Timedoctor Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording. [00:19] >> SEO has a 202% return on ad spend. Paid ads has a 155% return on ad spend, and email has a 127. Bootstrap companies grow faster than their venture backed counterparts, past 10,000,000 ARR. [00:35] Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software [01:01] founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. [01:20] >> I wanna start out my talk with a question because I always like to start out my talks with questions. And usually, these questions are something that I talk about around a couple other founders. And this question, the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized it was actually a lot more complicated to answer than initially when I asked it. And that question is, how do we build billion dollar bootstrapped SaaS companies? How many [01:48] >> of you guys are bootstrapped right now? Just a raise of hands. Perfect. And how many are venture backed? Okay. Cool. You guys are gonna be pissed off, but don't worry about it. It it you're gonna learn something from this as well. So here's some interesting statistics. Bootstrap SaaS medium growth rate is 28.5% from three to 20,000,000 ARR. That's pretty good. Another statistic that I saw was SaaS median growth rate over 10,000,000 ARR is 24%. So growth [02:18] >> goes down obviously a little bit as you're scaling the organization. However, if you split out venture backed companies, Bootstrapped actually grows 6.7% faster than venture backed companies. Now isn't that very counterintuitive? Don't you usually have a bunch of people that are at conferences like this and say, no. No. You need to raise money because that's gonna allow you to grow faster. But no. Bootstrap companies grow faster than their venture backed counterparts. Past 10,000,000 ARR, they actually [02:55] >> grow faster than their venture backed counterparts. There is a lot more failure rate on the smaller ones, but once you get past that 10,000,000 ARR mark, Bootstrap actually grows faster. So this was really weird for me because I thought to myself, okay. So if we want to build more billion dollar bootstrapped SaaS companies, we have to start to think differently. Because to be completely honest with you, the information is different. The conflicts are different. The economics [03:19] >> are are different. The culture is different. The business is different. But in my opinion, it is better. And that's not just my opinion. That's a fact. So how do we build billion dollar bootstrapped SaaS companies? Well, my answer is that bootstrapped SaaS needs a different playbook than venture backed companies. We need a different methodology in order to be able to build those types of companies. And I would also add on that bootstrapped companies learning from venture [03:52] >> backed companies is counterproductive to their overall growth. So we've seen a lot of bootstrapped companies. We've seen a lot of venture backed companies that have talked over the last two days at SAS Open. But what I really wanted to do was focus specifically on the 13 counterintuitive insights that I had bootstrapping an 8 figure SaaS. Now, this is the slide to say, don't leave the room. I know what I'm talking about. My name is Leah Martin. [04:19] >> I'm the co founder and chief innovation officer at Time Doctor, which is just a really great way of saying. I basically just get to play around with the research and development team all day long, which I've been loving by the way over the last year. I'm also the co organizer of running remote, which is the largest conference on remote work. I also co wrote the same titled book, running remote, which became a Wall Street Journal bestseller [04:40] >> last year, teaching you everything you need to know on building and scaling remote teams. And I'm really passionate on focusing on understanding how work works. And my second passion is actually working with SaaS businesses. We have team members in 46 different countries all over the world. And they all work seamlessly because we've understood remote work at scale. And when I was working on this talk about a month ago, I was actually in this little coffee shop [05:05] >> in the Phifei Islands. Does everyone know where the Phifei Islands are? One person. Okay. It's in Thailand. And I just realized in this moment as I was writing out this talk, if I had raised venture money, I would have never been able to do the cool and fun stuff that I currently do now, me and my cofounder, because we can't just go fuck off to, you know, Thiefy Islands for two months. So it's also a lot [05:32] >> more fun. So first insight that I have is if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And probably a lot of people know this quote. It comes from Peter Drucker. But probably a lot of you don't know that Peter Drucker actually stole this from this guy, Lord Kelvin. And I actually like this one more. