Coda | Powering the Maker Generation

Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. Today we are rebroadcasting our episode from last summer featuring Shashir Marotra. Shashir is the CEO and co founder of Coda. The company makes an all in one dog platform that allows workers to collaborate on projects no matter where they are in the world. Coda just closed a $100 million Series D round. When Greylock General partner Sarah Goa spoke to Shashir last August, the world was deep in the throes of the pandemic and almost everyone was working remotely. While Coda was already popular with many organizations prior, the widespread transition to virtual work led to a spike in usage. In the months since, the working world has largely come to the realization that tools like Coda aren't just great for helping people work together, but when they can't meet in person, they're actually just great all the time. From restructuring workflow processes to overhauling the way meetings are run, tools like Coda have enabled companies to permanently alter the way they operate. Today, as the pandemic winds down in person, work is becoming an option again. But businesses around the world are instead choosing to adopt a hybrid model that includes remote work rather than go back to the office full time. This conversation is part of Greylock's Work From Anywhere podcast, hosted by Sarah Goa.

Hi everyone. I'm Sarah Guoa, General Partner at Greylock. You're listening to Grey Matter, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. You're listening to episode six of our Work From Anywhere series exploring how the world has been turned upside down since the pandemic began. At Greylock, we're excited to invest in entrepreneurs that are tackling the rapid change 2020 has brought. In this series, we'll talk to an amazing set of founders and CEOs of companies that are working through these issues in real time, especially those who have led the distributed work movement and those building technology tools for the digital first economy. Our next guest is Shashir Malhotra, the co founder and CEO of Coda, who I've had the pleasure of working with over the past four years on his crazy ambitious mission to bring spreadsheets, apps and documents together, and whose company has just raised an $80 million Series C financing round. Shashir, welcome to Gray Matter.

Great to be here.

Let's start by scrolling back a bit. Can you introduce yourself and how you and Alex came up with the idea and the sort of founding story here.

I started Coda in 2014. Before that I spent about six years at Google. I was responsible for the YouTube products there. And before that I spent about six years at Microsoft, worked on Office, Windows, SQL Server, and started a company before that called Centrada. I think if you ask people close to the company, they'll say, coda is an idea I've been working on in some form or the other for almost two decades, informed by a lot of early projects at Centrada, Microsoft, and then throughout the Google experience as well. But the actual moment of conviction happened in 2014. I'd been at YouTube for a while. I was almost ready to do my next thing, but starting a company was actually not very high on my list. And I had this friend Alex and I, who ended up being my co founder here. Alex and I went to college together. We've worked together in multiple different products and companies since then. But he was off starting another company, which thankfully wasn't going that well. And so he had come to me and asked to brainstorm about ideas for where he could take his startup. And so the foundation of what became Coda was mostly me brainstorming with Alex about his startup. And, you know, at one point in the middle of one of those brainstorms, one of us wrote this line up on the whiteboard, said, what if anyone could make a doc as powerful as an app? And that line basically become a bit of a rallying cry for us. For me personally, it just stuck in my head in a way that I. I just couldn't let go. And I often tell people that when you're starting a company, you have to ask yourself two questions. Is it. Is it an idea that you can't imagine not working on and you have a person you can't imagine not working with? And I usually tell people that when I was at YouTube, I used to tell people that as a way to discourage them. Usually one of the two criteria didn't happen. And so it's a good way to keep people at Google. But all of a sudden I found myself in the state of, you know, both things were true. Alex and I are a sort of obvious pair, very complementary skills. Consider him to be one of the best engineers that I know. And this idea, I just, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I would wake up drawing, I would, you know, everybody I could talk to about it, I wanted to talk to about it. And so I got kind of sucked in. I often tell people I think founding a company is as much of A curse as it is a blessing. It's a thing you just, at some point, you wake up and you say, I just have to do it. And so that's how we started Coda.

I've now heard you say that phrase, a doc as powerful as an app, maybe 100 times over the last year. This year. Can you unwrap that a little bit in terms of what you meant?

