Utmost | Mobilizing the Talent Continuum

Hi everyone and welcome to Gray Matter. I'm Sam Monamidi, an investor at Greylock Partners. Today's episode continues our series on Working From Anywhere. Our guest is Dan Beck, the COO and co founder of Utmost. Utmost was founded in 2018 in response to the changing nature of work and and the growing role of the contingent workforce across industries. Utmost provides software to enable enterprises to manage and engage their extended workforce and works with customers and industries ranging from insurance and healthcare to design and technology. Prior to co founding Utmost, Dan held senior leadership roles at Workday and Utmost has been distributed since its inception. Now let's welcome Dan to Graymatter. Welcome to Gray Matter. I'm excited to be here with Dan Beck from Utmost. Dan, I've been looking very forward to this conversation for two reasons. One is it's been a privilege to be partnered with you and the team. Since late 2018, you folks have obviously been running a company that's been distributed from the start. So I'm keen to ask you about that. And the second is I'm keen for folks to learn more about what Utmost is building and some of your perspectives given the vantage point of building this new system of record for enabling the extended workforce. But let's just start with Utmost and how you folks run internally. Tell us a little bit about the company and how the team has been set up and how you've been running as a distributed team from the start.

Thank you Sam. Great to be here. We're in the business of building enterprise solutions for non employee labor. So think of it as the contingent workers, the contractors, the gig workers, as well as service based contracts, business process, outsourced relationships. So all of the non employees doing work for companies, we've been at this for two years. I've already seen a massive increase in the amount of sophisticated questions being asked and answered around total workforce planning, ultimate, you know, strategic workforce optimization, inclusive of employees and non employees. Whereas if you back up even a few short years, the whole industry for non employees was just about a rate card, give me a better rate for this job code. And we just think there's a talent forward view of this that is going to be the way companies think about their workforce in the future. This is why we started. The company is after 10 years at Workday running their technology products group. We started seeing companies had a pretty good handle on their employee population and no idea about their non employee population. We said, well why is that like why can it be so complicated? Why is it so hard to get a handle on the non Employees and usually it came down to a combination of terrible software, silo data, all the, all the usual things that can get your entrepreneurial juices going. And then secondly, this interesting mix of how non employee labor, the extended workers get connected to enterprises is usually via some staffing intermediary. You put those together of help companies get the right strategic workforce mix so they can prosecute their business. As a team we've been distributed from the start in that I'm here in California, our headquarters are in San Francisco and my two co founders are Irish based in Dublin, Ireland and we've run our entire engineering and design efforts out of Ireland from the get go.

Dan, why did you all start utmost in a distributed way?

Yeah, we started distributed really by nature of our founding team. I'm here in California and San Francisco Bay area and my two co founders are in Dublin, Ireland, Henri and Patty. I knew Andre from my days at workday. At some point you go from colleagues to friends as you work together for 10 years. And so almost by necessity we said look, we're going to be distributed from the start. Patty runs our engineering function. So we knew we were going to build our engineering team in Ireland and then more go to market functions here. But it's been that choice to have a distributed team from the start, mainly between San Francisco and California and Dublin, Ireland. But I think it helped us have good best practices from the get go. And so, you know, some of the things that we did as a distributed team from day one I think are now quite common. But it started with perhaps obvious things such as good use of collaboration tools and writing everything down. We think it takes good discipline, it shows the right level of commitment to the team to get things written down and in a reusable format. So you know, that's sort of obvious but a lot of times those water cooler chats wouldn't be captured anywhere. And so as a distributed team we really took extra efforts. You know, we never treated our office or our network as trusted. So we never had equipment, if you will, in the, in the offices. We had multi factor auth to every service we were using and I think that always helped us because then you know, as we brought on new team members and certainly as we got into Covid, you know, that was pretty self evident that we were prepared for that and used to that. And so aggressive use I'd say of SaaS services, of collaboration tools. But also our, both our network and our physical facilities were never treated as any different than, you know, you sitting at home or you sitting In a coffee shop, which had some advantages.

Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things I hear a lot from founders and, and startup builders who have transitioned from an in office culture to a more distributed culture over the last few months is, you know, they miss the serendipity of the office. And Dan, you mentioned the water cooler. Those, those more serendipitous interactions that build trust and connection between teammates. I'm curious if you folks have used any interesting tools or operational practices to continue to generate that serendipity across the team.

Yeah, we do. I mean, we thought about this a lot because we were both distributed from the get go. And then ironically, once Covid hit and we shut down our offices, our physical offices, I almost think, ironically, that the team in California and the US writ large was almost more used to being remote and being distributed than the team in Ireland. So suddenly, if you will, the core team, 2/3 of our team are still in Ireland, got more of a dose of like, hey, now you need to be remote. And so I found that we even had, I think we were quite good on the distributed collaboration and we got more committed to it. I mean, so we've done things like the virtual happy hours and we had a fun team. You know, you might be too serious when you assign someone to be on the fun team, but, you know, kidding aside, we'd have virtual happy hours with a fun team assigned for games and ways to bring people out of their shells. Because now suddenly, you know, you have a team of software engineers and designers and product leaders and, you know, maybe a team that's a little bit introverted to start, then thrust into a remote situation. And so I don't know if you ever played Drawful 2 or any of these sort of, you know, online drawing tools or sort of lightweight, they're purposely flipping and fun. From a business productivity perspective, we've actually shifted to pretty heavy use of products like Miro for virtual whiteboarding and collaboration. And that's, that's widespread now. So we'll use products like Figma for our design efforts, but then we'll wrap it with more aggressive uses of products like Miro, which has been fun and different. And then, you know, we are following all the regulations and getting ready to get back to work plans, but those keep getting pushed off. Right. So it's an interesting dynamic of trying to set expectations, but then being ready to get back in person if and when that's appropriate.

That makes sense. And one more thing I'm curious about on working as a distributed team, is what you mentioned around written documentation and how when you work in a distributed way, these constraints are actually forcing functions that encourage teams to write more, document more and communicate more clearly. Can you just expand on that and maybe on two areas? One is are there any resources out there that you folks have looked at on how to do documentation and communication in a best in class way as a remote team? And then the second is what, what are some of the benefits now that you've been doing this for almost two years that folks may not anticipate around being forced to document things regularly and so consistently?

Yeah, we're probably using the kind of tools you'd expect. We are exploring Coda. So I know one of your portfolio companies, very cool product there. We're heavy users of Google, all things Google Docs, of course, the Atlassian products Slack. The key is to have the discipline to have some structure around writing things down. So for example, we will bring written reports to my, you know one of the functions I read lead is our go to market efforts, right. And so sales, marketing services. And so I'll ask the team to author, even if it's brief, a written report that then at the start of a meeting we would review so that everyone has a bit of a baseline of their understanding. So it's not just that the discipline to write things down, but it's also putting them in a place people understand. As we pipeline an opportunity, that opportunity gets a folder in our Google structure and then any artifacts, anything we find, anything related to that gets placed in there. So if you look at our pipeline, we have 35 active opportunities right now there are 35 folders under our CRM tool that says like indicative of each one of those client opportunities, which is pretty handy. And then importantly I'll very quickly somebody says oh I just had a great discussion with Blah, particularly for newer members of the team we say like great, I look forward to reading the notes. And you can imagine as the co founder and COO when I ask that people are like oh that's right, I should write up those notes and then link it to, you know in this case HubSpot is what we use and it's been great. I'd say one thing very tangibly, like we just brought on a QA test automation engineer. We've been very tight on headcount growth as you know with COVID But you know we have selectively brought on new players. Then we can give them a treasure trove, say here's the stuff to read to onboard and people can very Rapidly get up to speed, which is compelling.

Absolutely. Onboarding speed seems to be a consistent benefit. I hear from from other founders who are running companies in similar ways.