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And I stole it from this guy, David Skock, who actually did a [06:00] >> really great talk at web summit last year about SAS metrics. If you're interested in checking that one out, it is amazing. But in our organization, everyone has a number. And if you don't have a number, you can't work here. That's very simple. So when you start working inside of Time Doctor, you need to be able to have some type of quantifiable, trackable goal to work towards. And this is our version. And again, I'm gonna give everyone [06:25] >> access to this at the end if you're interested in downloading all of these reports. So this is our top level executive dashboard. We have leading indicators and we have lagging indicators. We have three different colors, which is red, yellow, and green. Green means everything's doing great. Don't worry about it. Maybe we should have actually set a more aggressive goal previous quarter. Yellow means maybe this person is not gonna actually hit their target. We should probably pay [06:52] >> attention. And red means there's a fifty fifty shot of this person not hitting or this department not hitting their goals or not. Just from looking at this dashboard, where were our problems for this quarter? [07:06] >> Any ideas? It is PQLs, MQLs, deals, pipeline. We totally miffed we totally whipped this particular quarter on our improved targets. So we work on that, obviously. And we spend 90% of our time on the reds. We spend 10% of our time on the yellows, and we spend none of the time on the greens. We basically just set a more aggressive target for next year. Next one, camels not unicorns. Reduced resources eliminates optionality. When you have a [07:34] >> ton of cash, it's really easy to be able to work on crazy new things and go in directions that you wouldn't necessarily be interested in pursuing in the first place. You kinda solve problems with money. And we see a lot of this with a lot of venture backed companies. But I actually almost wanted to make this one of my counter intuitive insights, is make EBITDA. For everyone that's here right now, who has some net profit, some [07:59] >> EBITDA in their books? How many have like 5%? Keep your hands up. 102030%? Woah. You're buying the drinks. Okay. Thank you very much. So in my opinion, one of the things that my my financial adviser actually sat me down about six years ago. And he said, Liam, you have 94.5% of your net worth in a private company that you can't sell. You [08:28] >> need to start taking some risk off the table. And so we did. And and that's very counter to grow at all costs. Reinvest everything you possibly can inside of this business. And in my opinion, that was the that was the right move to make, which was start to make some profit. And it completely protected us against a lot of problems that we had down the line. I would say 10% is good is a rule of thumb [08:53] >> minimum. 20% is where I would really put the target at. And 30% is if you think that there are going to be some rough economic times in the next couple quarters, boost yourself up to 30% EBITDA to protect yourself in terms of that downside. Next one, large TAMs equals bad for bootstrapped companies. Again, this is probably something that people are not gonna like very much when I say this. But these three books, how many of you [09:20] >> have read Crossing the Chasm, Blitzscaling, or Scaling Up? Almost everybody. Right? And what they teach is that and I'm just using Crossing the Chasm as an example. You should be focusing on your early market segment, not the big mainstream market. So when we started Time Doctor, we had a probably a billion dollar total addressable market. Now post COVID with everyone using remote work, our industry became a lot bigger. It's probably worth 20 to 30,000,000,000 at this [09:51] >> point. And so we recognized that if we wanted to start the same business today, we would never do it because we just don't have the resources to be able to do it. And there are lots of competitors right now that are raising $50,102 $100,000,000 to be able to compete against us, but they've gotta overcome the entrenched brand that we've built, which is very, very difficult for them. And we actually were terrified around 2021 because we had, [10:16] >> like, seven companies that raised over a $100,000,000 to come directly after our market. And so far, none of them have really penetrated the market that badly because we already had that early market segment. So focus on the markets that are early. I would say below 10,000,000,000 is where I would really go. But if you can get it lower to a billion dollar total addressable market that you think is gonna grow in the future, that's where you [10:38] >> should go. Another honorable mention here is a lot of people talk about innovation, but you should really just talk about the dollars and cents. This is a great book, traction. Has anyone read this book before? Couple people. It's amazing. Stop focusing focusing about how to get from zero to one and just focus how to do that particular thing. Next one, remote is the best option, which obviously is gonna come from me, but I'll give you a [11:01] >> couple statistics to be able to reinforce that. Remote workers are 35 to 40% more productive than their office workers. They have a higher engagement than on-site employees. On average, they save seventy two minutes of their day just on commuting. So if you have your in office employees and your remote employees and you let your remote employees sleep for seventy two more minutes per day, you will have more productive employees. They say between 600 and $6,000 yearly. [11:29] >> They have a 93% of working professionals believe that remote work positively impacts their mental health. 51% of working professionals prefer fully remote. 46 prefer hybrid. 