Yeah. I like to say that great businesses tend to start with very simple theses. And for example, for YouTube, it was online video. We'll do to cable what cable did to broadcast, and we'll go from 3 channels to 300 channels to 3 million channels. And you know, when we first used to talk about that, it was not really obvious to people that that would come true. And it did, you know, so. So similarly, our statement for Coda that anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app is I'd say today for some set of people, totally obvious. But for others, it's a big head scratcher. Like, what does that mean? And it really comes out of a couple observations of the world. The first is that I think the world runs on docs, not apps. And easiest way to test this is go look at how any team operates, any business operates, ask them what tools they're using, and they'll rattle off all these different tools. And then we use this for inventory, and we use this for task management, and this for CRM and so on. And then you sit and watch them all day long. And the things they actually spend their time in are generally documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and some set of communication tools. And so in my mind, the line between these two things has been fairly blurry. Something we should talk about. When I worked in office, I got to Google right when Google Docs was coming out. So we ran YouTube basically on Google Docs and Google Sheets. And for us, that line between doc and app was very artificial. We used to do things like we wanted to do planning a little bit differently than the way Google did it. And so we did okrs a little bit differently. And so we couldn't use their tools. We had to build our own. We did it in big spreadsheets. You know, we did compensation differently than how Google did it. I have a model for what I call level independent compensation that was very helpful for us. We did it all in spreadsheets. And my favorite example is in the early days of YouTube, if you hit flag on a YouTube video, it would create a row in a spreadsheet on an ops person's desk. So my view is this line that there's, you know, docs and productivity tools on one side and his applications on the other side. I think that's sort of a false dichotomy. So that's kind of observation number one. Observation number two is that these tools we use, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, they're all kind of cemented in metaphors from the 1970s. And we're basically looking at versions of WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc that have just been sort of copied and pasted through from green screen to DOS to Windows to macOS to Chrome and the web and to mobile phones and. But the core metaphors are all exactly the same. And so you sort of stick those two things together and say, okay, so people use docs in these entirely different ways, and they were created and those tools haven't changed in 40, 50 years. I mean, everything else in software in that time period is completely different. Operating systems are unrecognizable from what they were like in the 70s. You know, databases are totally different. Things like search engines and social networks didn't even exist. So we looked at that and said, why is it that the modalities have totally changed, but the platform hasn't? That started that frame on. What if we built a new doc where we intentionally erase this line? Anybody can make a doc as powerful as an app and encourage people to cross that boundary and not have an artificial separation between them. That's a little bit about both the founding story as well as where that phrase comes from.

When you think about the explosion of SaaS applications that every business is using today, and the fact that they're still. Still popping out to docs and sheets for core parts of their business. What do you tell users and teams about when they should use CODA and when they should use specific applications?

People pick differently all the time. You can, in coda, rebuild many different applications. But also in Coda, we've built this thing we call packs, which is a pretty interesting native way for CODA docs to reach out to other applications. And we see people use this both ways. Some teams will start in Coda, some and, you know, we have about 25,000 teams using Coda all over the world now. Many of them run entirely on Coda. And they do everything. It's their CRM system, it's their bug tracker, it's their task manager, it's their note taker, it's their wiki. Everything ends up in coda. On the other side, we have lots of teams that Pick up Coda and they, they use the Jira pack and they connect to Jira and they use GitHub pack and connect to GitHub and they use us as a coordination and front end tool for working with those other applications as well. I think that will continue. I expect that that ebb and flow will be important. There's a few reasons why people choose to do it in Coda versus in other places. The most obvious is it's already deployed. You've got something already up and running, everybody's already on Salesforce and you want something that integrates with it rather than replaces it. But the other cases, those are applications with key workflows or key capabilities that you want to be able to reach out to. The types of things you can do in Coda will go pretty far. But you know what we do. For example, we're big customers of Intercom as our tool for messaging communication, and that's a set of things that Intercom does that I think are just best in class, really critical and we're happy to integrate with them and we use them in addition to Coda. So there's sort of a. We try to have the best of both. When it's possible, use Coda for it. But we also really embrace the idea that when you use other tools you should feel like Coda is a great add on to that.

Yeah, I remember thinking even at the series a presentation for Coda, original codename Krypton, that this was going to be such a durable need. Even as people found more and more of these, you know, best in breed applications like an Intercom. Just because you saw this behavior happen all the time where people needed to connect functionality or break out of an application somehow and all of these sort of horizontal data analysis and workflows and communication just never ended up in each of these applications. I remember thinking at the time, like they can solve this tragedy of the commons that happens in SaaS, that's only going to get worse. So it's cool to see that happen for more and more teams.

One fun observation is I had fairly experienced founder tell me enterprise apps. If you look at the most commonly pressed buttons in any SaaS app, it's okay, cancel and export to Excel. And so in my mind, the idea for Coda is I would like to be the substrate that treats all such things as equivalent building blocks. And one of the things we did with packs is, you know, packs look and feel like very native experiences in Coda. And so you don't get this feeling of if it's in Coda versus not in coda. It's a big difference. And that allows people to think of Coda as something that doesn't have to replace all those things. It makes all of them better. That's at least a theory.

The theme of this podcast is work from anywhere. Coda as a product and as a team has grown quite a bit over the last couple of years. You also didn't start as a distributed team. You obviously are now, but in ways that are more, I think, durable than just related to the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about what the sort of state of the company is, both in terms of the usage you're seeing and then what your own team looks like?