We would all agree it's the right thing, but we never quite got around to it. Right. And so now there's just more of a expectation that. And it also helps you probably appreciate this, you know, just what you see across your portfolio companies. It helps with fomo, you know, folks like, oh, they don't want to miss out on that meeting, they don't want to miss out on that client engagement, they don't want to miss out on that, you know, whatever it is, particularly the more client facing. And then they feel comfortable if they optimistic because they know they're going to get a really good digest of what happened, decisions made, even little things like who was there. Yeah.

You know, you mentioned several that I'm excited about and I think it comes back to what you said, Dan, which is these aren't new best practices. These are best practices we've all known about for a long time. But it's easy to be lazy when you're sitting next to your colleagues and you can get away with some of the laziness. And so the constraints introduced by this pandemic and the way we're all now working actually force us to adopt these best practices consistently. And in that sense there's a bit of a positive impact as well on the way we work.

So you kind of find these practices that you're optimized for a remote meeting, remote team, distributed group, be the practices people want to do anyway, even when they're in person or the outcome of a get in person meeting is still author the doc, post it where people can find it, hit it on a slack channel, which is kind of interesting to see. The behaviors are persisting even when we are in fact together.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's maybe sequence from talking about how you folks are working at utmost to remote work more generally. One of the things I'm curious for your perspective on, Dan, is as we think about this concept of distributed teams and this concept becoming more mainstream, more companies adopting it, what's the impact of that on different labor pools that are accessible to companies? And in particular, how does that make contingent labor a more viable source of talent for companies?

We just see an acceleration of the use of contingent workers. And in a way we obviously knew that when we started the business. But as we've gotten into it, the dynamic nature of how work's actually getting done continues to astound me. And I think with COVID in mind, it's certainly going to be an accelerant. And you know, for example, I'll tell you the one that came up recently, it sort of blew my mind. We see healthcare delivery networks composed of vast numbers of volunteers. And at first when I, when I heard this I was like, oh, volunteer, like here at the Palo Alto Medical center, there's some, there's some nice person sitting by the door that guides you where to go, right? Like that kind of volunteer, like somebody help you with like where to go floor plan. It's like, no, these are nurse practitioner volunteers. We're working with one healthcare concern. I'll just kind of keep the name to myself right now. But they have 2,000 nurse practitioners who are volunteers, but they're volunteering to get their clinical hours and simultaneously. And this is something we've learned very recently. They're in multiple roles, they're a part time worker at a certain rate and then they're a volunteer as a nurse practitioner for clinical hours. So the same individual is on two active engagements with two totally different, if you will, pay rates, qualification needs, etc. All at the same time. And from the end employer's perspective, most of what they're doing is entirely free volunteer work. And so you know, you have these like, you know, not one, not two, not 10, like a quarter of their workforce fits that population demographic. And that's really interesting. You know we see in the insurance business our first customer, we see that they have tens of thousands of insurance sales agents, but those individuals come together with brokers that sort of recommend multiple insurance products. And so it's this interesting fusion of around 1400 employees with 14,000 independent sales agents, with 10,000 brokers. And now all of that work, a traditional business used to be done kind of in person, is now going digital to sell those products. So it's already kind of vast. I think the thing that to say, just to answer your question Salm, is the nature of how work's actually getting done in the real world is already extremely complicated, including outside parties, contingent workers, or just, you know, the top, the top level name for it, we call it the extended workforce. I think with an eye towards, you know, what's going on with remote work. We see, you know, and then this is a little bit harsh to say, you know, we want to be thoughtful and sensitive to what's going on out there for workers. But you know, quite candidly, Chros I sit down with will talk to them and say look, we, we furloughed 5,000 people, we're only bringing back 500. Right. So 4,500 people are essentially out of a job, but the work's still going to get done. They just might need to be in a different employment relationship. And we see stats from folks like, you know, well regarded analysts like Gardner saying, Look, 74% of organizations plan to increase their use of remote work after the pandemic. And a third of that, or a third total, 30%, expect a increase in non employed labor. So my take is that you're going to have, yes, these really dynamic working relationships will continue and they'll continue with an acceleration of the non employed labor. Even our little company, right. So here we are a company of, I guess we're 34 employees now. We have over 120 employees, non employees, doing different things for the firm across all categories. And so we're not alone in that. Right. And that's the accountants, the consultancies, the staff engineers, you know, the plant waters, you know, for folks that actually come to the office when we sell offices to go to. And that's pretty interesting. And I don't think we're alone in that bottom line. The answer question is it's already a rich tapestry of how work's actually getting done out there. And the more we progress, the more we discover these different use cases that are quite compelling. And it's just going to accelerate post Covid, where companies essentially, I hate to say that furlough example again, companies essentially say, look, rather than having employees, we're going to have more flexible labor costs, which ultimately leads them to the extended workforce, to contingent workers and other types of working relationships.

