Remotion | Creating Ambient Awareness

Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Goa, 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 eight of our Work From Anywhere series exploring how organizations are creating a new post, Pandemic Normal. Our guest is Alexander Ambirikos, the co founder and CEO of Remotion. Alexander, welcome to Gray Matter. Thanks for having me and congratulations on the launch this week. I'm really excited to see more teams in Remotion.

Same here. Thanks a lot.

Okay, so let us start with just some history for our listeners. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the founding story of Remotion?

I like to start by saying I'm actually kind of from all over the world. I'm like half Greek, half Malaysian, grew up in Europe, came to the States for college, which is where I met my co founder, Charlie. And before I knew it, I'd spent 11 years in the Bay Area and was kind of feeling this tension of like, you know, I'm still in the Bay Area, I really like my job here, but I'm kind of far away from my community. And that tension is a lot of the reason behind starting Remotion for me. Remotion is this video workspace that creates ambient awareness of your team on your desktop, but then fundamentally changes when your team uses video so that you end up more connected. Going back after college, I went to work at Dropbox as a product manager. And a lot of the learnings about collaboration from my time there also inform Remotion. I left Dropbox two and a half years ago to work on a gaming company. Actually, I'm yet another of those founders who started a gaming company, ended up pivoting into collaboration.

There's good mojo there. It's okay.

Yeah, I mean, some of the ideas are really interesting there, right? Like, gaming is about bringing people together, and so is collaboration. The idea behind the gaming company that we were working on was bringing people together around live video moments, around games. I'm one of those people who deeply believes that technology can connect people. But on the other hand, I don't use Instagram or Facebook at all. I really like sort of the deeper connections and conversations that we can have, like this or like one you might have over video. The gaming company didn't end up working out, but a lot of those ideas were in my head. And after I realized that I didn't want to be in the gaming space anymore, I spent six months just really traversing the desert trying to figure out what I wanted to do definitely the hardest period in my career and ended up meeting my co founder, Charlie. That's basically how we got started on Remotion. The thing when I met Charlie was we felt so aligned around what kind of company we wanted to build, what kind of problems we were interested in, and most importantly, what type of cultures we enjoyed working in. But Charlie was moving to Chicago and so we knew we'd be co founding remotely. And this question of we really want to work together, but can we have the company culture that we want remotely is what led us to Remotion.

I'm sure you got a ton of advice against that.

Oh yeah, definitely. All the advice was basically, hey, maybe you can hire remotely later when you have an established company culture, but definitely don't co found remotely. At least consider working together for a year and then maybe Charlie can move. And it was really interesting digging into why we spoke to so many leaders who ran company cultures that they would describe as like, you know, we're an in office culture. This is very important to us. I feel incredibly privileged to be working with Charlie. He's the best co founder I could ask for. I remember when I first met him immediately thinking this is someone with a lot of grit. And what we were doing in 2019 was, was contrarian. And a lot of people told us it was a bad idea and we shouldn't be doing it. And when I look back at that, you know, I think about why did we succeed in getting through that time? I think that grit was one of the biggest things, this idea that we could believe in ourselves. So Charlie is amazing from that point of view. And I hear a lot of co founder stories where you hear about the CEO who feels incredibly lonely. As a CEO, I actually, I'm very lucky to not be one of those CEOs. I think that we have a really special co founding relationship where it's like a very high trust relationship and we kind of are able to steer the ship together. Other than that, the other things that make Charlie great are just he's incredibly intelligent, incredibly adaptable, good listener, and he's really managing to scale and learn the new things that we have to be doing as founders. So it's an inspiration for me when I see him learning and I think, okay, I have to learn faster too. I think there's two interesting things to say here. The first is sort of unpacking what that was back then. And the second thing is right now all of those companies are actually also fully distributed. And. And so it's Been really interesting to see those leaders sort of reevaluating or unpacking what it means to be in office and figuring out or trying to figure out how to bring aspects of that into their remote culture today.

It's a problem that everyone has, and you guys were crazy or stubborn enough to just opt into. I was lucky enough to run into you guys at the watering hole at the end of the desert. But tell us a little bit about what the product is.

