Noah Kagan walks through Sumo.com's office, showing how it's designed to attract talent and speed up work. The space includes a secret podcast studio where anyone can record in a minute, a massage room, sales gongs that celebrate deals, and a Japanese bar for the marketing team. Kagan contrasts this pragmatic setup with the lavish spending he saw at Facebook.
When I was at Facebook, it's interesting, like Mark spent like half a million on the office. Uh-huh. And I was like, why would you spend so much on the office? I was like, dog, I just need like IKEA chairs and a desk and like all that. He's like, people spend a third of their life here. You want to create an environment that people actually want to come to. Cool environment. Like, I think parts of it, some people come, they're like, oh, we have to actually do work? Yeah. But there's a balance. Like, yeah, have the best of everything. Yeah. Because like, if they're gonna have to be here all day, create a good environment. But it's also a good recruiting tool too. Yeah, when you come and there's like, like if you come in here, there's a massage room. Yeah. So we have a masseuse that comes every week. I love it. Pretty cool. And now I'm like, yeah, we need it. That's a good interview. No, you can watch if you want. No, it's because we ran out of space We're like, we need to use this sometimes. These are all the people that make it happen. What's the story behind the names? They're all like fat-ass wrestlers, sumo fat asses. So like Luchador, E. Honda, Andre the Giant. This is really cool. So Troy, who's over in the corner, will do webinars every once a week at least, like for new customers. That's when he had hair. Look at that. Those are good days. That's when you run a startup. Look, lose all your hair. The one thing that I realized with offices is that like if you're trying to do video or audio or things in general, How do you lubricate it? Meaning make it easy. So you literally can come in here and like, if you ever want to do YouTube or anything like that, so in less than a minute you can already start recording or making a video for YouTube or podcasts or anything. So you make it really easy for yourself to do the things you want. And then I put a secret room in for my podcasts. Secret room, let's go. XXX. Yeah, a lot of X's. Oh, here, actually, I'll take a photo of you guys. So we have people that come that we get interviewed. We put photos of them. This is— Chad got me a license plate. Yeah, it's supposed to say Chief Sumo, but it looks like Chef Sumo. So I got sumo.com as a license plate. One, two. Nice. Yeah, so I'll do podcast interviews when people come into town, and I'll take their photos. I think it's just cool to have something that like people can talk about. It just makes it kind of fun. Like I like these kind of quirks in my home or office. Like do you see the other secret door? We're not supposed to, but we cut a hole between the two units. Yeah, upstairs. Well, I think that's one thing about running a business or entrepreneur. Like you're not supposed to. Not supposed to. Like if it was already been. You weren't supposed to, someone else would have done it. Yeah. And then you were third. Well, you're second. Yeah, so they basically helped build the sales. Then so when they're— it's actually kind of cool when they're on a sales call, that light will turn on up there, on air. Marketing team, free lunches, drinks, and then we built a Japanese bar. It's actually kind of cool. This is Chris and Sarah, they write our content. That's Matt, he does sales. They do more than that in life, that's just what they help us out here. I think this is kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah, so we have like a— so every Friday Chad will make happy hour drinks. He'll make like crazy cocktails just every Friday. Badass. And the whole team just gets off 5:30. He'll ring the bell. I don't— where's the bell? You guys need a gong. That's what you need. Every sales team member has a gong. You see on their desks. So every time they make a sale, they'll do a gong. Love it. Sneaky, sneaky. Love it. Most of the day I'm working. Most of the day it's like I'm over at that desk. You're like slouched over like— Yeah, I mean, I think there's a balance that I think more people need to not be at a computer because the more you're at a computer, you're probably not thinking. You're just like in do mode. So I do try to take the Fridays to like, all right, let me go bike riding or get out of the fucking office. Because you actually think of good ideas there when you're free. Yeah, totally. Or meet with you and we talk about that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, the rest of the day I'm at the same office. Yeah. All right, there you go. Thank you. Oh, namaste.