4% for some reason wanna be in the office twenty four seven. I don't really know why that is. And then lastly, there's a 50% higher retention rate in in compared to their in office counterparts. And lastly, it's more fun. As I said, I get to go to the Phi Phi Islands. I [11:54] >> get to travel around the world with my co founder and all the other employees that work inside of the company. So it's a lot more fun. And one other statistic, which I'll push to you guys is pre COVID, why Combinator saw that 16% of their startups were started remotely. Today, this cohort, 82% are partially or fully remote. So if you wanna be able to build products for the remote tech platforms and future, remote is definitely the [12:23] >> direction to go. If you wanna learn more, go to running remote. That's my conference that we run end of this month actually in Lisbon, Portugal. It is a lot of fun. Talk to me afterwards if you wanna go. Next. There's one to three ways to get customers. That's it. Very, very few companies, if you look at their user acquisition funnels, actually do more than three, four, five significant sources of user acquisition as you see them scale. [12:51] >> Here's a survey to be able to prove that out. This is a survey of $118,100,000,000 dollar plus companies. This is where they've deployed all of their revenue. They are basically all of their marketing channel revenue. You can see there's a lot in organic social media. And then you can see the absolute horrific return on investment for organic social media. Tweeting is not a strategy for anyone that's interested. What you need to focus on is SEO has [13:20] >> a 202% return on ad spend. Paid ads has a 155% return on ad spend. And email has a 127% return on ad spend. Do SEO, paid ads, and email in that order. If your CMO tells you to do anything different, they don't know what they're talking about. Next, build product number two at 10,000,000 ARR or below 40% year over year growth. When we first started Time Doctor, about a year and a half into it, we decided [13:49] >> to build this other company, which is called staff.com. And we thought that in the two sided marketplace space, everyone was doing it wrong, and we would do it right. So we ended up building this URL. We we bought this URL, which was very expensive. It was, like, $550. And we built this two sided marketplace. Year one, we were doing 86,000 MRR. Year two, we were doing a 112,000 MRR. So the business completely collapsed in on itself. [14:16] >> And while that was happening, Time Doctor was growing at 60% year over year. No problem whatsoever. And we were applying no marketing, no engineering resources into it. It was just running. So focus on your winners. Don't start losers before you actually scale up your winners. If you have something that's working, just keep doing it. I know that founders hate that, but keep doing it. Next. More than 10,000,000 ARR, you are a retention company. You are not [14:47] >> a customer acquisition company. I don't know if anyone uses Chartmogul here. We use it. A couple people. So these are our numbers in 2019. You can see that new revenue, which is the dark blue section, was about 40% of our overall revenue breakdown. In 2023, it was about 15% of our overall revenue breakdown. We are an expansion company now. We are not a user acquisition company. So we've deployed a lot more resources to CS, making sure [15:18] >> that we retain our customers, making sure that they're happy. As we just talked about in the previous talk, what to measure, CSAT, NPS, net retention referral rate. We actually have an NPS of over 56 right now. So we're doing quite a bit better than Alvaro, which is obviously something else that I could talk to you about. Next one. Brand is the most important thing. Plus past 10,000,000 ARR. I really do believe this. So when COVID happened, [15:50] >> a lot of companies just went and bought our product because they were like, well, we don't really have a remote team, but we identify what you guys do, which is time tracking for remote workers. And then when COVID happened, we just saw a massive, massive influx of revenue coming in. And we didn't really know where it was coming from, but we recognized long term that it was from our brand impression. And if you have a company [16:10] >> that's worth more than 10,000,000 ARR, particularly if you have a large customer base, let's say more than 10,000 customers, they're going to talk and that referral engine is something that's going to feed you to a 100,000,000, in my opinion. How do you test this? Well, you increase prices and you see if they stay. That's one of the best ways to test that. We did that through experimentation, and we actually it was one of those things that [16:32] >> we should have done it ten years ago and we didn't do it. We realized that there was almost no impact on conversion and churn by raising our prices by 20%, which just automatically raised revenue by 20%. Next, product led first, sales led later. So this is a bit of a story of March 2020. And everyone kinda knows what happened in March '20. The entire economy completely imploded, exploded, exploded for real work, imploded for everything else. So [17:04] >> February 2020, we were doing about 20,000 in new business MRR. By March, we were doing a 115,000 in new business MRR. And by April, we were doing 212,000 in MRR. We literally took the sales team that was working on about 10% of all deals. And we said, if you're working on and a $100,000 ARR deal would be important to that sales team. And we all of a sudden said, only work on million dollar deals. So the [17:34] >> product led engine actually converted all of those customers. 