How to Get from 0 to 1 and Build a Remote Team with Sam Udotong of Fireflies.ai

All right, welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I am a co-founder of the Founder Institute. I see a lot of people joining, which is always awesome. We have a very interesting and topical topic. I guess that's why they call it topical today. So really quick, the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed accelerator. We actually are enrolling in more programs around the world today than we ever have been in our 11-year history, and that's because this is the— a good time to build a business. So you can learn more about FI at fi.co. But to the topic at hand, we're gonna talk today about being scrappy and building a remote team. Now obviously, you know, we were just talking about this before we went live here. Being scrappy always a prerequisite for an entrepreneur, right? That's something that you always need to do. In a time like now, you need to do that even more. But building a remote team is something that definitely, from what I have seen, you know, people definitely don't understand the difference between the dynamics of something being physical and something being online. And this is a place that we're seeing a lot of companies fumbling around right now. Even with us and Founder Institute, you know, we're working with a lot of people to run online events. And even just the difference between an online event and a physical event is like night and day, right? But people always sort of walk into it thinking that it's similar, and building a remote team is certainly not any different. So today to talk about two of these things, of being scrappy and also building a remote team, we have a guest. His name is Sam Udotong, and he's the co-founder and CTO of Fireflies. Let me— sorry, I had my spotlight video on here. Hey, Sam.

Hey, thank you. Good to be here.

Yeah. So, as I said, with those two trends, honestly, we might not be able to find a better speaker, okay? We're gonna get into Sam's story in a second about how he started his business bootstrapping and being scrappy to get the business off the ground. And also, and this is something that we were just talking about, very rare but gonna become much more of an occurrence. Sam's team, it's him and his co-founder, live in the Bay Area in San Francisco. And everyone else does not. All right, so they have literally built out this, this virtual team, and this is something that's going to become, you know, sort of the new normal, at least in our opinion. So, Sam, do you want to tell us a little bit about what Fireflies does, just to get started?

Yeah, so Fireflies is an AI that can join meetings and take notes, and our idea from day one is that meetings are— and webinars and anywhere that there's conversation, have a lot of valuable information. And unless you do a really good job of taking notes, all that information tends to get lost. Even just 2 hours after the meeting, you probably can't remember everything. So Fireflies is an AI that will literally join your meetings and record it, transcribe it, and organize information in a notebook so that you can search back to any conversation that you've ever had. It's free to start using and it's live, so. Check it out, Fireflies.ai.

Yeah, check out Fireflies. And even just, and this is something to, you know, just looking into some of your background here, the initial idea for Fireflies, was it a delivery app or something?

Yeah, we've had a really long journey. So we actually, me and my co-founder Kirsch actually started Fireflies back at MIT. And when we first started working together, it was from a hackathon. And our first idea was let's build a delivery app on campus where you can actually use Bitcoin to get, to pay your deliverers and get food delivered. And we actually called that Fireflies. And we actually pivoted 7 times up until we reached this version in 2017. And so it's a really long story. I don't know if we should get into it, but yeah, we learned a lot along the way. So happy to share that. My lessons with you guys.

Yeah, it's funny how much I see that too, where you, you see a business— because Fireflies, for your business, uh, seems pretty logical, right? It's like, oh, it's fireflies hanging out, they're listening and they're interpreting, right? But it also makes sense for other businesses. But anyway, it's just funny how that works sometimes, where you, you see a business like, oh, I get the business name, but like, no, actually it was a different business. And anyway, um, so, uh, so yeah, Sam said MIT alum. He also is a guest lecturer at Stanford's, uh, AI classes. And he's got a really interesting story. So we're gonna start getting into this now, but before we do, just real quick, let me look in the chat here. All right, this is great. We got some nice volume in the chat. I'm seeing Adele from Bahrain, Cynthia from New York City, Amar from Philadelphia, Christine from Santa Barbara, Andres from Bogotá. Was it Peru? Ohio, Vancouver, Toronto. Awesome, all right. So for everybody on the line, all right, thank you for joining us. If you want to watch an online video that's not interactive, you can go to YouTube, right? I want this to be interactive. The value of any online event, of any webinar, and obviously a lot of people are running webinars right now, but the value of these things is for us to interact with you. This is a 100% live event and we have a member of our team in the chat right now. You can You can probably see them talking. And anytime throughout this event, please throw the questions into the chat, and we will queue them up, and we'll get to them, okay? So please don't be shy. The value of these events is for us to interact with you, and I'm gonna— we have a base kind of structure for a discussion that we wanna have, but we wanna weave in as many of your questions as possible. Okay, so with that being said, sort of the structure that we do have is number one is to talk about kind of this scrappiness. Right? And then after that, then to talk about how to build a remote team. So we'll start on the topic of being scrappy. So, Sam, again, I've been around startups for a long time and just reading your story was definitely fairly unique. So, you know, maybe just give us a minute or two just so people know exactly, you know, your level of scrappy.

