our mentality. And the folks that work here at the stage of our business remote works. Great.

Now that said, I think for a lot of people, like founders come to me like, ah, well you're remote, you know, remote's bad, and you know, in office is good. And my answer is yes, if that's what you need. But Ryan, here's what I think. I think that for most founders, it's not about which one is better, it's about which one makes sense for you. There's pros and cons to both. We've done both, right?

There's a time and a place for either, but I think for most startups when they're, they're getting into this and they're so hung up on saying, oh, this one's better, this one's better. Try 'em both. Do what we do, do hybrid, do a few days in, a few days out. See which one you like better.

If, if one of them feels more compatible, great, but realize that either one has a massive set of trade-offs, and that's fine, but you have to go all in in the end on which path you think makes sense, not just for you, but for every single person in the company. And that is not an easy thing to do. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone. You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes.

Connect with bootstrap founders and the advisors helping them win in the startups.com community. Check out the startups.com community@www.startups.com to see if it's for you. Could be just the thing you need. I hope to see you inside.