In a nutshell. Remotion is a product for teams that want to have a culture of talking live. One of the core beliefs of Remotion is that if you're a remote team, say in 2019, there was basically one culture that worked for you, which was a very async first culture. And Remotion is a video workspace that's designed to help teams have a culture of talking live, help them move faster and more connected. And so basically what Remotion does is it puts a lightweight doc on the side of your screen that shows you recent selfies of your teammates, and you can see who's around, you can see what they're up to, and most importantly, whether or not it's a good time to talk. And. And from there, you can click on a person and quickly start a conversation. And what this does to your team is that instead of living in a world where you're going to default to text for almost everything and then occasionally schedule a meeting for, like, the next day if the topic's really important now, you can reach out just to catch up when you notice someone showing up in the morning, or you can reach out to quickly unblock yourself when you have a question, or you can set up office hours for yourselves and cancel some meetings instead.

So why is it important that you actually have a piece of desktop real estate? It's kind of an aggressive thing to ask of users to be around all the time. Why not just have people spin up a call when they need it?

Yeah, I mean, the short answer to this is, I think you have a choice between being ambiently aware of something or continuously getting notified. I'll explain that a little. So, for anyone listening, the most striking thing you'll notice about Remotion if you go to our website, is that we put those selfies of your teammates on your desktop and they're there all the time off to the side. The app is really tiny. There's nothing you see other than your teammates, but it's always there. And the reason that we have this is because when we started looking at why teams don't get into spontaneous conversations. Today we realized that half the problem is okay, it's really just formal. There's a lot of problem circumstance to set up a meeting. So we're only going to do it if it's a really big important topic. But the other half of the problem is that you just don't know if it's a good time to chat. Right. And so when all you can see about someone is a green dot next to a name, you have no idea whether or not this is a good time for them to talk. And all you're judging this by is like how much are they texting in whatever platform. And so that's a real limiting factor. And what remotion does is it creates this idea of availability. And so you can see when someone's around, you can see if maybe they're super focused and you should reach out later or you can see if they're maybe they feel like getting distracted, they feel like being social and so you can reach out to them and quickly have that five minute conversation. On a more meta level, when we think about collaboration and what happens when work starts happening online today, the way you find out about it is you get a notification in some messaging platform and email on your phone and it becomes incredibly distracting. What we're trying to create is a world where you can live with many fewer notifications that you're subscribed to because instead of getting notified, you're just maintaining this ambient awareness for the closest collaborators on your team and you can see what's happening, have that top of mind. And if you miss something, that's okay. There's no red dot or missed notification that you need to catch up on.

Why is the app so small today? Right. You described it as small. It's like basically just faces. Clearly, I think the team is super productive. Why not add all the other channels? Add workflow?

Yeah. Fundamentally remotion is about people. This comes from one of the learnings that I had when I was working at Dropbox and we were working on collaboration products like Paper. And my observation was that the most successful things that we did were the features where you could really feel the other person that you were collaborating with on the other side of your screen. And so I realized people gravitate to other people. And so there's the opportunity that we're not focused on to build tools that improve the middle of a collaborative loop and give you great ways to say, provide comments and some rich media asset, but the beginning and end of a Collaborative loop will always be like, hey, Sarah, I'm sending this thing over to you. We'd love to chat with you about it when you're done. And then when you're done, like, hey, I thought it was really great how you set this up for me. I had some feedback for you. Here it is. We always naturally want to talk to other people and so Remotion takes that to the extreme and, and just focuses on the people that you're working with. And that's why when you look at our ui, all you will see is the people that you work with, nothing else that gets in your way. Of course, the other reason for this is that since we are permanently on your screen, we want to stay as much out of your way as possible. And so we've kept the app really small. We have to be disciplined about that.

When you and Charlie and the team were beginning to build Remotion, were you aiming for a particular type of team, like particular culture size? Like, who is it designed for?

