Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo | Becoming a Remote-First Company

Foreign Hi everyone, I'm David Thacker, an investing partner at Greylock. You're listening to Gray Matter, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. This episode is part of our new series focused on the people, technologies and business strategies that enable most of us to work from anywhere. Today we're talking with Adam d', Angelo, the founder and CEO of Quora. Before co founding the question and answer website in 2009, Adam previously worked as a chief technology officer at Facebook. Prior to the COVID 19 pandemic, Quora had a strong office culture and discouraged employees from working remotely most of the time. But once the company had no choice, Adam says they discovered the benefits of working from anywhere far outweighed the drawbacks. Just a few weeks ago, Quora announced it would become a remote first company. So let's hear more from Adam about what guided that decision and his predictions for what lasting effects the pandemic will have on the company. Adam, welcome to Greylock.

Thanks for having me.

Just a few weeks ago you wrote a great data packed essay which you published on Quora, which I'd encourage our listeners to check out. This essay described your decision to become a remote first company and outlined your reasons for this shift in strategy. Before we get into the details of that decision, let's start off first with a brief introduction. Can you tell us about how Quora got started and what the company does?

Sure. So Quora is a question and answer platform and we started the company in 2009. We had this view that there was at the time, there was a lot of information on the Internet, but if you wanted to get a good answer to a question and you happen to know someone who was an expert on the topic, usually the quality of what you could learn from talking to that person directly was much greater than what you could find online. But most people, they don't have friends who are experts on whatever kind of decision they're trying to make. And so people are forced into making choices about their career or where to go to college or how to deal with a problem in their family, and they usually don't have access to the knowledge that would be best for them. And then we noticed on the other side, at the same time, people who have this knowledge, they're actually very happy usually to share it with the world. So Core is a platform that connects people who want knowledge with people who have it. And then over time we build up this big library of answers to questions and it keeps growing and growing. And so as of today, we have over 300 million monthly unique visitors who come to the Quora platform.

And can you tell us a little bit about what Quora set up, like was before the pandemic? Where were most of your employees? How do they collaborate? What kind of tools were you using?

So with the exception of our sales teams, we had almost everyone in a single office in Mountain View, and everyone came to the office every day. We had a lot of in person meetings, a lot of informal communication, people sitting next to each other. It was an open office plan. And we used a lot of different collaboration tools. We're kind of pragmatic about just mixing and matching. So we use Slack, we use Quip for most of our internal documents and we send a lot of email. Other than that, we use kind of just the standard set of tools that most companies are using.

And you said you were never previously a proponent of remote work. Right. And were there any reasons for that? I mean, had you experienced remote work at Facebook or other in a place where it wasn't working well? And how much of that had to do with the time period in which you started core? I mean, you started core back in 2009 when the tools. Back then, collaboration tools were much more primitive. So maybe you would have thought differently about that. Have you started today?

There were a lot of different factors, but when we started the company, housing costs in Silicon Valley were pretty low relative to what they are now. It was easy to get H1B visas, to get people from around the world and around the country. Basically you could assemble everyone in this one place and office space was cheap and it made sense to have everyone in an office. And from time to time we'd have people try working remotely. Someone lost their visa and had to go work from their home country. Someone else had to have a sick family member and they had to go be with them. And so you'd always get these kind of like mini experiments of what is it like for one person to work remotely. And it was almost universally that it was worse during that period when someone would be working remotely. You'd have a meeting and everyone's in person and then the one person is on video. But people tend to forget about them. For the person who's remote, it's hard for them to get people's attention. They can't see everyone's faces very well. People get kind of just disconnected from the company. They end up, I think, as kind of like second class in a lot of choices that people make. There's not, I don't think any of this is malicious, but People just tend to have a bias toward whoever's right next to them and whoever they're seeing every day. And so I think it's a pretty bad setup to have some people like to have a small number of people remote and have most of the company oriented around in person work. It just means people are like out of the loop, they're disadvantaged, and everything has to be done two ways. You have your normal way of building relationships and then you have to do something different for the people who are remote. And it's hard enough to, you know, to run a company and get everyone going in the same direction. When you're all going, you're all operating on the same system. And to then have two systems going at once is just. It's really, really hard.