Dan, one of the things you touched on which I want to follow up about is, you know, you mentioned how the pandemic has accelerated different employers accepting remote work as part of company culture culture and allowing remote to be a core part of the workforce going forward. I'm curious, as you talk to different customers, whether it's insurance companies, healthcare companies, companies in different verticals, what are the questions employers should be asking themselves when they evaluate their total workforce strategy and make decisions around different work streams or teams and whether or not to just maintain employee labor. Consider non employee labor and remote as part of that.

Yeah, you're asking the right question, Tom. What we're seeing is that it starts at that highest level question, the way you posed it, which is if you back up in your mind with non employee labor 20 years, it was 2% of the working population. If you accelerate to today, there's a recent study out from Ardent Partners that says it's 43% of the working population, up from 10% in 2010. So in the last decade we went from 10% to 43% again according to Arden Partners. But you see similar things from, you know, the McKinsey Global Institute and Gardner and other credible firms. And what it manifests as as we engage with senior execs is they start asking, how do I think the right workforce mix? How do I optimize my entire workforce? And so we think it starts from first, you need core visibility to even engage in that discussion, who's working for you, where? But once you start having a handle on that, and these are the kind of things candidly that Utmost helps with, start saying, well, what are the critical roles, the locations, what skills do I need, what suppliers are bringing me those skills? And that's an interesting one. I mean if you had to say, what's the great connective tissue? Now it really is getting to a skills taxonomy where a company can ask a question and get a fair answer. Because what happened? In point of fact, companies will have job codes, job classifications. If they have 10,000 employees, they have like 5,000 job classifications. And then if they have 10,000 continued workers, they have 50 roles for continued workers. And so it's not even a fair comparison. You can't, you know, it just doesn't map. But when you get it down to a skills level and say, well, are they doing marketing skills, you know, development skills, python skills, like what sort of sub aspect of it? It becomes a much better way to, to make that comparison. But then secondly, what are the critical projects? Is this revenue producing? Is it about operational efficiency? Do you have to do it with regulation? And then ultimately it's like, how does this factor into a strategic workforce plan?

Yeah, I'd love to just double click a little bit and maybe tell us a little bit about OTMO software and product capabilities and how companies are using it today to help answer these questions around the entire total workforce.