When we were designing Remotion, we were designing Remotion for teams that want to have talking live as a major part of their culture and as a major part of how they move fast and feel connected. Really. We exist because we believe that whether or not you're a co located team, remote first team, hybrid team, you should be able to choose your culture and you should be able to have that culture of talking live. When we look back to when we got started, we noticed that co located teams were naturally talking live. It was so obvious that we don't even talk about the fact that when you're in an office, you talk live. But we noticed that remote teams were not able to make that work. They were having to fundamentally redesign their culture to put a lot more structure into when they use live conversation and video. And then we found that hybrid teams were stuck in this awkward middle ground. Hence the conventional wisdom from folks like GitLab that hybrid teams don't work. And we think this is a really important problem to solve. An important principle for us was this idea of creating ambient awareness. And so tactically, what that means is that you need to meet your users where they are on the hardware that they're using. And so we started by designing for fully distributed teams first, because they all have laptops and that's what the product is now. And over time, we will start solving for other teams like hybrid teams, et cetera. And I think that what will need to happen to support hybrid teams really well is again, we'll need to meet them where they are. And so they'll need to be more hardware specific to the office setup.

You know, the vast majority of companies suddenly transforming themselves to be asynchronous documentation and text only. Right. Or at least very, very dominant that way. And so there's something a lot more human about remotion, to me.

Yeah. And it's. It's been really interesting to. To see what's been happening in 2020 in addition to what was the case in 2019. When we started, Charlie and I knew we were in for a really long haul because we knew that the type of culture that we wanted to build for our own company, and hence why we were building the tool, was not the same as all the best practices that you would read online. We incorporate a lot of stuff from, say, like the GitLab handbook, but not everything. And we knew that it was going to be really hard and take a very long time for more teams to realize that there was more than one way to do remote. And what's happened in 2020 is that, for example, I recently listened to your podcast with Dylan Phil from Figma, and he was talking about how he wants to go and build a hybrid team, even though that's not the best practice. And he surveyed his team and he thinks that's going to work for him. On a broader level, there's a lot of really interesting data coming out of the pandemic that kind of points to whether or not, say, like, super text first is the right way to go versus using video in different ways. There's a really interesting study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that used global data and basically found that in the first month of the pandemic, teams around the world increased their internal email volume by 20%. And so we saw teams basically trying to bridge the distance with text, but basically it didn't work. And instead, if we look at this global data, this much larger sample across companies, even outside of tech, what we see is that actually folks are pushing their tools to talk more frequently with shorter meetings. Teams around the world now, they have on average, 13% more meetings, and those meetings are minus 20% in duration. So there's clearly a need for teams to have a more fluid way to talk live. And so for us, it's really exciting to see that because we can say, okay, that's exactly what we thought would be the case when we were building this in 2019. And with the current tools that people have, they're still having maybe like six to seven conversations a day that are 48 minutes long, that's still a really long cry away from being able to look over at your colleague, glance over and say, hey, do you have five minutes to talk? When we look at remotion usage, we can take that to the next level. Half of conversations in remotion are actually 10 minutes or less in duration. And our average duration is way lower as well. And so for those teams that today are trying to figure out how to bridge a distance with more face to face connections, remotion is a great fit.

So you already have a lot of teams in remotion that are having different types of conversations and different frequency. Can you talk a little bit about just the usage package patterns that excite you and where you feel like it's working, it's helping people build that different culture?

Yeah, it's really interesting to see sort of how usage evolves when a team adopts remotion. And to be honest, this is one of the things that we're still figuring out because remotion is another way of remote work. And so some teams, they try remotion, they immediately get it, and other teams are trying to help them figure out how to do it. So a typical story might be a team starts using remotion and they're used to using video for standup. And so maybe at the beginning they just use remotion once a day and they just do their standup and remotion. But then what happens is now that they all have the app open after standup and they've left it open, they start doing co working, they start answering quick questions right after standup. And then maybe a week later they start realizing that, hey, we can actually cancel some meetings because this fluid conversation, this ad hoc conversation, is just working better for us. And then they start upgrading their text conversations to video more frequently and just documenting the outcomes instead of having like this very long litigation in text. Then the most exciting thing that we see, then teams start having conversations that they weren't even happening before. Because when you filter your team's collaboration through typing or through scheduling, it turns out typing is hard and scheduling is annoying. Sometimes it's easier just not to say anything. When we see teams starting to have more conversations that they were having before, that's what really gets us excited. The way we really see this is the number of conversation increases and then the qualitative feedback we hear back from the team is like, hey, remote work feels totally different to me. I feel way more connected to my.