Yeah, I've definitely seen that in my own experience at Google and other places where those employees that are in the remote offices feel disadvantaged and they don't feel great about it. They feel like they're missing out on the opportunities. Right. And sometimes that leads those employees to going working other places Right. Where they feel like they want to be at a headquarters environment. So now that you've switched to remote first, can you tell us what new technologies you're using? Are there other changes to process you've taken to make sure your teams can collaborate effectively? In particular, in your essay, you talked about the idea of having scheduled times when employees of the company need to be available no matter where they are in the world, so that collaboration, synchronous collaboration can happen.

I think maybe different from some other remote first companies. We're still focused on synchronous communication. So we use Zoom for video calls and we do a lot of them. And we think that the kind of back and forth between people who have different skill sets and different responsibilities is very important. And if you have to write absolutely everything down and formalize everything into structured goals, that's going to limit creativity and it's going to limit the ability to kind of push the boundaries of what's possible. If you get someone who's really good at machine learning representing what's possible in that domain, and you get someone else who's a really good product designer representing what's possible there, and you have someone in leadership maybe representing what costs you can tolerate, if you have everyone who can represent these different aspects of building a product at the same time in a single conversation, you can make a lot of progress. That would be very hard if you had to force formalize everything and make it asynchronous. So we still focus on synchronous coordination. And so we designated 9:00am to 3:00pm Pacific Time as hours that employees have to be available. So if you're on the east coast, that's noon to 6pm and actually there's other countries you can work from where that's not too bad. If you're in Europe, it's late at night. Some people might want to work late, late at night, it might not be for other people, that's fine. But for now, it's a big enough adjustment for us to just get used to remote work, that we don't want to take on the shift to asynchronous coordination as part of that. And we may never, because of the nature of the product that we're building.

That totally makes sense. I can see how it's impossible to be completely asynchronous, given what you do. There are certain types of activities have to be done in real time. So, you know, in terms of your employee reaction to this change to the shift to remote, what was the reaction and how did you consult employees? How did you incorporate their feedback before making this decision?

On the face, it's a super polarizing choice, right? So either you say, after Covid, everyone's going to have to come back to the office just like it was before, or you say we're going to have kind of this, like, hybrid of some people out of the office and some people in the office. And that kind of coordination then gets really hard to get all the downsides of both. Or you say we're going to orient around remote work and maybe even have everyone remote. And for any choice in there, there's a major downside, right? So we have about. I think at this point, the majority of our employees prefer not to come back to the office. So having to get everyone back to the office would be very difficult. And you get all the downsides that come with the office. You know, that I already mentioned. Like, everyone has a long commute, can't get visas, people paying these Bay Area housing costs. And so there's all these downsides with that. Then there's the hybrid world, which. Which has its own problems. And then there's a world of making it all remote, which actually, you know, there's a significant fraction of the employees who really like the office, and they. They want to socialize and maybe don't have space at home to work super productively. They want to have some boundary between home and work. Maybe they have kids. Those kids maybe make it hard for them to work at home, it's not an easy choice to make. And so we ran a series of surveys of employees asking things like, how productive do you feel like you've been? What can we do to make you more productive? But it was not an easy process and it took a huge amount of my time and focus. And I think it's a. I think it's been a very hard thing for people to figure this out. On top of the. Just adjusting to the pandemic and having to operate remotely.

Yeah, certainly. I think in your essay you mentioned that one of the surprises of this was how much more productive you felt and employees felt when you were expecting a huge loss in productivity from the pandemic. But in retrospect, it's actually been a positive for all the reasons you mentioned, not needing to commute anymore, not having to deal with visa issues, and a bunch of other reasons. So core has been around for more than a decade, and that time there's been an explosion of growth in the tech sector, and it's been incredibly competitive to hire and recruit top talent, especially in Silicon Valley. So do core is a requirement that employees work locally? Did that ever impact your ability to attract the best talent to Quora? And do you think this change is going to help you attract better talent, Quora?