98% of our customers were converting through our product led model where a lot of our competitors didn't have that. And they basically wasted all of those leads where we ended up actually being able to get them. Funny story. We had a g 20 country literally deploy on our software [17:58] >> through a PLG model. I don't know how the credit card worked, but they deployed 500,000 employees on the system. And we went down for like an hour and a half. It was absolutely insane. And then we called them and we were like, stop. Stop doing this. We're gonna shut down your account. We'll try to onboard you properly. And that resulted in 202% growth in 2020. But again, by focusing on the actual PLG base, we could have [18:26] >> our sales team focus on the cream on the top. And a sales team is gonna cost you a couple million dollars to really deploy at scale. So it's incredibly important that you keep those costs small. You build the product so it can sell itself, and then you add the sales team on top. Next, pay less attention to competitors. Here's a couple slides to be able to reinforce this. This is Forbes, Statista, top reasons why startups fail. [18:51] >> There's also something from Fractal. Again, is just stuff that I googled. Get out competed is the fourth and eighth top reason why startups fail. Ran out of cash is the second most important one. If you're bootstrapped, you don't run out of cash because you live within your means. And you don't have to actually invest in time in raising capital and going after all of these. I mean, you guys know that have raised capital. It sucks up [19:17] >> a ton of energy and time. And so by removing that and focusing on just building and servicing customers that don't even know that your solution exists, particularly if you're in early side of the crossing the chasm process. You're going to be much more successful than focusing on your competitors that maybe own 2% of the overall market when you own 1% of the overall market. Next, and this is the most important one. Founders will try to self [19:48] >> sabotage. If things are going well in the business, you're gonna do stupid stuff to screw it up. And I think the reason why is because founders really like chaos. The company was born out of chaos. It was a very chaotic process to be able to say, we're gonna do this thing that no one's ever done before and I'm gonna do absolutely every job inside of the organization. You're gonna do stupid stuff like you're gonna build a [20:15] >> product that has no correlation to your original customer base. You're gonna not answer emails properly. You're not gonna work on partnerships the way that you should have been. You're just not going to focus on the things that matter because either consciously or subconsciously, you want to be able to sabotage the business. Because when you sabotage the business, there's more chaos. And then you are in a state of chaos which makes you unhappy consciously, but very unhappy [20:40] >> subconsciously. [20:42] >> And it breaks down into two big categories. Either number one, you believe subconsciously that you don't deserve to build a billion dollar business. Or number two, have limiting beliefs. [20:55] >> So your friends, your your your cousins, your parents, whoever it is, they don't want you to succeed and that intrinsically becomes a problem for you. I had to work on this actually for years. I was scared of telling people that I'm rich. And it's one of those things that even triggers me right now because I think to myself, all rich people are lazy assholes that just kinda sit around all day and don't do anything. But the [21:24] >> reality is that that was subconsciously holding me back from actually saying, well, I wanna build a billion dollar company, and I wanna be able to execute on that strategy and not become something that I hate. And that took a lot of therapy to be able to solve it. One last story I'll leave you with. I had a friend of mine and I went to his office. And literally in his office, he had a little sticky note [21:50] >> that read, your mother truly believes you deserve this. And to put it up there just to be able to get past that mental block. If you're having that type of mental block right now, talk to me off stage. I'm happy to be able to help you. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on therapy to hopefully change that type of mindset in my own head. But it's so important to be able to get past that self [22:13] >> sabotage because you will not succeed otherwise. The books didn't get here unfortunately. I was supposed to do a book signing, but they were not shipped in time. But if you have any other questions, that QR code has all of the documentation that I just went through and including this talk. And if anyone wants to chat with me, I'll be around. Thanks a lot.