Team as a metrics person. Sometimes you do try to infer from the numbers though. And I remember talking to some of your early users and getting really excited because I'd have teams tell me, well, we have 100 conversations on remotion in a week. And they'd say that with excitement in their voices. And I just can't imagine people feeling that way about scheduled meetings. But then when you use the in office analog, you're like, yeah, I Talk to people 100 times a week in the office. And that's how we're doing collaborative and creative and get to know our teammates and make decisions. And so I think it's really cool to see people actually changing the way they work.

There's been a really cool piece of feedback that we've seen consistently that is some user joy around how it feels to talk in Remotion. That to be completely honest, we didn't intentionally design for the video call experience in Remotion is really lightweight. The idea it just stays small on the side of your screen in the dock. And the idea there was just to make it really fast to get in and out of conversation without getting in the way of your work. But what our users tell us is actually that if you spend 30 minutes in a scheduled meeting, that's pretty exhausting. But if you spend 30 minutes talking in remotely, spread across maybe five or six conversations at various points in the day, those are actually really energizing. And so I remember one raving review from someone who was like, you know, I was feeling pretty down and then I set my status to open to talk and someone reached out to me and we had a conversation. At the end of it I was super pumped and I was surprised because I'd been reading all these articles about zoom fatigue and I actually feel great after this conversation. So I think there was something to be said about this. This idea that it's not actually just getting onto video chats, that's exhausting. It's spending all day in scheduled back to back meetings, that's exhausting. And even if you sit in an office, actually that's exhausting too. Spending your whole day in meetings. Whereas those conversations you might just have in your pod for five, six minutes, those are energizing. And that's what we're trying to bring out of your team.

Yeah, I think that there's something that is has not been teased apart. When most people think about how they communicate in that if you ask anyone, do you want to have more meetings? Like, their answer is probably going to be no. Right? But if you ask people like, do you enjoy talking to Your teammates or do you want to collaborate with them, whiteboard with them, have quick conversation with them? The answer to that is almost always yes. And I think there's a real opportunity around getting people to see video as something for conversation and not just for meetings.

Yeah, 100%. Actually. I think the biggest competition to Remotion is the idea that video is for meetings. We as a company are trying to evangelize this idea that you should be able to just talk to someone the same way you would if you shared a workspace. That's why we're a video workspace. And there's this potentially, there's this cultural acceptance of like, okay, the way that we communicate remotely today is either I text someone or I schedule a meeting. And that is the biggest risk to us. And what we're trying to do and what we're trying to get better at as company is like, tell the story of like, hey, like if you were in person, you might talk to each other in a certain way. Why does it have to be different when you're remote? A big part of how we've created the product we've created is with hundreds or I don't know if it's even thousands now of just one on one interviews with like me and people on different teams. And the number of times this is always quite fun where I've been in a room with someone, on a call with someone and we're talking about things and they tell me very, at the beginning promotion is very interesting, but we have an anti meeting culture. And I'm like, oh, that's super interesting. And then later in the conversation it started telling me, yeah, and it's really hard, you know, we can't. I feel disconnected from my team and I can't reach out to talk to people. And all of a sudden I realize that they both simultaneously have an anti meeting culture and also want to talk more to their team. And it takes some work to tease those things apart and usually by the end of the conversation and you know, that's why we're here. Building Remotion now we're able to reach this consensus that scheduled meetings suck. But it doesn't matter if it's video or in person. What's actually energizing is ad hoc conversation.

Remotion currently is macOS native. That is, I don't know, perhaps a kind of different decision in 2020 when it's very in vogue to just build electron apps. Why do that?