You know, we think we've always been able to hire very good people locally. You know, it hasn't always been easy, but I think we've been able to just compete in that market, and that's been okay. But I think the real cost has been on the people who can't get to the Bay Area. And so we haven't been able to recruit any of them. And, you know, there's really good people all around the world who. We have a lot of people in the company who joined when it was at a time when it was easier to. To get visas. And they've been really great employees. But that's, you know, that's a pipeline that's. That's kind of not possible now with the way the Visa system has. Has changed. So we think this is going to be a big advantage in recruiting long term. But I think the, you know, some of the biggest benefits of this is not for the company, but it's for the. All the people around the world who, who previously didn't have access to work in this market.

Yeah, in my prior employer, Google, that was one of the philosophies. I mean, Google's been pretty famous for opening engineering offices all over the world, and it was not just because of visas, but there's a lot of people that just don't want to move the Bay Area or don't want to relocate to the US So the theory was let's open offices wherever we can be close to great tech talent, which is certainly global. Now, in terms of your product development process, let's talk a little bit about that. Because Core is a tightly integrated product and experience and so your teams need to be working really closely together to make that product. What tools are you using? And you know, is this going to require any new product development process or any new skill sets to make this work, to ensure you continue to have a really great product?

So so far we've been able to roughly maintain the same process. We set goals, we have meetings, we, we stay in sync, we prototype things, we test things out, we run a ton of experiments. All of that has continued to work. We rely on a lot of in house tools for things like experimentation and continuous deployment of our code. But so far it hasn't had to change too much. I think if we look at what's been challenging in adapting to the new environment, I think trying to replicate some of the kind of like informal communication that happened around the office is one of the areas I'm particularly interested in right now. So the idea of being able to hold a party virtually, like what replaces that, or a happy hour or just people socializing in the cafe, I think there aren't great tools for that yet. I think it's possible to replace them though, and I think there are going to be ways to do that. I think it's just this whole market only just recently got created. The demand for products like this has just grown 100x in production the last few months. And so I'm excited to see what comes out of that. We've been experimenting with a tool called Donut that pairs employees randomly to have one on one quick casual conversations. And that's kind of like one step in this direction. But I think it's far from what we're eventually going to get to, which is something more, you know, where you have more like informal casual interactions and they're lighter weight.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. At Greylock, we've been doing virtual happy hours through Zoom and it's not quite the same thing as being in person. So I think it's a tractable problem. Someone will invent a good way to do that. So let's talk a little bit about leadership lessons now. Nothing could have prepared anyone for what we're going through with this Pandemic. I don't think anyone foresaw this coming and there's definitely a lot of lessons here for founders and CEOs to help them get through this. Are there any relevant learnings from the past that have helped you adapt to this situation?

Yeah. So we started the company in 2009 and that was just before the big wave of mobile and smartphone adoption hit. And one of the things I learned, just looking back on that experience, is that we didn't really jump on mobile as an opportunity and we tried to gradually adapt to it. There were some bottom up efforts to we had a mobile team, we had individuals working on mobile apps for different platforms at first. Then we made the mobile team turn into more of a platform team to enable other products, other product teams to build the mobile app. But we never really said, hey, at a high level, mobile is really, really important and we're going to need to make tough decisions and kind of orient the whole company around it. And so today most of our usage is mobile and we've adapted, but it just took a lot longer than it should have. And I think in retrospect I, as the CEO, I needed to just stand up and say, hey. Well, first I needed to recognize how critical the decision was and how important it was to make a choice about whether to invest in mobile or not. And then assuming what I decided was that we need to, to become, let's say, mobile first company, I needed to really have that become the top priority for some period of time. I needed to be willing to kind of impose that choice on everyone and hopefully get people bought in. But it was a tough choice to make and it wasn't something that you could just say like you could just expect everyone locally to make the right decisions. And so I kind of just learned a, a lesson about decisiveness as a leader in cases like that, from that experience. And so that really kind of like triggered for me here where I said, hey, we got to make a choice here. It's going to be terrible to have this hybrid world where some people are remote and some people are in the office and we don't know what's, you know, how every choice is going to be made as a compromise. And you know, it's not as simple as just saying like, make a choice. The real lesson from that to me was recognize that this is a really important choice to be made and then dedicate a lot of time to making sure you make the right choice and then communicating it well and getting people bought in. And so that was something That I think I really learned from that experience. And I think we're really going to benefit from the decisiveness here. I think I've just heard from a lot of employees at other companies that the uncertainty is killing everyone. No one knows if they're going to have to go back to the office or not. They don't know if they can move out of the Bay Area now. They have to renew their lease, but their company hasn't given due guidance on when they're going to have to be back or the guidance keeps changing. They say, oh, we'll probably tolerate some remote work, but they're not clear about whether you're going to be effectively second class or not. Then people don't know that. And so they assume that they're probably going to be and the whole thing can unravel pretty quickly. And so I think this is something that just really calls for like a tough choice to be made. At the same time you don't, you have to make that choice without perfect information. So I feel very good about where we landed, but it's not easy and I can really empathize with the struggle that other people are going through.