So Companies are using Utmost2 as a system of record for their non employed labor. And importantly, the way we differentiate is we think about that as all classifications of workers, all type of work. We don't delineate and just focus on temp labor brought to companies by staffing firms. We think about the full set of cohorts and it really is a talent continuum. And if it's a freelancer, a contractor, a consultant, a contingent worker, be a staffing firm, service based contracts, business process outsourcing, and we don't make a Judgment or choice on that, we've designed a system that can handle those complex business relationships and then across sourcing, so finding that labor, engaging on and off boarding, paying, so tracking time, invoicing, paying. That's the solution we offer. And importantly, we're squarely focused on serving workday customers. So for a workday customer, we call that entire non employee population the extended workforce. We say you can extend your workday investment to support your extended workforce. So that's the software we built. I'd say one thing that's interesting about it is it does get to a total talent picture. And our belief is just we want to be on the right side of history, that increasingly the worker is more empowered, that we believe. A lot of people have chosen to be more independent. This is not a thing that's thrust upon them. This is a lifestyle choice. They have the skills, they have the interest. And it's a choice to be a freelancer, to be independent, to set up their own little company. And that's a really interesting trend in that companies increasingly have, they have relationships with workers. And in a way it's like mobilizing talent when they need it. It's less finding someone, they have no idea who it is to do a project. It's like when they're ready for the project, they remobilize talent. And so you see that in some cyclical businesses where, you know, in retail, where a holiday spike in retail or we have one client in life sciences, for example, over an eight week period annually during cold and flu season, they have 20,000 workers come and pack pills and bottles in their facilities. And that's even pre Covid. Like that's nothing to do with COVID And so the speed and the velocity of these labor spikes are really interesting. And yet each of those workers, each of those 20,000 need to be certified to do that activity for them. So that's pretty interesting, right? So you have this army of people come together and if you think of an eight week window on average, you know, folks are there for four weeks. I mean it's this high velocity, very dynamic now that's physically in person because of the nature of the business. But increasingly it's just mobilizing work, increasing on a global, remote, dynamic basis. So utmost builds software to support those kinds of use cases. And yet we do it in a way that's complementary to workday. So you can get to a total workforce view.

That's a great example that you gave of the life sciences company and some of the patterns around work and the elastic nature for them and how they can take advantage of contingent workers and extended workforces to serve those work streams. You've referenced a few other verticals and types of customers as well. I'm curious, like when you look across the board of companies that you're working with and that are using utmost, what are some of the other patterns beyond just the elastic nature of work that they can take advantage of and that you see with extended workforces?

As we get out there and we engage with more clients, we see patterns of blurring the lines between employees and non employees. Some of the workers in this extended workforce are highly skilled. They're so skilled they choose not to be employed by anyone. You know, they'd rather be independent. And then they dial in, they connect in for small pieces of work to contribute to a whole. And so it's not true, at least in the experience we're having, that it's just sort of low skilled labor that you don't want to hire an employee for. Sometimes it's just the opposite. It's skilled labor that you can't hire, that you want to get projects done with. It's everything under the sun. I mean, it's really an interesting time in that sometimes it's skills based. You know, I know one gentleman, he's. I mean, this is, this is like where we all kind of want to be. He's a chief medical officer for hire and he is the individual that gets hired when life sciences companies want to get a drug through a clinical trial. And so he, you know, he is purposely independent. He doesn't want to be an employee for anyone. So he's on the upper echelon. You know, we see digital global supply chains. We have one prospect not yet a customer, but they literally have people on courthouse steps getting legal documents, case law, directly from the courthouse. They digitize that. The digital versions go to three facilities in the Philippines, in India, or in China. All that's outsourced labor. They tag it, they digitize it, they make it searchable and then it comes back and they package that up into a searchable database. For legal entities, these kind of global supply chains are just, they'll blow your mind.

That makes sense. And I want to flip it and go to the employer worker perspective. And Dan, you've at times referenced how this is a new form of work and there's a lot of positives associated with this form of work as well. From the perspective of the worker. Can you elaborate on that? And then also for workers who are finding employment in these Forms. What are some of the considerations that they should have in mind as they transition to this type of work?