Intro I want to start this talk off with a question that I've had off the top of my head for going on almost three years now and if you are a remote founder you probably have had the same question in your head as well this question is why did some companies not just survive but thrive during the pandemic how did some companies seem to defy all of this assumptions that we made about work because to be completely honest with you we didn't have any office parties during the pandemic we didn't have any team building lunches during the pandemic I didn't get a birthday cake on my birthday company didn't buy me one of those uh I also didn't get any pizza Thursdays I didn't even get any nap rooms during the pandemic although I did sleep a lot more often pre-pandemic than post-pandemic or post pandemic so why did some companies not just survive but thrive during the pandemic to explain this we need to actually talk about what actually happened during that pandemic so Remote Work Trends what happened in March of 2020 I love to show people this slide there's a buddy of mine's corporate VPN company for remote workers that's what happened during March of 2020 he forexed his business in three days and here's an even scarier number in February of 2020 four percent of the US Workforce was working remotely by March 45 of the U.S Workforce was working remotely that's the biggest shift in Works since the Industrial Revolution but the Industrial Revolution took 80 years and we did that in March so more than that Google has this like fantastic data set that I love to show people on Mobility changes over time Unfortunately they did take it down because they don't want everyone to know that every single smartphone that you carry is collecting all of this metadata they still do it they just took down the reports but thankfully I was able to get a pull off of it and this is retail and Recreation over time as you can see we had the pandemic we had a huge drop off and then we had a return to the mean this is Park usage actually where I'm from in Canada but again it applies almost everywhere in the Western World we had a big pop-up and now where we are turning to the mean with regards to parks this is workplace attendance I don't know if any of you guys are statisticians but that graph looks a little bit different from everyone else's so from the peak in March of 2020 at 45 of the workforce working remotely dependent upon the data source that you look at and there's lots of different data sources out there today 26 to 44 of the US Workforce is currently working remotely and he isn't even crazier statistic that number is going back up so by 2027 it's projected to be 50 of the US Workforce and actually by 2030 we're projected to be at 62 percent depending upon the data set that you take a look at so if you're thinking remote work is just this Remote Work is permanent singular thing that happened during coven and we're all going to go back to the office the harsh reality is that you have to actually adapt to that business model right now now I have a bit of a crazier statement to make a lot of people that hear this think I'm kind of nuts but I believe that remote work is a permanent civilizational shift I think that it's a consequence of the internet that's maybe even more important than the internet itself now you might think to yourself that's just some weird guy talking to you and he loves remote work so this is uh you don't want to put any weight on that it's not actually me that's Mark Andreessen from Andreessen and Horowitz who is arguably the best investor in the history of Western Civilization so even though Mark Andreessen is a genius I'm going back to that same problem why did some companies not just survive but Thrive during the pandemic and a couple years ago I actually figured out the answer I had that aha moment and it completely changed my perspective on how remote work is currently done and how we operate remotely inside of our company I was so passionate about it that I took two years to write this which is uh my book Running remote where I interviewed dozens of seven eight and nine figure remote first entrepreneurs and understood what they do differently from everyone else that transitioned towards remote work and as it turns out remote companies they work in a way that's so alien to you that if I described it to you most of people that see this talk or read my book the biggest response that I get is you're full of like this is not actually the way that people operate their businesses but it is the way that they operate their businesses and it's just based off this singular simple relatively counter-intuitive rule now we've also seen this and I've gotten a lot of comments from people as I've been walking around talking about remote work there's a very aggressive and I would honestly border on conspiratorial pushback to the office I see that Mark Zuckerberg just said after he basically cut another 20 of his Workforce that remote work may not be for him well to be honest with you when you completely change your corporation over to VR from social media there's probably going to be a couple bumps along the way here's the stats I have studied 17 remote studies that were published in 2021 on average remote workers are 13 more productive than their on-premise counterparts remote workers work on average a day more per week than their on-premise counterparts that can be good or bad we really don't know about that one and the craziest study this is 16 000 subjects out of Stanford over a nine month period identified that remote workers have an attrition rate that is 50 percent lower than their on-premise counterparts everyone here knows churn I'm telling you this is employee churn this is money in the bank so it's so great why are we seeing this push back to the office well let me first tell you a little bit about myself my name is Leah Martin I'm the co founder of timedoctorinstaff.com I'm also the co-organizer of running remote which is the largest conference on building and scaling remote teams we have employees in 28 different countries all over the world and we all work seamlessly based off of this fundamental rule that I discovered not just three years ago actually a little bit before that but the real focus of me trying to speak to you today is to understand how you can unlock