So we've been non headquarters for a long time. Like I said before, it was cool. I think obviously the recent world events have caused teams to stretch that definition even further. And like the way we are distributed now is distributed in a way that I don't think is normal. And there's a big difference between, you know, you usually don't see your teammates and you have to stay. You're not ever allowed to see your teammates. That's like a very different type of of distributed. But actually when we started the company, this is actually one of our first Alex and I had a long debate about our philosophies on centralized companies versus distributed ones. And part of why we opened Seattle so quickly and so on was the viewpoint that companies that start distributed often end up building better companies. And I published a guide about this year's guide to distribute teams, which you can find find on our gallery as well. Talks a little bit about this history, but a lot of this was formed from my experience at Google. And just as contrast, Microsoft was about the most centralized company, especially back when I was there, it was about the most centralized company you could imagine. If you weren't in Redmond, you did not exist. And then I got to Google and Google was kind of the opposite. And my YouTube team, we had eight engineering offices around the world. I had about 25 sales marketing offices around the world. So you got used to it very fast. And at one point in I think probably 2011, 2012, Larry took over as CEO of Google and he sort of had a change of heart. And he came around to all the teams, he made a bunch of changes, he moved us to business units and, you know, and so on. But one of the things he came to every team and he said, I'd like everybody to centralize more. And you know, we built this Big model of how spread out every team was and in particular where the product development teams were. And, and YouTube was in eight places, Chrome was in like 21 places, Maps was in 20 some places. We were all spread out all over the world. And Larry asked us all if we would reduce down to three spots each. And everybody sort of screamed about it. And he came to each of us and tried to convince us one on one. You know, my first question was like, I don't get it, like this problem or opportunity. Larry was the biggest advocate for years. He was the, if you could put three engineers in a place, then you can create an office. And, and so for all of us, this was like a lot of cognitive dissonance of like, what's changing here? And so we went through this process and actually ended up being kind of like a reaffirmation process. In this process, Google shut down exactly one office, is the Atlanta office. It was such a big outcry. We didn't shut down any others and basically everything went back to the way it was. And in that process we all sort of re justified why we did it. And we each got asked like, why do you want to keep these offices? And there was the obvious reason of, well, you can hire better. I mean, there's more. There's people that want to live everywhere. We've all learned that not everybody wants to live in the San Francisco Bay area. I like living here. I find it to be the right match for our family. But, you know, many people, that's not the right match. But the bigger thing that in my write up that I gave for this was I think that we run better as a distributed company than as a centralized one. And I think the behaviors you implement end up becoming better even when you're all together. And I think that was the heart of why we chose for Coda to be distributed. I think this process, while terrible for the world in many ways from a business perspective, I think we're all, you know, I think people like to say we're jumping 10 years into the future. I think that's a really good thing because I think it not only, you know, equalize the world and you can live anywhere and you can hire from anywhere. That, that removes a lot of blockages to, to being able to participate in the startup ecosystem, but it also, I think, leads to better teams.

Okay, so let's talk about what's happened over the last seven months or so because it's been crazy for Coda and for everybody. Why don't we start with a Bright point. So I remember from the last board meeting you guys celebrated, you're actually shipping a lot faster than you were last year. What's your hypothesis as to why that is? Or maybe you have the data.