You know, we believe in being on the right side of history on this. I think more empowered workers with control over their data is a good thing. You know, we, we certainly see some skill sets across industries that tend to be more likely to be independent freelancers, etc. I think the kind of things, I mean, sometimes it starts with a side hustle. We're seeing workers that start with they're employed somewhere and they're doing a side hustle and they're developing their skills more. But I guess at the highest level it's individuals are increasingly feeling confident that they can go out on their own if they have a skill set, something they love and they want to do. Our belief is, if there's one thing we've learned since we started the company, is that there's an amazing array of the type of work being done. The workers and the skill sets and the business constructs. Sometimes it's an individual showing up as what by US tax code would be a 1099 worker. Sometimes it's a service based arrangement and you don't even need to know who's working on it because it's entirely deliverable based on. But it's increasingly that it's higher velocity, it's more specific and it's just one of these things that the way that maybe 20 years ago you said, oh, we're going to hire a bunch of people as employees, we're going to have them in a single facility and we're going to have them prosecute our business. It's just nowhere near how work's actually getting done. Now I'll tell you the other thing. Now this is a little bit more on the alarming side. It's also amazing how clunky some of the experiences are. Right? So I mean, again, this is related to Covid. We had one prospect, very large employer and they had, unfortunately they were terminating their continued worker contracts. Many of these workers had received hardware, laptop, badge, etc. From the company. The company is now remote, like no one's coming into the facilities. They literally have laid off hundreds of people and they don't know how to get their equipment back. They don't even know where to send a box to say, could you please mail back this laptop? I mean, it's amazing how in a way, sort of rudimentary, some of the relationships are out there and we think there's a lot of opportunity to improve that.

As we've seen this transition and acceleration to more flexible work. We've also seen evolving policy and regulation and some pushback as well. And I'd love to get your thoughts and perspectives on the pushback on gig work and contract workers and some of the legal activity that's happening around, you know, gig workers, how they should be classified and independent workers as potential employees.

I think it's pretty tragic. I mean, talk about a vibrant time, right? Like legislation related to employment law is really interesting right now. We're all presently in California. There's Assembly Bill 5. This is causing Uber and Lyft and other gig work companies to put a ballot initiative on the ballot for this November to say we should let gig workers be independent if they want to, but we should have benefits. Really interesting op ed from the CEO of Uber in the New York Times recently saying, we want to offer benefits, but there's, there's this catch 22 for employers when they say the more you offer benefits to workers, the more you're likely to be seen as those workers being employees. I think we're in this dystopian scenario where if you're an employee, you have benefits. If you're an independent, you don't. And particularly over the last four or five years, a lot of energy around having a third category of worker. It shouldn't be so binary. I'll tell you my philosophy on this though. I think that genie is out of the bottle. I think it's a bit of a naive view to say, wouldn't it be great if everyone were just an employee and just kind of put no more gig work, no more kind of contingent work. Freelancers. The McKinsey Global Institute says there are 162 million independent workers and broad definition of independence. Freelancers. It's more like these kind of workers globally working right now, just in the US and Europe. And so I think it's kind of naive to think we're just going to go back to like the 50s where everyone was just employment for life and everything was great when you were an employee. In that I think people want choice. I think flexibility is good. I just think we need to find ways to have more benefits and more protections for workers. Could that be a third employment category? Possibly. That has its pros and cons to some really interesting legal papers out there and white papers and early thought. But I like the idea of empowering the workers, but finding that social safety net. Certainly Covid. I mean, the fires in California right now, we see the stresses that it's putting on workers when they don't have a safety net. However, I do think that there's a more nuanced view than just a binary. Just make everyone be an employee isn't. I just don't think that's the right answer.

Absolutely. I like the use of genie out of the bottle. I think we're going to have to see an evolution of legislation and it'll be interesting to see how the legislation keeps up and adapts to the new reality. I think I'm actually curious to. You know, we talk about the future of work a lot, and a lot of the trends we've been talking about today tie into the future of work. You know, Dan, I'm curious what you think persists about the current environment and the way we're all working right now and the way companies look at talent, you know, post pandemic. And what do you think doesn't persist? Are there elements of how we've begun to work that you think revert back over the coming years?