Yeah, that was one of the decisions we made very early on that was somewhat Contrarian. And it really boils down to first principles. Remotion has to do two things. The first thing Remotion has to do is create this ambient awareness of who's around and who's available to talk about. The second thing Remotion needs to do is it needs to deliver an excellent video call experience. As we can see from the fact that there's one dominant video app right now, we know that it's actually not trivial to have a really high quality video call experience. When we thought about each, we realized that native was the right way to go. If we want to create an amazing ambient experience for Remotion, we need it to blend deeply into your operating system. With Electron, it is possible to build many things, but your creativity as a team is going to be stifled because every time you want to do something unusual, you have to hack around the electron APIs. And so me being deeply familiar with Electron from the previous startup that I was working on, I realized that, hey, for now, we're going to start by building a native experience and really explore the edges of our creativity. And so you see features in Remotion that took us very little time to build. They took as long to build as they took to imagine. For example, when you have the dock minimized, you can still see your favorites in your status item. And so that gives you a really low key way to be aware of who's around. As another example, we have a lot of teams who use Remotion in design tools, and those design tools really use the right edge of the screen, which is where a lot of people have Remotion. So we built a feature where you can hold shift and just click through the app. And building something like that would be a nightmare in Electron because there's no way you have access to the APIs that you need. So that's for the first part, this idea of like, okay, we're going to build an app that creates ambient awareness. How do we integrate into the operating system? The second half is building a good video call experience, our belief. And you can just simply profile any Electron video calling app or any Chrome video calling experience and just see what it's doing to your computer. Our belief is that it's pretty tough to build a really high quality experience in Electron. But the interesting thing is that it might not seem that way to say new founders who are looking to start. Because the beauty of Electron is you get to build on Chromium and you get to build on all the hard work done by all Google's Chrome engineers. And so your baseline is really high and you start out with very few bugs. The problem is that you have very little control to get beyond that. For contrast, when we started working on remotion, we've spent at this point over a year building remotion and we have spent the vast majority of our time working on video quality and just simply trying to get it above Chromium's level of quality, which I would now say we're at. And so I think that now, having made that decision to go native, we have a much higher ceiling in terms of the quality of the audio video experience.

I guess I'll give your team a little shout out here as well and say, like, I've seen the experience dramatically increase even in the short amount of time I've been working with you guys and Windows and Linux people, they're coming for you. So they're looking for beta users soon. Alexander, what's next at Remotion? Can you give us a sneak peek of anything in the product that's coming that you're excited about besides multi platform?

Yeah. So the first thing that you just mentioned is multi platform. My favorite thing that happened this past week when we announced our series A on TechCrunch with Fast Company was really connecting deeply with our community, like even more than we were doing before. And my feeling about it was like, hey, I wish we did this even more. How do we get even closer to our customers? And the amount of feedback that we got and the amount of suggestions for ways to improve the, etc. Is amazing. And for me, this is kind of a breath of fresh air because we've been so heads down on just getting the basic core experience in place and making sure that basic video quality is there. Now I think we have some time to think about two new themes. The first is so we call champions, the people who like Remotion and want to get their team on board into Remotion. And I think we can do a much better job of giving the champion what they need to get the rest of the team on board and form habits. The product that you see today is basically a really functional thing that doesn't have very sophisticated onboarding. Either you get it or you don't. The second thing that I really want to do is just go and show some user love by looking at some of those top requested features and just respond to those and make the product better for our power users so that they can continue advocating for the product.

Awesome. Okay, so coming to more about your team and so remotion As a company, you're clearly fully distributed. How do you and Charlie work together? How does Remotion work as a team? You're not just distributed, but now like multinational.