There's a lot of reasons for that. I think the company's growing. We ship Coda 1.0 last February and you know, as you get more and more feedback from users, you sort of know what to do next and you kind of build on it. Once that flywheel, that loop of feedback to launches happens, once it starts, then that sort of hard to stop. But it's definitely the case that, as you know, I had to write the email saying, you know, on Sunday night saying, please everybody don't come into work on Monday. And none of us actually had any idea how long that would be for. You know, someone was asking me, hey, I'm going to take a vacation in three weeks, can I still do that? I gently wrote her and said, look, I don't think I need to answer this question for you. I think the world's going to answer this question for you. But from my perspective, I have no issues. So anyways, in that process, we all shifted quickly. Some of our processes very clearly leaned into this. And I mentioned this idea of when you design your company to be distributed, many of your best practices end up being great best practices, even when you're not distributed. One of my favorite examples is how we run meetings. And probably the most iconic is this thing we call Dory. And for your listeners who aren't familiar, it's a, it's a term that we used actually at Google for a tool built for tjf. So this famous meeting at Google where every Friday Larry and Sergey would get up in front of the entire company and answer questions from anyone in the company. And there were, you know, 10,000 people in the company. It's a Q and A voting tool. So you put in questions, you vote questions up and down and then you just answer them in order, right. It's kind of built for scale. At Coda, we rebuilt this into the product and if you, if you go into the product and hit slash story, you'll get one of these. What it does in meetings is it totally changes the dynamics because I'm sure everyone has been in a meeting where somebody dominates the meeting, right? It's the loudest person or the most senior person or whatever the dynamic may be, and everybody else is fighting to get an award in edgewise. And in Coda meetings, we tend to go through a write up or A presentation. And everybody sort of silently adds their questions and then votes them up and down. And then you go through them in order to. And there's a few things that come out of this. Number one, you equalize your group. All of a sudden, you don't have to be the loudest person, you don't have to be the most senior person. My questions get ranked right alongside everybody else's. And so you get this interesting equalization, democratization, feedback. The second thing you get is you get a ranked discussion. So you get this group of people. All of a sudden you walk out of the meeting and you say, we didn't get to answer everything, but we answered everything with at least three upvotes. So we feel pretty good. You feel the sense of accomplishment as you come out of things. And the third thing you get is you get much better questions. People think about it, and they write these different pieces down. Another one we do is we call pulse checks or sentiment trackers. And that's a very similar idea, but each person gets a row, and there's a question like, should we ship this feature? Should we do this launch? Should we go after this opportunity? Should we change our price, whatever it might be? We hide everybody's row, you get your own row, and you fill in, you know, whatever is one to five stars and why. And then we check the box and you see everybody's, and you get this, like, silent feedback. And then you come back out of it. And what's the main thing we get out of this is we remove groupthink. Like, usually you would do something like that. You go around a room and say, do you think we should do this? And the first person say, yes. And the second person would say, hell yes. And the third person has no choice but to say yes. And so you don't get that opportunity for people to give real feedback. So these two tools, Dory and Pulse, are two that we use really often. Interestingly, at Coda, this was originally developed because while we had people on video conference and basically every meeting, and so it seemed like an important thing to do. And then we found this interesting thing that even when we were all in the same room and even when there were only three people in the meeting, we still use Dorian Pulse, like, it still made the most sense in order to do this. And you. You've seen how we do this in board meetings as well. And so I think those tools actually scaled up really well. So if I were to divide up how the company operated, our official forums actually got even better, because these Tools. All of a sudden, it became much more obvious why we do it this way. And it just kind of flipped. I sent my email Sunday night, and basically every meeting ran exactly the same that week. There was no change. There's no change in processes. Everything just kept going. And because we were already used to it, the other highlight side I'd say is probably in our community. I think code is one of those products where you get surprised every day. The fun of working on a platform, and I've gotten to work on some really fun ones. YouTube had the same similar dynamic. You'd walk in every day to work and there'd be. Couldn't you believe that somebody did this? And sometimes it'd be like, heartwarming. It's like, oh my gosh, it's so amazing. Sometimes it'd be terrifying. So far we haven't had terrifying experiences on Coda, but you get surprised a lot. And so when the pandemic started, you know, we obviously we had some customers who went through real hardship and, you know, we got the email saying, I'm going out of business. What do I do about my subscription? And so on. And we work with customers to work through that. But on the flip side, we also saw people that really saw opportunity. And, you know, there were teams that were getting reconstructed and saying, hey, we've never worked distributed before. What do we do? And so we published a remote toolkit that people could use and do things like what we do with meetings. At the same time, we have this code of publishing feature where you can publish docs and they kind of look and feel like websites. And we had all these people publish guides, they publish trackers, they publish all these different ways to get connected. One bucket of things that was interesting was people published alumni directories. So there's a lot of people that all of a sudden had to change jobs. You know, some companies were shrink, some companies are growing, you know, massive shift in employment. And so a bunch of alumni guides got created and watching them use Coda to solve problems was really heartwarming.

Yeah. One of my many favorite things about Coda is that there's actually a super diverse user base because docs are a lot more accessible than many of the new software companies we see in Silicon Valley. I think, like, one of the most amazing things, one of the few positive things about the Pandemic has just been seeing a lot of businesses that are very real world oriented figure out how to get digital very quickly. Because I think there's been this, like, perspective of like, well, you know, there's some segment people who really know how to use software and technology and Slack and what have you, like everybody else isn't going to really use software. They won't, you know, go digital. But it's not true. If you look at just the incentives that people have, they're going to keep running their business unless they see dramatic benefit. And right now people are seeing dramatic need and, and doing things like Coda and other tools that they can really get with.

Absolutely.

And I will say the Coda board meetings are certainly the most structured participation in board meetings I've ever experienced. From a big fan.

Board meetings are one of my favorite examples of meetings that I think can be made so much better. I sit on a bunch of boards myself and I often find that I go to a board meeting and like you, I prepare. And for your listeners that don't know, Sarah is always the most prepared. And I'll come in with my list of observations. And there's like this interesting dynamic in most more casual boards that I sit on where I'll show up. And then it's almost like playing jump rope. Like, I've got my list of observations and I have to wait for the right slide to come up and then I have to, I have to ask this question that I don't really want an answer to, but I have a point I want to make. And then I get on my soapbox and I talk about my point, and then I get back down and God forbid that I happen to jump in on a side that I actually don't really care that much about. So I have to like, be sit quietly for everything. It's just like a terrible way to go through a meeting. And board meetings are particularly tough because the whole point is people come with different perspectives and don't work together all the time. And they're experiencing things in different ways. And so people are naturally more guarded, people are a little bit more careful. And so a lot of the dynamics of diversity of thought and getting the best ideas and so on, you have to kind of work to give people that opportunity to do it. So I, you know, I'm thankful for having a board that humors our crazy ideas and works with us on them. But I think it's a much more effective way to run meetings.