Yeah, sure. I can, I can share the context that I come in with. So I graduated from MIT in 2016. At the time, I had been working on Fireflies for some time with my co-founder, just casually. I had like a couple of full-time offers to go work at like Boeing and other tech companies, and I also had some grad school offers, and I was working on Fireflies and had like no money as a fresh college grad, and I was thinking What should I do? I mean, my co-founder decided to like take the leap and, you know, just trust our gut and just move out to San Francisco. I remember I got to SF with $100 in my pocket. And we were just like, let's go there and figure out what we can learn.

And that buys you a couple coffees.

Right. I mean, to me, it didn't seem like that little. It was like, we can just make this we can stretch this out, we can figure out a way to like get $5K, get $25K from, uh, like actually MIT had a great, uh, program where they would give students like $5K for your business and as long as you give them a receipt, it would reimburse you up until some time. So we had a plan to stay alive for a couple months and we, and we moved out there and then as soon as we got there, um, obviously there's a really strong network of, uh, people from MIT out there but they're all going and working at Facebooks and Googles And for me, I would like go out to dinner with some friends and just look at the menu and say, "None of this, I can't get any of this. I'm just gonna drink Soylent and eat Domino's pizza instead." So Soylent is like a meal in a bottle type of thing, and it's a really efficient way to, you know, get all the nutrients that you need and save money. So I actually had one bottle of Soylent every day for 3 years, and I also had like 2 boxes of Domino's every week for that same period of time. And I would just survive on Soylent and Domino's and then minimize the cost of rent. We never got an office space.

We would— Wait, just real quick. Let me bring it back here. Okay, so Soylent and Domino's?

Soylent and Domino's.

And it was only 1 Soylent a day?

Yeah, I usually did like about 2 meals a day. So Soylent would— I would actually drink the first one around like 1 PM or 2 PM, like almost like a late brunch kind of thing, and then I would have like my dinner as like 3 slices of Domino's, and that honestly was enough, and I would still be working like 12, 15, sometimes 18-hour days, but because all you have to do, like for me as a CTO, all I was just doing is typing code, it worked well.

Okay, yeah, sorry, sorry, I just, I wanted to interject there just, but yeah, so talk about your, your housing situation.

I think, yes, so When we got out here, I got like housing in like the living room of this place in San Francisco. And for office space, we would just go to coffee shops at first and just work there every day. We would like, eventually we just met people as a virtue of being out in San Francisco, connecting with like other founders, other venture capitalists, advisors, operators from top companies. And just tell them our story, and people resonated with it and said, hey, you guys should just come work at our office space for a few months. And we actually got access to like, I think, 5 different offices for free in SF while being here over the past couple years. And as we just like survived it, what it really forced us to do was figure out how do you build something that people want and will pay for. I think previously to that, before we moved out, while we were still in college, like hacking on different projects, like the food delivery idea. We wanted just to build something that we thought, hey, this would be cool, but it didn't really resonate. The business of it didn't really resonate. Like we didn't really value what it would mean to earn money from customers until we really moved out to SF and we were thinking about every month, like how am I gonna pay rent the next month? Or am I gonna end up on the streets if I don't figure out how to sell this product? And so there's like, for us, that was, for me, that was like a really strong driver of, you know, wanting to build something that people wanted. And it made us iterate much faster and make different decisions than we would have if we had the cushion of funding at the time. So we ended up bootstrapping for 3 years. In the process, learned a lot, ended up building a fully remote team. And then about, yeah, about a year ago in the fall, we announced a $5 million seed round, which was our first institutional funding, but we already have the remote DNA. So for us, we can stretch that a lot further than a company that didn't have that DNA could do.

And for everyone on the line too, if you Google Fireflies.ai, I'm seeing some questions here, Fireflies.ai seed round, you know, not all seed rounds are, built the same, right? You had some pretty impressive people in that round. And at least around Silicon Valley, it's a lot of the names that are backing your company. It's really, it's a massive endorsement, right? So just, you were touching a little bit on there where, because you, you know, it's sort of this forcing function idea. right? Because you were so focused on, okay, how do we get to revenue as quickly as possible? It can't just be something that's cool, like a delivery app. It has to be something that solves a real problem, right? Like, how did you guys kind of go through that process of trying to figure out, okay, if we need to get to revenue as quickly as possible, how can we find that problem quickly?