this singular concept and that singular concept is something that I like to call Asynchronous Management asynchronous management so that's the practice of leading teams without simultaneously or synchronously communicating with them so work focuses on individual autonomy allowing all team members to maximize their own productivity without being dependent upon others to provide updates now let me give you an example I don't know how old everyone else is in the audience but I remember watching Friends the TV show has anyone I mean obviously hopefully everyone has seen Friends the TV show thank you when I went to school 8 30 pm on Friday is when you would watch friends and if I showed up at school on Monday not watching friends I was exercised from from my class Community everyone was talking about that episode oh what did Ross do to Chandler I don't really know I can't remember it was so Fargo it was so far back but the reality is that if I didn't show up at 8 30 to sit my butt down on the couch and watch friends I had to wait six months before there was a rerun that is synchronous communication today we have things like Netflix Netflix is asynchronous communication the information is available for us when we want to consume it not when it's most advantageous to the organization to be able to to deliver it to you this is effectively a synchronous management this is the concept that almost all successful remote teams were using before the pandemic and there are simply three singular tenants that I go over in the book that I want to review with you right now first off is deliberate over Deliberate Communication communication the second one is what I like to call democratized workflows and the third is detailed metrics I call them 3DS my publisher wanted me to call them that but I think it's kind of stupid so deliberate democratized and detailed first off my friend Nathan Berry who spoke at our conference about six months ago he's put this much better than me there are two types of companies there's remote first and remote forced so which one are you in if you're in a zoom call eight hours a day you're getting slack notifications on your phone at 9 00 PM you're told to report to your weekly company team culture meeting where you sit around a zoom call and you play guards Cards Against Humanity but not the fun one by the way the one that's like HR approved that isn't actually enjoyable for anybody you're in a remote forced culture this is exactly counter too deliberate over communication I don't know if you guys know Simon sinek the find your y talk which is I think one of the most famous talks on Ted this is a infographic from a company called duist which is a very famous asynchronous remote company and they really focus on understanding why everyone is trying to measure culture through how you work together when in reality you actually need to focus on why you're doing the work what impact do you have as an organization and that needs to feed through every single person in your company identifying why you're here why the work that you do matters why you think that this company is doing great things will literally change the world that's all a deliberate form of communication that most companies that are remote don't truly understand effectively you need to get your culture locked in order to be able to run remotely Write Asynchronous Communication second is you need to build a culture of written asynchronous communication so in our company everything that can be documented is documented so that you are no longer the actual manager of the company the platform is the manager of the company so if someone asks me for researching for this book I was able to be a fly on the wall for a company called get lab multi-billion dollar company public now incredibly successful they don't do meetings at all I have a couple thousand people they don't do meetings so I was able to be put inside of their Organization for a couple days and I started asking questions and whenever I ask a question they would respond with a link so oh what's the HR policy for the organization it's this here's the link uh well how do you guys run your your operations in APAC region here's the link and so after about nine or ten of these questions uh someone jumped on to an actual synchronous call with me basically a slack chat and they said hey dude you need to stop asking questions like you don't really understand how this system works you're being disruptive to your managers and I was like I'm being disruptive to the manager I thought the manager's job was to be able to actually give me the information he's like no no your responsibility is to understand the platform so that you can answer your own questions so you can leave those managers up to be able to do more meaningful work one of the most interesting statistics that I found in researching this book asynchronous remote organizations have on average a managerial layer that is 50 thinner than their on-premise counterparts so there are less managers doing more work and they have by extension a more profitable business model so essentially when you build a culture of written documentation there are no private conversations everyone can be everywhere at once all of that documentation is open to everybody you basically come up with a company where you have like if you had like a business archaeologist you'd be able to take that person put them inside of your company and say why was this feature built two and a half years ago you'd be able to go into my