Yeah, absolutely. So for our many founders in the audience here, try dory and try pulse checks in your board meeting. Yes, One point on that. I think that there has been resistance from lots of people to the idea of like, designing meetings.

Yes.

The way you do like to do it in a really organic way, just like people like to, you know, structure slides and whatever else when they. When they make presentations. Like, what advice would you have for. For leaders who are trying to get their own teams or their boards to participate in this way?

I think one of the key things we have another phrase we use at Coda, which is we think of meetings as being in one of four stages. We call it wallow, frame, propose, close. And there's a little symbol we use for. It looks like a diamond. And so while o frame, proposed, close, the idea is that meetings have this arc, and if you picture sort of a diamond shape, it open on one side, closed on the other side. Sometimes meetings are about opening to new ideas. They're about expression. They're about encouraging people to bring new things. And sometimes they're about closing down. They're about. All right, we've got three options. We need to make a choice. We need to commit. So one observation I would have is just be clear on what state you're in. This is a meeting where I'm at the wallow phase, and I really need new ideas. I don't really know exactly where I'm at or I'm at the frame stage. And I think I know these are the three questions to answer. I don't really need you to answer the question yet. I need you to tell me, are these the right three questions? And it's like, are we all going to commit to the answer to these questions? They're going to give us the right answer? Or I'm at the proposed stage, and I have a set of options, and I really need to decide which one we're going to go after. Or I'm at what we call the closed stage. We've made our decision. Now I need commitment, and I need everybody enrolled. I need you to do these three things. I need you to these three things, and so on. What I find is much of the feedback I get on structured versus unstructured meetings is really people misunderstanding which stage you're at. We actually have a set of different tools we use for each one. Like, for example, in the wallow phase, the most important thing is a yes and culture. So you want to design things where, you know, everybody's ideas are present. And the last thing you want to do is kind of vote on everybody's ideas. What you really want to do is, like, give a model where people can express their ideas, and then everybody kind of adds to them. And so you design a meeting that way in order to do it same on the closed stage. The last thing you want is new ideas. Like, we're done with this. Like, what I need is for you to sign here that we're all going to do our part to make this thing successful. The principle, I would say, is design your meetings like you design your apps. And like, when you design your apps, you think about your incentives. You, you think about your game mechanics, you think about, I have to have a new onboarding flow and I need notifications at this level. The thing you're trying to do is you're trying to expose to everybody that actually everybody's ideas are closer than you think. And I don't think it's really about, like structured versus unstructured. It's about incentives. Like, even what feels unstructured is actually generally quite structured. Hey, we're going to do a brainstorm meeting. Is like, there's some way that it's happening. Diversity is a thing we talk a lot about. And I often find that people talk about it in the context of like, hiring and so on, but they don't often talk about it in like, where we experience it all day long and we kind of throw up our hands at that problem. I think it's good. Go work it into each one of your systems. And what do you think you're correcting for? What biases do you think your team has or doesn't have and what things are you trying to encourage? So I don't think it's about structure versus unstructured. Everything's structured. It's just like even lack of structure is structured.

It's super helpful because it should be visible to everybody that some structure in the conversations you're having already exists. Like, it might be emergent, but there's going to be behaviors you want and don't. And if you can actually figure out what the incentives are that you want and the behaviors you want, then people are going to be more on board to this idea of designing meetings.

Yeah, agreed.

Okay, cool. What about on the low light side or what's been hard on the customer side?

I mentioned everybody who serves small businesses at all saw customers go through hardship and that's just hard to see and you don't feel good about it. You know, there's a lot you. You feel helpless. It's not in many cases. Some cases you can help and coda can be a helpful tool. Some cases there's just not that much you can do, and that's unfortunate and sad on the team side. On an individual level, you know, some people had really tough times, including people that had people get sick in their families and. Or just the hardship of, you know, they have a family of five stuffed into the house with no school and like. And, you know, that can be really hard on people. That was tough. And I don't, I don't think there's magical answers to any of those things. I think at a sort of meta company level, the thing that was probably hardest for us is, you know, I think that if you sort of divide up the process of a company, there's a set of things that are fairly structured meetings. Like, we got to do these important things together. And then there's this kind of fabric of the company, this sort of trust level that develops. And for us, we haven't all been in the same office for most of the time of the company. So that part we were used to, but we were all in some office and we were all in some place where you could interact with each other. And more importantly, we have a set of processes where we get together as a. Everybody in the company gets together four times a year. And we do it actually. We structured around hackathons. We actually just did one last week. I view hackathons a little bit as an excuse for it. And, you know, I love our hackathons, A great part of our culture. Hackathons never worked for me at YouTube. Like, we never got it to be a productive part of the process. But here, like 80% of the best ideas in the product have come out of hackathons. So it's very effective for us. But it's really a little bit of an excuse to just get everybody in the same space. And so we get everybody to fly them all in and we get. We do them twice. Usually we do twice a year here and twice a year in Seattle. And the reason we do that is it's immense trust building. And, you know, the way I think about it is those little interactions, the have a beer with somebody, share lunch with somebody. Like, all of those things build trust that lasts for a long time. I mean, you can go weeks without seeing the person in person. Once you just are sort of reminded, oh, that's another human with similar incentives to me, different experiences, different set of qualities to bring to the table. And I think losing that is really tough. And if I was thinking about, as we go back, what's going to stay the same and what's going to be different? Some of the things, like the way our core official forums work have all gotten much better. And I think, I think we will Lean heavily into some of the things we've refined and gotten better. I think there used to be a time where we used to say we need to get the company together because we have this important decision to make. Now we definitely don't want to do that. Get everybody together to have this important decision to make is kind of backwards. I think we're going to shift and the time we spend together will be spent much more in trust building and bond building than it will be in, you know, official work. And I think that shift for us, we sort of did it a little bit before. I don't think I appreciated how much that allowed the rest of the processes to work. And so I think, you know, we've now run two hackathons distributed. Obviously we're going to do more that way. I think we're doing a pretty good job of them and I think it still goes well.