Yeah, this is actually a really interesting story. So, um, the background before we even moved— before we reached this idea of this AI note-taker, right, was that we had built 6 different products. There's actually a logical progression of how we pivoted from product to product, and there was never like a massive jump. I won't go into that, but what I'll say is that our approach was always to start coding it first and to try to build the app and, you know, get someone— get feedback on it, just spoken feedback, get iterate on the design, build first and then sell. When we reached the last pivot, we like, we're literally just on our wits' end. This was like our last stand in a way, and we were like, what can we do to make money Is there a way that we can make money without even building anything? So when we started this AI note-taker, we said, hey, we have an AI that can join meetings and take notes. And in reality, uh-oh, so we got people to pay like $100 per month for that, and it would just transcribe a few hours of meetings every month, back in 2017. And what we did was we said, there's an AI that will join your meeting, but in reality, it was just me and my co-founder blackboxing it, calling into the meeting, sitting there silently and taking notes, and then sending it out. So we found a way to test the idea without building it, and we were able to make enough money to pay for rent. And only at that point were we like, okay, let's stop here, and now let's go and automate everything in between.

Right, okay. Um, and do you think that Do you think that you'd be where you are today if you didn't bootstrap it in the beginning? Do you think you would have kind of made some of those same decisions and gotten— realized sort of that customer need if you hadn't gone through that process?

I think there's multiple ways to build the right business and find product-market fit, get from zero to one. So I don't think the way that we did it is the way for everyone. I think for us, I mean, I think for us particularly, it would be, it was the only way to get where we are today because we had been working on the idea for so long. And if we were not bootstrapping, we definitely would have run out of money. I mean, I remember when we first moved out to San Francisco in 2017, I knew people, like friends in my network or acquaintances that raised multiple millions of dollars, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million. And I look around today and they've all stopped working on it. And I mean, I think the truth of the matter is people find a way to spend whatever's in your budget. Yep.

So that's, that's, that's a truism, man.

Yeah. And so yeah, we, I definitely think that the bootstrapping way for us was necessary for us to find the fit because it basically just extended the amount of time that we had. To find the right idea.

Okay. So we got some questions here. So Shane was asking, like, did you have a side hustle when you were going through this scrappy process?

I never had a side hustle, but I did take on like probably 2 or 3 month-long jobs at times when, it was like super thin and there was no other way but to take on a job and, you know, build someone a website or build someone an app. I think I did that 2 or 3 times, but I wouldn't say it was— it was kind of an inconsistent hustle. Yeah.

Okay. Let's see. So somebody named Better Stories, which I think is a brand name, but anyway, they're asking like, was this story— they're asking is, do investors love or hate the scrappy founder story? So I guess I can kind of rephrase that and say, like, the same kind of story that you're telling us right now, was that something that was part of your fundraising process?

This is actually an interesting one. We never thought that this would be an interesting story for investors, and we didn't include it in the pitch. We actually didn't talk about it for the longest time. It's pretty embarrassing even to share publicly. Like, it's kind of embarrassing, but at this point I'm just like, yeah, might as well just share the truth of it, because I think that there should be more people that do that and share the hard parts of the journey. But surprisingly, it actually did help with some of the fundraising. I remember we met some pretty incredible venture VCs and we just told them the story as if we're like, you know, just talking like friends and we didn't even expect funding to come out of it. But the story was like, wow, these founders are so resilient. They're not gonna quit. They have the, like, I guess for them, and I'm still learning about this right now, for them, Persistence is a really valuable trait, and that actually helps with fundraising, like beyond just having a good business or making good revenue or having a good go-to-market. If you also couple that with the right mentality, it actually can help. Yeah, that's what I'll say about that.

Yeah, no, I mean, and just going off of yours, I don't know if you, I've seen a lot of companies do this and yes, a lot of these investors, they're looking for the founders that they know are gonna just persist. You know what I mean? So I can definitely see why that would be a value to them, especially in early-stage investments when there's not a lot of data for people to use, right? It's all about risk management and it's like, wow, this person was able to do this and they drove through this, like, I trust for it to be a little bit less risk. So lots of great questions coming in. Please keep them coming. I realize I actually was at fault here because my stuff wasn't refreshing, so I wasn't seeing a lot of questions. So I was like, what's going on? But actually, there's a ton of questions. So that's my bad, everybody. So let's see here. Okay, Chris is asking, and we're still on the topic of sort of being scrappy here, and we're gonna move on pretty soon to the topic of building a remote team, but on the topic of being scrappy, Chris is asking, you know, that Sam reads as being sort of Spartan. I don't know if that's a compliment, or I guess it's a compliment. How did you, how did your health, you know, and how did you hold up during that time to bootstrap the business?