base camp threads go into my sauna boards go into my jira and actually tell me the answer that oh it was Bridget that built that and uh we fired Bridget three months after she made that decision so why are we actually thinking about this as a new feature or something that we should add on inside of the organization so it allows you to be able to have a history inside of your organization again without no one holding that sacred knowledge there's a process for doing it I call it the 4ds again the D's my publisher really like these discover design deploy and debug the beginning process you discover the actual process why is it there why does it exist spoiler the vast majority of the time the process is there because the founder or the VP or the c-level executive just put it in place it's not that it's actually any good so you actually have to figure out how to design it the second stage is you go to the design stage the first time that you do something you do it for yourself the second time that you do it you think about turning it into a process and the third time you turn it into a process reason why you don't do it a hundredth time is because you forget all of those small details and building out the process the reason why you don't do it the first time is because you don't know how to do it you take that process bring it to your team and you deploy it you do not ask your team do you like this process they'll all say yes and then they'll never use it ever again what you say instead is what are three things that I can do to improve this process document that's it three things you're then in the debug stage and then you go back through design deploy and debug till you get to a perfect process where you're getting no more meaningful feedback Detailed Metrics third thing detailed metrics every single person in the company must have at least one longitudinal and quantifiable metric that they report on weekly and here's the tricky part this is the part that and I love that this is a conference for Founders because this is the part that's really going to piss you off you need to take those metrics and you need to give it to everyone in the company ideally giving everyone the same informational Advantage as the CEO of the company so I know probably the vast majority of you are not going to do that because you're very scared about giving that information over like hey the raise didn't work out properly or churn is looking a lot worse we might have to do some Cuts but the reality is that if you arm everyone with that type of information they start to act like CEOs they start having a lot more autonomy in their decision making and it's not because you're smarter than anyone else it's because you have an informational Advantage async synchronous companies give people access to everything inside of their companies so here's a couple examples this is our leadership meeting here are our core values we go over that every single day we do it inside of Asana the vast majority of the time we actually make sure we have something called Silent meetings so basically if we go to our issues here these are our company rocks these are our issues I pulled this this week uh first one is FB svb could be a huge opportunity for us we want to buy some companies if everything melts and uh goes into the if we have less than three issues that we have not discussed asynchronously and completed we automatically delete the meeting so we meet on average about two out of every four meetings per month and also counter-intuitively the issues that always stick up there are generally issues that are connected to HR Susan doesn't like Jack Jack thinks that Charlie's an idiot those are the ones that usually stay on and we have to actually work them out synchronously but generally for us we don't meet we have these silent meetings where we debate all these issues asynchronously we come to a conclusion and we're able to move forward and here are some of our top metrics I pulled these off of literally this week we've got Andy who is in charge of marketing we've got Rodrigo in charge of growth we've got Charles in Charge in charge of sales and Nina in charge of success every single person is measured by these and then all of those links lead to other opening metrics for department heads inside of the company so if you implement async this is what's going to happen you're going to have greater inclusivity in culture exchange you're going to have women and minorities become leaders in your organization Charisma bias disappears this is my this is my Captain America story basically if you go into a meeting and you see eight people I don't even have to hear what they have to say usually it's the six foot five guy that looks like Captain America that ends up having his ideas adopted it's not because he has better ideas it's because he's actually charismatic and he's able to communicate his ideas more effectively asynchronous removes that ability hiring becomes faster leadership will be agnostic to anything but results you'll have a global talent pool which means better Talent period we hire in 28 different countries and managers will stop paying attention to presence and instead on results so remote work in my opinion gives employers and employees the opportunity to find the best of each other remote work is not going away so I suggest that you adapt now I'm going to be doing a book signing over there if you want to get a free book let me know if you want to come to running remote let me know thanks a lot foreign