Yeah, it's been amazing how many companies big and small have yet to provide clarity to their employees around this issue. And it's caused so much uncertainty. And to your point, you know, as a leader, this has to be a top down decision. There's no way this could be a bottom up decision.

Right.

I mean, you're changing your process, your culture, your tools, the way the company operates. So it has to be driven by the CEO and you have to make sure that it actually happens. And not all employees are going to be supportive of it, but at least they know what the direction is and they can either choose to get along with that or to go somewhere else. So kudos to you for that. Let's go back and talk a little bit more about the hybrid model. We talked about the disadvantages of that and your decision to declare remote first. Right. You know, I thought some of the interesting things you mentioned in your essay in order to enforce this, you know, one of the things was for your meetings you're going to require every employee to call in in their own window or pane of glass, basically, as opposed to having some employees be in your co working space, you know, in the same conference room. Another thing that you mentioned was you're not going to go to the office more than once per month, which I thought was, was pretty amazing because I'm sure you live pretty Close to there. So just tell me more about those decisions and what led up to that.

So on the everyone calling into meetings, we had a period when Covid was just starting, and I kept going into the office personally, but we were letting people work from home because for whatever, some people just didn't want to take the same level of risk. So we had, I think, a few weeks of these meetings where there were a few people in. In a meeting room in the office, and then a few people called in remotely. And I was in the office for the first phase of it. And then there was a period where I was working from home and there were still some people in the office. So I was on the other side. And it's just a terrible experience to be in a meeting where there's a few people in a room and then a few people called in the people in the room. You tend to forget about the person who's called in, especially if there's only one of them. You can exchange glances with people in the room, but the person who's called in, they can't get to that level of subtlety in the video fidelity. If you're the person called in, you can't interrupt as easily as the people in person can. And so you end up with this just like. It's just a really bad dynamic. If you're the person called in, you'll see the two other remote people full size on their video screen. But the people in the meeting in person, one of them might be sitting pretty far away from the camera. And so they'll be like a tenth the size of the other people. And it's just very hard to have a good meeting like that. So that's the reason we're going to standardize on that. And it's not an easy thing to standardize on. We're going to have to get a lot of little booths or cut up meeting rooms into smaller pieces to be able to do that. But we just think it's the right thing. So I think one of the ways that this hybrid setup can go wrong is that you get a little bit of an advantage from being at the office. And that could be because your boss is there and you can build a stronger relationship with them being right next to them and being in person. It can be because people maybe are subtly judging you on whether you're there or how much you're there. And you can demonstrate in the office that you work really hard. But you know, if you're remote that people can't see exactly how. How much you're working. And so I think things really tend to like trickle down from the CEO. If the CEO is there, then the most ambitious other people who want to build relationships with them, I think correctly assess that their chances are better in the office. And they're going to, you know, if they're going to move to Florida, they're just going to be at a long term disadvantage. And so then most of the leadership team under the CEO decides to stay in the office. There's team dynamics where the one or two people who are not in the office, they get kind of excluded subtly. And I don't think anyone's really malicious here. It's just human nature to kind of think about the people around you more than you think about other people. And next time there's a role opens up or some opportunity is there, the, the first person they're going to think of for that role is the person who they saw that morning. And so I just thought that to make this really work and to make sure that remote became the primary way we were oriented, I needed to not be in the office. And I thought it was important for me not to just make a vague statement like I'm not really going to work from the office or even like I'm not going to have a desk at the office. If people thought that I might be around half the time or even a third of the time, it could just send a signal that the office is like, you're better off at the office and that that's the main way. So I thought it was important to actually like formally state like, I'm not going to come into the office more than, more than once a month.