Right. So Remotion is obviously a key part of how we work together. And there's sort of the obvious stuff which is we use Remotion to talk over video. But there's actually another thing which is the feeling of being connected that we haven't talked about yet, that Remotion promotion provides for us. And so I think it's kind of nice maybe to illustrate it with the day. The first thing you'll notice if you join our team on Remotion and you log on for the morning is you might see some other people online in the morning and they might be open to talk with some kind of social status, like, let's catch up. And so one of the rituals that we have at Remotion that is really meaningful to me is saying hi to my teammates when we first log in without any agenda. And maybe it's a one minute conversation. More often than not, we actually end up talking about something productive as well. But Remotion is basically full of these little rituals that are the things that organically happen when you're in the same room and that now organically happen as well when your team becomes Remotion native. More structurally, the biggest ritual that brings our team together every day is we have a stand up. It's like the one time of day where we can have folks all the way from Australia to Uruguay logging in at the same time. It's not even about giving each other updates. Our standups are kind of unique in that we use them to see each other, maybe any quick announcements. And then we have what we call demo culture, where anyone on the team can share anything that they're working on. And it's just like a 60 to 122nd demo. We try to limit feedback and it helps the team stay aware of what is happening. Other than that, we use the usual tools. So we're obviously rigorous about text messaging and when we have live conversations, we document the one liner of the outcome of that conversation. In Slack, we also use task tracking tools and basically all the usual tools.

One thing that I think could be useful to a lot of our listeners is hearing how you think about hiring and onboarding your teammates. I think a lot of founders and leaders are struggling right now with the idea of hiring during the pandemic lockdown.

Right. It's even evolving for us, like the way we collaborate, the way we hire looks very different now that we're nine people than it looked when we were two people a year ago. And I'm, you know, we're still small. Like I'm sure it looks very different even it'll look very different when we're 30 people. I think the, the most important thing for us when we think about hiring is getting a feel for the person that we're working with. And so we actually spend a lot of time talking to people that we're hiring and we spend a lot of time talking to them in sort of a non interview way almost. It's like, you know, maybe they'll have a call with Charlie, my co founder, that's very casual in nature, a call with me that's very casual in nature. And we're really just trying to get a feel for what that person is like as a person. And then we bring them through what would normally be called an on site. An interesting thing people can take advantage of when running on sites remotely is that you don't have to do it all in one day. You can actually let the candidate choose how they want to structure their interviews and give them more time. And these small touches like that where you kind of acknowledge the humanity of the person interviewing with you I think lend to a much higher close rate because they ultimately they feel recognized and seen when it comes to onboarding. I think this is something we can get a lot better at at our size and with tools like Remotion we're actually able to get away with fairly like less process around onboarding because people can come into the team and they, they basically just see everyone, right? There's like this visual artifact that you can look at and you can see it changing throughout the day and you have a feeling that this is my team and you can see the selfies of your team changing throughout the day and you start getting into these casual conversations. So for our most recent hire, we didn't even set them up with, you know, structured coffee chats that we set up every day. But over the course of their first day they ended up talking to everyone on the team anyways because that's just how the product works when people are available.

I'm really excited to talk to you about more macro themes around remote work. Everyone is now reckoning with the decision around what they're going to do in 2020 and how distributed they're going to be on a go forward basis. So what are you thinking about? What are the biggest drags you see on that that will swing leaders One way or another.