Let's dig into that a little bit more. So I remember that maybe it was human connection or in real life matters that was one of your four principles of a distributed team. Go check out this doc listeners. But let's get real for a minute in that you can't have that right now. You can't have that for who knows how long. You know, I really admire your leadership. Like you're in a battle with a all things considered, relatively small team for the next application and productivity platform. Like that's a very big ambition and it's scary because you're competing with like well funded other startups and some of the biggest and most, most competent incumbents out there. But you have commanded like enormous loyalty and enthusiasm from people for a number of years already. Like how do you think about maintain that sense of connection both as a leader and then like without this opportunity for in real life it's hard.

And I'd say of the things I feel very confident about and the ones that I'm not sure or somewhat nervous about this is on the side that I feel like we're trying a lot of things. I'm not sure any of them are great yet. You know, some of the things we're trying, I'm sure every company is doing versions of these things. We have a set of things that are just try to recreate those physical forms that way. And so you'll do things like we do virtual lunch on Mondays and it's a, everybody picks different rooms and you jump in. No sort of real topics. Well, sometimes people like pick a game to play or they pick a real topic and they, they talk about just Try to recreate the lunch environment. We do a similar happy hour type thing. We also try really hard to build a set of fun into the experience. And I think that goes an enormously long way. Just having a culture where people know that you can sort of relax a bit and, you know, express yourself different ways. We did one, you saw it for the hackathon we did. The theme of this hackathon was called Overcooked. We had two people run this hackathon, Kelsey and Thomas. They really like this game called Overcooked. And so they like kind of overfit this thing to it, but they basically like leaned all the way into it. So they mailed us all aprons that have Coda logos on it. We all take this group picture with and that everybody changed their names on our various communications slack and so on to have a name that has something to do with the food. And just like little things like that were really helpful. That is just like a prompt for just trying to create that trust. How do we make sure we just remember who each other is and still celebrate, you know, the little things that make us all human?

And I think a lot of teams are recognizing that this is now something that is missing. In the first thing I feel like everybody went to, which is correct, going to more distributed work was we need structure, we need asynchronous communication, we need to figure out how we can make decisions remotely. But I think as we get deeper into this, people are feeling that gap of that sense of connection to our teams and that being important to people's productivity a lot more deeply.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's switch gears a little bit to one tactical topic. You just raised a really large round of financing for Coda. You clearly did it during a period where you couldn't go hang out with people in person. Talk a little bit about that or any learnings for entrepreneurs.

I would say it was somewhat unexpected. You know, we've had a really good 18 months and product has scaled really fast since. Since we launched last year. But I was not expecting to raise money now. We didn't really need it now and I didn't, you know, my view was what everybody told us in the middle of a pandemic, don't expect to raise money now. We got preemptive interest from a few different folks who had been following us for a while and ran a very quick sort of one week process and turned out more people were interested than we thought. I was really excited to get Mamoon to lead the round. So Mamoon from Kleiner's leading. I view him as one of the best B2B SaaS investors out there. He was at the top of my list for a while, as you know. And so I was really excited to get him involved. And of course from the company's perspective, it allows us to forward invest. In terms of the process itself, I have a couple observations. I mean I think in some senses being all remote actually accelerated the process for better or worse. We haven't had to raise money for code often, but I've watched it with other companies. This process can be exhausting, right? And it's like meeting after meeting and go meet somebody here. And then even just the Monday partner meetings is like you're going back and forth between Menlo park and San Francisco and at best you can fit in three different meetings and all of a sudden you could do 10 meetings a day. And that four diligence processes happening at the same time. Everything kind of sped up in one way. So, so that, that, that part, like back to our previous like structure versus unstructured, all that stuff can, you can do much faster and getting everybody together. And like most of the partnership meetings I think were better attended than they would have been in the past because it's like, you know, everybody has nowhere else to be, so they're all present for it. The part that I think was much harder was that sort of trust building part. You know, I think people say this a lot about raising money is, is build those relationships when you're not raising money. And, and I think, you know, for better or worse, that was very important to this. Like you have a lot of trust, you understand each other better and so others, you're trying to rebuild that relationship while you're in doing that with, you know, over zoom, with very sort of directed interactions is hard to do. It's going to speed up the process, which I think is a good thing, but it's going to lean even heavier on relationships that you might have cemented beforehand and really change those into becoming more important. I remember when it started and I had a set of investors tell me we can't possibly invest without taking the founder to dinner. It's like obviously that's changing, right? That can't be a requirement anymore. But from the founder's perspective as well, like you're going to, you know, the people that invest in your company are going to be with you for a decade and to do that without someone you feel like, you know, is really hard. And I would just tell everybody that advice is always given get to know people when you're not raising money. It's like 10 times more important now than it was before.