One of the things you mentioned was that there had traditionally been a stigma in Silicon Valley and other places about companies that were completely remote. And there's been a few high profile examples of very successful startups like Automatic Zapier, you know, GitLab, that had made this model work. But for the most part, I think employees in Silicon Valley and others, venture capitalists, kind of frowned upon these types of companies. I think that's going to quickly change. But have you talked to any of these other companies to learn about what they've done differently? Is there anything you want to emulate from these other companies to make sure you're more successful in this approach?

We're trying to learn as much as we can from everyone. The GitLab documentation online is pretty good and so that's been available to us and that's available to public. You can read all their policies about how they do everything. We're not generally just copying what they do though, because we need to figure out what the right policies are for us. And for example, we're focused on synchronous communication. And GitLab and Automattic, I think, are very focused on asynchronous communication and just totally writing everything down and having people across all kinds of time zones. So we're kind of like forging our own path here. But we've talked to people at all these companies. I think one of the things that's happened because everyone has been forced to work from home for this period, I think a lot of actually employees have learned that they prefer working from home when they wouldn't have wanted to work for a remote first company in the past. But now they've had this experience and so that's a big change going forward. So now you can recruit, I think, better employees or just the market for people who want to work remotely has probably grown massively. And as investors are seeing these companies do well despite all this, I think in the past it might have been like harder to raise money for a company that was remote oriented. There was an interview where the GitLab CEO said that for most of their existence, investors saw it as a negative, that they were all remote. And at this point, that has changed. And so a lot of building a company is about just building confidence, right? You need to get employees confident that what you're going to do is going to work. You need to get investors confident that it's going to work. And in the past, if part of your story was like we're going to be all remote, people would just see it as maybe not as absolute negative, but at least as like a risk factor. And that would undermine the process of building everyone's confidence in the success of the company. So I think that's just totally changed now that everyone has seen that working from home can work really well.

Yeah, I agree. The sentiment has totally changed around that. Next question is about your coworking space in Mountain View. So you're going to convert your existing office into a co working space where employees can pop in. Those that want to work in an office. Tell us more about what that office will look like. Are you reconfiguring it? And then you know, anything you can tell us about what your plans are to allow employees to safely return or the things you're having to do differently with the office.

So we have a significant fraction of our employees. It's a minority, but it's significant that they want to return to the office when it's safe to return. And you know, we want to continue to employ employees who want to work from the office. We don't want to just cut to just only remote. So we're going to provide the office for employees who want it. We're still learning what exactly we're going to have to do to make sure things are safe for everyone with COVID And so Covid alone is going to force some kind of reconfiguration of the office. That might mean spacing out desks. It's going to probably mean some other things too. We're not going to have business able to have like shared food. You know, we'll have to have like everything individually wrapped. And so there's a whole set of changes that need to happen just because of COVID After Covid is over, I think the most important change to the office is going to be support for everyone being on their own video call. So that's going to mean a larger number of smaller rooms. And we've had this open office space in the past that, you know, it's not very good for being on a video call if you're going to distract the people who are sitting right next to you. So it may mean that we get a bunch of like phone booth style spaces that you can go into to be on a call, or it may mean that we just have little one person offices for people who want those or both. We'll have to just kind of learn and adapt. But I think it's a long way away actually before we're going to be able to have full use of the office.

Got it. The last topic, last question we had was just around the societal benefits to a shift to remote work. And this is one of the things you discussed in your essay. You think there's a much broader impact here with this trend to remote work, including increased labor mobility, better access to job opportunities for people all over the world, reducing the pressure on housing prices and mass transit systems. A lot of interesting topics here. So tell us a little more about that.