It's a really interesting question. And you know, when we got started in 2019, we definitely had no idea what would happen this year. I think first there are some obvious observations, which is that everyone is considering remote work. Everyone has worked remotely now. And when you go and you read what's being written about this, what's being studied, I think leaders around the world are concluding, hey, you know, we were really worried about productivity, but productivity even was temporarily up at the beginning of the pandemic because people had nothing to do. But that's not remote work, that's pandemic work. And now folks are recognizing like, hey, productivity is okay. And so I think there are two questions that need to be answered. The first is, is productivity okay right now? Because we had plans, you know, one or two quarters ago and we're just doing those plans and remote work is great for execution. And will productivity get worse? We don't really know that. The second thing that there is more of a clear answer to is what about the non productivity aspects of running a company? What about the relationships that our employees have with each other within, say, a core team and then more broadly across the company? What about our customer relationships? How are those relationships doing and how do we build new ones? And I think we're beginning to see consensus there that this is really hard. And actually we haven't figured out how to do this. And nearly every leader I talk to is worried about this aspect of, of remote work. And so I think where our mission as a company is to help more teams embrace remote work. And so on the one hand, we're really excited that more teams are open to remote work and they're realizing it can work. On the other hand, we're really worried because in our ideal state of the world, Remotion would be a fully built out product and we would be helping those companies with those relationships right now, whereas we're only at the beginning of our journey. And what I really don't want to happen is for companies to try adopting remote and to realize like, hey, productivity is fine, but it's kind of stalling out because our relationships aren't there and our creativity isn't there, where it's harder for us to innovate and to start concluding that they need to go back to an office. That's something that I worry about a lot. What I will say though is that I don't think that's going to happen because leaders care about productivity, they care about their company's relationships. But the other thing they care deeply about is hiring and growing their teams. And I think what we're seeing is that people like the workforce, really like working remotely and they really like that freedom. And so I don't know if it's really going to be possible for companies to hire competitively if they don't enable remote work in some way. And so I think what will actually happen is that companies around the world are basically going to have to try to figure out how do we keep the culture that we want to have while enabling remote to some extent. And that's where companies like us come into play, where we come in and say, hey, you can actually there's more than one culture that works remotely and you can have the culture that you used to have and support remote with.

Smaller adjustments or something that feels at least as connected and human. Because I think we're all going to feel a little bit different. But as you said, it may not be a transition to what is considered like the OG way of doing remote. Right?

Yeah. And I think it's worth calling out that what we're seeing right now, this is not a test of remote work. Even our company feels totally different now than it did in January when we were at an in person off site in Lisbon where everyone flew in. You know, we talk a lot about like nearly every week someone on the team has an idea for like, oh, their next off site, let's do this awesome thing. And I'm just so sad because I don't even know when that's going to be.

I'm responsible for organizing our Greylock team off site and we are going to do in person, socially distanced. I polled our team and I was like, well, we could do, we could do like a meeting in Zoom or we could go get together in person. And it was very clear very quickly what people wanted to do. So looking forward to that for you guys. Okay, so one last macro question for you. What's the thing that is holding your attention around second or third order effects of remote work related or unrelated to collaboration productivity teams?

There's going to be a lot of changes to the labor market and how hiring works and how compensation works, how commercial real estate will be affected. And I think those are oft discussed and very interesting. But I think for me, the thing that's most interesting to think about is the nature of community and local community. I spent most of my life in a tiny town of 3,000 people. And when I left to go to the States and start my career, I left behind a lot of those Friendships. And I'm just now in such a different profession from folks from my hometown that I'm not in touch with them anymore. And this you see across all professional industries and across knowledge workers, you see folks being pulled by jobs in urban areas away from the local communities where they came from and creating new friend groups that are very predicated on their profession. Right. So you say, you know, you go to college somewhere, you move to San Francisco, say, and you become friends with a lot of folks who work in tech and San Francisco is incredibly diverse, but your friend group might be more tech oriented. Right. And when I look at what's happening around the world and I see like all this polarization, I can't help but feel that some of it is because community is becoming more tied to like what we do for a living and a little bit less to like where we're locally from. And so I'm really hopeful that as remote work becomes more common and as people don't have to move to get great jobs and have amazing careers, they will be able to stay closer to their local communities. And that can actually do a little bit of the reversal of the polarization we're seeing now and help bring people closer together.

It's an inspiring thought. What one piece of advice would you give to any other early entrepreneurs and leaders navigating this time?

Just thinking back to this week, for me, I think that again, the surprising thing that I really loved from this week was connecting more deeply with our community. And I think that this time it's very easy to become disconnected from the broader community that you have. And so my advice would be think about the relationships that matter and then the non obvious relationships that matter and find ways to stay close to those people. If you have customers, stay close to those customers. If you're a founder and you're go wandering the desert like I was earlier, you know, wandering the desert alone is horrible, but there are so many great people that helped me get to where I am and, and I was so lucky that I was doing that during pre Covid times. And I, I empathize deeply with anyone who's wandering the desert right now during COVID and I, I would say definitely lean on people as much as you can. On a secondary note, I, I talked to a lot of, you know, slightly earlier stage founders than me and I, you know, I've recently seen some, some tensions in relationships because those teams are a little bit underinvesting in their co founder relationship. And I would say so I think this thought of mine applies Both to your broader community, but even to your, to your close relationships. Like since you're not seeing each other in person and you don't have these organic ways of building that trust, I think it's a well worthy topic for everyone to think about how they organically grow trust and build relationships with their team.