Yep. I've made two investments in this period of time. One with founders that I had already known and worked with and that was like quite easy actually because you're just looking for more data, more understanding the right opportunity. And another that was like a decision I feel extremely high conviction on, but felt like taking a new kind of risk because you know this founder is going to laugh because he's eventually going to hear it, but there is some sense of like with another human that you haven't set spent in real life time with this guy, an axe murderer. Is he actually a high integrity person? Hundreds of references say so, but you never know.

It's probably worth mentioning the, the diversity like our round Mamoon led and we had five other firms that participated in a big list of angels. The diversity of that group was much higher because of this distributed nature. We have firms participating from Boston, Seattle. We have angels from all over the world. I think that actually is a big positive that is good. But yeah, that lack of like, I don't quite know who this person is. My favorite thing, whether they're an expert or not, I don't know. Reference are probably better. I don't know that looking someone in the eye actually tells you that. But like one of my favorite examples is you meet someone that you've only met on Zoom. And I always had this interesting experience of I have no idea how tall you are and so the, and you're getting to a room for the first time. Like, oh, like my mental image of you is like completely shot. And just little things like that are unimportant in the investment decision or at least should be. But there, there's a, there's a piece of like I don't really know this person that, that goes away. I will say I don't think it's, it's probably positive that like you replace that with reference checks. It's probably, probably did, you know, three times as many reference checks as you would have done otherwise. And that's great. I think that's, that's probably a better signal than, you know, I, I happen to have eaten dinner with this person three times and so I feel like I know them and so I, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. But for founders and for investors as well, I think it's just much harder.

It's just new. And for any listener on the call, I am actually six feet Tall and you can't tell my head is the same.

You are the perfect example of this. I'd be very curious. You should get the people that you just invested in to guess how tall you are. Nobody's going to come close.

Okay, so fun part here. You have been thinking deeply about collaboration for a couple decades. This last half year has obviously probably triggered new beliefs about it. What is the most contrarian belief you have about collaboration?

I get asked a lot about. So we think that productivity tools are changing fast and they've been roughly the same for 40 or 50 years. What makes you think that they're going to change? Some people hear that statement, they haven't changed in 50 years and they think, oh, that's opportunity. Not that many things last that long. I think there are two things that are going to lead to a dramatic shift in how many productivity tools we see and how much innovation we see in the space. I think we are already seeing. One is for the first time in a long time, the primary innovators in the space are not platform companies. And if you look back at just like the Office franchise and Docs and so on, Excel got created because Microsoft needed to make sure there was a great version of Excel on their operating systems. And you know, Apple created the iWork suite because they needed to make sure there was a, it was a hedge that against Office working on, on macOS. And Google created Google Docs because they wanted to make sure that they, that the browser was the predominant platform. You know, each of those companies incentive to actually innovate in the core product was much lower than ensuring the success of their platform. I'm not saying that in a positive or negative way. It's just an observation that we've just had multiple generations of that and I think that dam got broken and now we're seeing people come in without that incentive and that leads to a different class of innovation. The second one related to that, but is maybe more subtle, is what I call the death of the file format. You know, if you go back and look at the iWork suite, I think what Apple did with Pages, Keynote and Numbers was they actually tried, they shifted the model and it didn't really work. And each of those products I think is quite good, but none of them really took off. And I think the reason is fairly simple. If you go build something in Keynote and then try to send it to someone, you need to make sure that they have Keynote and they need to make sure they have a Mac. And so the chances of that spreading is much Much lower. And I think the big thing that's changed here is when Google Docs came out, we all got. Well, first everybody was super skeptical. Then we all got impressed by collaboration and said, oh my gosh, this is magical. We can all type in the same place. But the other thing that happened with Google Docs is it got rid of file formats. And now if I send you a Google sheet and say, can you look at this? I don't need to know that you've got this thing installed and. And so on. You can just use it. I think the story gets told about, like, beta versus VHS a lot is that, you know, it's very hard for beta to take off because there's just too many people had VHS recorders and players. Some of your listeners are going to have no idea what I'm talking about. But I think the same thing happened with file formats and it kind of made us all stuck. Now, as everything moves to the cloud, I think we're going to see a very different pace of innovation.