I think what persists is way better use of collaboration tools and techniques that are geared towards remote work that turns out are just. Just make for a better meeting in the first place, even when you're all in the same place. And so I think a lot of that will persist. I do personally like the serendipity of being at the whiteboard and being together. But I'll tell you what, you know, use Miro and some of these tools today, it's. It's about as good. And if someone missed the meeting, they can catch up very quickly. You know, like there's, there's sort of that, that ability. So I think what will persist is more acceptance of remote work. I mean, it's naive to say here in August of 2020, but I was reluctant to hire a VP of marketing that wasn't going to be in one of our primary offices. How can you be a people leader and hold down a major function if you're in a different state? And so now think how naive that feels now, five months into Covid, of course we can. We've all been remote. We're all. We've proven we can be productive, possibly even more productive. I'll say one more thing that I think absolutely persists is companies are going to have more pools of talent that they tap into to get their business done that are increasingly separate from them. It's going to be alumni groups, it's going to be former contingent workers that they mobilize. It's going to be different sets of firms that are able to work like, we had one contract designer. She was fantastic. You guys put us in touch with her. She worked with us for five weeks. If at any point she put up her hand, said, hey, I'm free again for. We take her for five weeks. Right. She was a 1099 worker. And so I think this idea of multiple, slightly extended pools of talent that companies mobilize to get things done, I think things that won't persist, I don't know. I mean, I think we're in the state of never come to the office, don't ever worry about it. You know, there's a human side to all of this. And whether it's getting together for a hackathon or a period of get together, I think we're going to want to do that. I think there will be price pressure. You know, I imagine there are a lot of geographies or getting a lot of. A lot of people moving there, then we'll have sort of cost of living price pressure. We say, great, I'm glad you've moved outside of St. Louis. We're going to now change your salary to reflect that. And I think that'll be interesting to see how companies manage that. Honestly, I think that Covid is a hot mess. And I really feel for not just the. The tragic loss of life, but the loss of income and jobs and the impact on the economy. But most of what I see are accelerants for the way that work's going to look in the future. We just took 10 years of gradual evolution to more remote, more kind of extended workers, different pools of talent. We just crammed it into the last five, six months, and I think a lot of that's going to persist.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. We see the same thing from our perspective, not just in the way we work and employ folks, but more broadly, just the way companies operate. You know, taking many years of digital transformation, accelerating it into a couple of quarters. I think the interesting point you raised, Dan, is as we hopefully, you know, come out of this pandemic and go back to being able to be in the office in some capacity, there's a future sort of hybrid world that we'll land at. And then the question is, what are the things that we all have to do as teams, companies, et cetera, to make ourselves productive and maximally impactful in that hybrid world.

Yeah, I think you're right, Tom. I agree with that.

You mentioned the human side of things. I'd like to end the podcast on the human side of things. What advice do you have as a leader as a founder for folks who are transitioning to this way of working. And just personally, you know, what are one or two things you've been doing to stay sane and happy and productive during this period?

I would say there's just a ton of great content out there and some of this is, you know, thanks to our relationship with Greylock and we're grateful we partnered with you and Sarah. You know, we have exposure to the Greylock network which is of course fantastic. But there's so much public content out where companies are, they're sharing their learnings. I would say take advantage of the chance to learn and keep learning and be it online coursework, podcasts, etc. I'd say from the sanity side, you know, it's not every day that you're home for five months for dinner. So there always silver lining out there with what we're facing now. I'd say personally I've gotten into birding. I've taken some online courses. Back to online courses on ornithology. I'd recommend the Cornell School of Ornithology if you're into birds. So, you know, appreciate the little things. I suppose maybe the takeaway there is something very different than your day to day. But I will say, like, I've always thought birds were cool. Now I think they're cooler. Just get out there and you know, they're everywhere and they can fly.

I completely agree with the sentiment of looking for something new to do during this time and that's a really interesting one. I'm going to go look into it after the podcast. Awesome. Dan Notes thanks for joining us on Gray Matter. I'm delighted we got such a unique perspective from both sides on the future of work, remote work, distributed teams. And thanks everyone for listening.

Thank you.

Okay everyone, that concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to our podcast on soundcloud.com greylock partners or you can find new episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com youm can also follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Sam Monamidi and thanks for listening.