That's something I think about as well as you might imagine. Investing with very little information is in a team based way is a profession that is rife with continual disagreement. And even in a team with like a lot of liking and respect and, and interest in different domains, then you end up with like micro conflicts all the time. And so without ways to build relationships back from that like remotion or like an in person offsite, I think that could veer you off the rails just.

To jump in with a fun thought here. I mean like we created this relationship digitally, right? Our series A was, was conducted remotely. And I think maybe that was easier said for me than for you because my work is remote anyway, so kudos for coming up with the conviction fully remotely. And I just remember a hilarious moment when we were texting back and forth and at one point I had asked you for so many references because I was trying to know who is Sarah? What's it going to be like working with her? At some point you texted me, I think you've done more references on me than I've done on you. And I just think that's a hilarious moment. But it's the type of stuff that you have to do when you're trying to figure out who someone is and what it's gonna be like working together.

Well, if you don't feel good about it now, you can't say it on this podcast. Alexander.

No, I feel great about it and.

I will say I'm clearly over it, but it was a bit of a jump at Greylock to say we're gonna start doing fully remote investments and signing up for five or ten year journeys with founders that we have not met in person. But the Way of the world in 2020 says we can do that.

Were we your first remote investment or did you have others?

Yes, we work okay, broadly across the partnership, not just me. We made other investments during the lockdown period, but not in people that we've never met in person. So my favorite section now, Hot Takes first is Content, Second is Shout out, and third is Learning. So content, is there a book, movie, podcast, piece of art, anything that has brought you a little bit of joy over the last last seven months that you'd Recommend.

This isn't a recent book, but I read it recently, which is how to Build a Car by Adrian Newey. I studied mechanical engineering for undergrad so I'm naturally drawn to this, but it's sort of this like semi autobiography that's written very lightly with like very surface level mechanical engineering descriptions of how to game the Formula one system. So it's like perfectly intellectual enough, but still kind of lighthearted. It's just a really fun read in a book with beautiful diagrams from one of the most legendary Formula one car.

Designers and okay, shout out. Friend, partner, teammate, whatever. Somebody who's stepped up in the period of the pandemic for you.

I always am reminded that my work is fully remote and a lot of people can work remotely. So I think a big shout out goes to everyone whose work is necessarily in person, essential workers and such. I'd like to give a shout out to Jasmine, Jimmy and Randy who after hearing me sort of give an internal version of our media deck for the press announcement, realized that we could make significant improvements to how we talk about remotion on our website. And so the four of us together over the course of just a last minute few days leading up to the launch, significantly reworked the copy on our website and I think that was really helpful in telling our story and definitely going above and beyond. So thank you to all of you.

So last one, being trapped in a room or in a small apartment by yourself with your thoughts for seven months often introduces some learnings about yourself as well. Anything you have discovered about yourself or friends and family in this time.

Hilariously, I discovered that I like vegan food and anyone who knows me will find this hilarious because I love meat. But my sister was in college and her college shut down during the pandemic and so she moved in with my girlfriend and I. During this time. My sister mostly cooks vegan food and so she was cooking a lot of vegan food. And at the beginning I was incredibly skeptical. But now if I have too much meat, I kind of wish to have vegan food again. So that's a funny discovery.

Okay, I remain unconvinced, but I will invite myself to your sister's dining table at some point. Sure Alexander. So much fun to have you on. And thanks again for doing the Work From Anywhere podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Okay everyone, that concludes this episode of Gray Matter. Find our episodes wherever you get your podcasts or get episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com and on Twitter reylockVC ormus. Let us know what we should discuss next. Thanks for listening.