I remember in the memo for Krypton Coda, actually, we didn't have nearly as clever a tagline for it as death of the file format, but it was basically the idea that web collaboration was the thing that was going to enable people to break away from the office and that you were no longer hostage to using something that everybody else could open.

Yeah, actually, I have another one for you. This might be even more contrarian. When I got to YouTube in 2008, first time I had to give a speech about YouTube was a couple months later. And I use this line, the one I told you earlier. Online video will do to cable what cable did to broadcast. And we're going to go from 3 channels to 300 channels to 3 million channels. And at the time, I got basically laughed out of the room, like nobody knew what I was talking about. The YouTube competition at the time was MySpace and Flickr. And people looked at and said, you really think your cat videos can compete with Disney and espn? Like, what. What crazy world are you living in? And obviously now said, decade later, and that statement online video will do to cable or cable did the broadcast has clearly come out to be true. I think the thing that everybody missed is what I call the maker generation. They missed human ingenuity. They missed the idea that humans are natural makers. And I get asked a lot about how to think about, you know, me going from YouTube Dakota. For a lot of people, that feels like totally different. You know, it's B2B versus B2C. I don't view it that way. I view it as actually, I'm working on an extension of the same mission. And that what's actually happening with Coda and tools like this is we're embracing the same maker generation. And I think tools like Coda will do to software what YouTube did to video. And we're going to see a completely different class of people turn into makers. And the interesting about it is they're not going to think of it the same way, just like YouTube creators. You know, in those days, people thought you had to live in LA and go to USC film school to be a great video creator. And they were dismissive of all the people that didn't meet those criteria. And then gradually those got bigger and bigger and bigger. But I think similarly with Coda, you no longer have to have an engineering degree to reinvent how your planning system works at your company, or how your fitness program works for your family or whatever you might want to imagine. And those people are. Are not going to think of themselves as developers because they think they're just building docs.

That is aggressively democratic of you, Shashir. I love it. Okay, quick tips. We're all stuck at home. What's a wreck you have? Book, movie, tweet, video, podcast.

Podcast. I recommend Hardcore History. Anybody who doesn't know Dan Carlin. Actually, I don't know Dan Carlin. I listen to his podcast. It's amazing. One of the best storytellers I've ever heard. Book I'll stretch into a doc. There's a doc written by Des Trainer called Des's Productivity Guide. It's on Coda. You can go see it. And it starts with a tweet that I think is really awesome, which is thinking about productivity and its tools. Your email is what others think you should work on. Your to do list is what you think you should work on. And your calendar is usually what you actually work on. How much of the overlap in your world, you can go read the rest of it yourself. It was transformational to how I think about my time and how I think about focus.

Okay, so shout out one way someone on your team has stepped up during the last half year.

I have a couple examples. Someone built this doc called the More youe Know, which I think is a really fun example. Everybody puts in these facts and every day it just slacks out a fact. And some of them are like little tidbits about people in the company. Some of them are about history, about. I added a whole bunch about Legos. I'm super into Legos.

Awesome. And who built that?

An engineer named Kronal.

Awesome. Okay. And then discovery. Weirdest thing you've learned about you, your family, Alex, or the team joined the last half year.

Okay. Probably family is the easiest one. The impact of TikTok on this family is, like, hard to understate. We're all on it all the time. My younger daughter in particular, she cannot walk into a room without doing a TikTok dance. And it's just, like, has become part of her personality. And they've suckered me and my wife into doing a bunch of them, too. And you can go find them if you like. And I just think it's so interesting because I have a bunch of industry conversations where Everybody's talking about TikTok as, like, this really interesting geopolitical battle. And at home, I'm just watching this new format. I think new formats don't happen very often, and I really. I love it. I think it's. It's participatory, it's positive, it's encouraging, it's challenging. I think it's.

I.

Great. So that's really fun.

Awesome. I don't know if you remember this, but we were series A investors in musical ly that became TikTok. So just imagine the Greylock partner conversation around this product when it was like, mostly girls doing dances. Still is girls doing funny dances and us, like, trying to explain why this product would matter.

I cannot imagine investing in this product back then, but that's. Yeah, must have been really hard.

And I'm definitely going to show a TikTok video of President Shershir at the next board meeting, so I hope you save time for it.

All right, sounds good.

Okay, that's a wrap. Shashir, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Okay, everyone, that concludes this episode of Gray Matter and certainly one of my favorite episodes so far. Next up, I'm incredibly excited to talk with Wade Foster, co founder and CEO of Zapier, who is building and running a remote team. Before it was cool. Find our episodes wherever you get your podcasts or get episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com and on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Sarah Goua, and thanks for listening.