Yeah, so we made this choice because we think it's the best thing for us and our employees and for our mission. But I think there's just a ton of benefits that come to the world and to society as more companies will orient around remote work. So one big cost is just commuting getting reduced. So people spend half an hour, an hour commuting each way to an office and that whole time is basically wasted and a lot of time. It's actually very stressful for people. I've seen some studies where they kind of survey people about how much they enjoy every minute of their day, rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, and just poll a lot of people and just see what activities people enjoy and what activities people don't enjoy. And commuting often ends up as the lowest of anything on the list. And so commuting is a big source of stress for people, even independent of the whole time sink. So that's one factor. Another dynamic I've gotten interested in is this, this issue of labor mobility in the U.S. so if you look at data from the 1940s, 1950s, people used to move around the country a lot more than they move now. And they used to move toward locations where they could make more money. And so these states that had higher GDP per capita would usually see inflows of population. And states that had lower GDP per capita, people would leave those states and people would basically, you know, they'd set out for where they could make more money. And that was good for everyone. And over time, if you look at the data, more recently, people have just stopped moving around. And it's kind of a puzzle about why this is happening. One reason that I think there's pretty good evidence for is increased housing costs. So these places where you can get better jobs, often the cost of housing has gotten bid up so high that, that it kind of cancels out all the benefit of living there. And that's really decreased labor mobility. And I think, I think it's just really bad for equality in the US in the long term. Another factor that I think is maybe a little less obvious is there's this idea called the two body problem, which means that if you have two people in a couple who are both working, suddenly moving in order to improve your job situation is much harder. So you can't just say. In the past when most families only had a single earner, it was pretty easy to make a choice. If you get a better opportunity in some other state, you decide whether you want to take it or not, and then you move there if that's better than your current situation. But now with the rise of more two income households, suddenly one person gets a job offer somewhere else. But it's now this really tough coordination problem. It might not be the best time for their partner to change their job. There might just be a lot of uncertainty about whether their partner will have as good opportunities in the other location. So there's evidence that the rise of two Income households, which, to be clear, I think is a good thing overall for, you know, for gender equality and also for the economy as a whole. It has had this negative effect on labor mobility. So for these reasons and probably some other reasons that are not very well understood, labor mobility is way down. And I think what's really great about remote work is that if you have just a single person in a couple who's working remotely, suddenly this whole coordination problem is gone. So suddenly their partner can just take whatever the best job is and the couple can relocate to wherever they're going to get the best job. So you actually, you don't need the whole workforce working remotely to get this benefit. You only need one of the two people in each couple. And then we could go back to the level of labor mobility we had in the past, I guess, aside from the housing cost issue. But this remote work actually can also help the housing cost issue because it's going to take pressure off the Bay Area housing market if more of the companies here can hire people remotely. So, anyway, I think this could just be a really great thing for the economy and for society going forward as people have access to live wherever they want. I think in addition to that, it was kind of this assumption with office work that people would live in the same location forever. And people often, I think, want to change where they live. So their life circumstances change. They might want to go live in Europe for a year and try that out. They might have kids and want to go live near their family for a while. If they're single, they might want to move to a city. City like New York, where it's easier to meet new people. So this idea that, like, people are going to have to live in the same place for their whole career, that was pretty costly on people. And a lot of employees had to face the choice of either, you know, stay in their one location or maybe, you know, maybe if you're working at Google, you can go to London and work from the London office. But it's going to mean your team is going to have to change. You're probably at a disadvantage relative to the. If you had stayed at headquarters in Mountain View. And so I think just like having this level playing field and saying, like, wherever you are in the world, you're going to be on uneven footing just is going to free people up to move around for whatever is best for them, for whatever they value in the rest of their life.

Yeah, it's going to be really exciting to see how this plays out in the global economy. It does feel like a really significant, permanent structural shift that we're undergoing right now. So we'll see what happens. But we wish you the best of luck in the transition to Remote first decora and want to thank you very much for taking the time to join us today.

Adam, thank you for having me.

All right, that concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to our podcast on soundcloud.com greylock partners and you can also find new episodes and blogs on our website, greylock.com youm can follow us on Twitter greylockvc. I'm David Thacker, and thanks for listening. SA.