Yeah, I mean, there were definitely some challenges with health. I mean, I would say on a high level, I was very stubborn about my health. And I mean, I'm young and just graduated, so I do have some room to play with. But at the same time, I definitely did not make all the right health decisions. I remember at one point when I first started, you know, on a drastically different diet than I had been doing all throughout college. I actually like had to go to the emergency room at some point. Everything was fine, it was just like a bladder infection, but that was a slight shock, but that didn't stop me, I just kept on the same diet. And I actually think—

Just by the way, the same thing happened to me. It wasn't a bladder infection, but I had internal bleeding, I lost half my blood, and that was during like a particularly stressful time. Of building out the business. So yeah, it's—

Yeah, it's super easy to, you know, just prioritize the business and deprioritize your health. And at the time, you can probably justify it and say, this is what I have to do, otherwise, I mean, I'm gonna fail. But yeah, something— it's hard, it's hard. And I think when it comes to health, the diet of Soylent and Domino's was actually good for me. Because Soylent has like a lot of nutrients. I don't want to pitch it, but like it, it, yeah, I didn't have to really work out and I could still like do like 50 push-ups and like, I don't know. Soylent was good for me, so my diet was okay, but I will say that from like the mental health perspective of not really having any sort of budget to spend or any reserves in the bank, and just kind of think like month to month. That was really difficult. I remember when we actually raised the funding last year, about a month after that, I actually just started thinking a lot differently and I just could breathe a sigh of relief and start thinking more long-term. Whereas before that, there was definitely some mental health issues and purposely like limiting myself with things that I could have done. So yeah, I think there were some health trade-offs that I had to make But overall, nothing that, you know, stops the journey.

But I'm gonna move on to the building a remote team side here next. But just as a last question on the scrappy side, like, so you were talking about like physical health, right? Like on the mental side, you know, and just so you get, I mean, San Francisco is one of the most expensive places in the world, certainly the most expensive place in the US. Lived there for many years, and to be out there in that environment and, you know, to really be that scrappy can be challenging. I mean, how, you know, how did you sort of keep your sanity and how, I mean, did you have a social life, I guess, is one way I would put it?

I think I actually used the social life to keep my sanity. I had a pretty, I would say I enjoyed the social life. I went out like many weekends. And I think the hard part is like when you have friends that are, you know, going on trips to, you know, Napa or going to the mountains or like buying tables and like they clearly are just making a lot of good money from the like big tech companies.

Oh, and it's all jobs that you could have had too.

Right. And then I'm just like, this really sucks. So there were a lot of times in those 3 years where me and my co-founder were like, Is this really it? Like, should we just give up now? But I don't know, the light at the end of the tunnel, we could always see the light at the end of the tunnel, so we just continued.

Right.

But yeah, I guess to answer your question, the social life did help me cope, and like going to go hang out with friends. I did a lot of freestyle rapping as well, which was a nice way to like be creative and like de-stress and not have to think about everything else. But yeah, I think everyone should definitely, in general, even when you're building a company and you're not bootstrapping, you should have a way to just disconnect from work.

Alright, alright. So I'm gonna follow the audience's lead here. A lot of people wanna talk about building a remote team. So just to kind of roll it back for a minute, 'cause I know a lot of people join these webinars a little bit late. Sam and his co-founder are the only people that are not, or that are based in the Bay Area, right? And you have a remote team of how many people?

Now we're up around 20 people.

20 people remotely, okay. And was this your plan all along to build remote, or how was that part of sort of the scrappy thing, or like how did that just start to?

So we actually started off remote from day one because, I went to MIT undergrad and my co-founder Krish went to UPenn, and we had— we worked together on a hackathon and then we just continued working remotely, um, throughout our entire— like, uh, throughout those years. And when we moved out to SF, uh, we moved together but we were living different places and we didn't want to get an office space, so even then we were still remote. And then it just made sense to us, like, uh, we had to really think critically about Is it worth, you know, hiring a Bay Area engineer and getting office space here, or is there another solution? So for us, remote was always a smart thing to do, and it was also the most fun, as many people are finding out now, being able to work from home, control your schedule. So yeah, we've always been remote, and we've always wanted to be. Right.

Before, when we were chatting before we went live here, we were talking about the concept of, you know, the missionaries versus the mercenaries, right? When you're in a hypercompetitive market, of which Silicon Valley may be the most hypercompetitive, but I'm sure you're gonna see similar things in a lot of big cities around the world, you're gonna be kind of playing in a pool to find good talent with things that you really can't compete with as an early-stage entrepreneur, right?

Right, exactly. Yeah, to, to like convince someone that Facebook was making, uh, some people making up to $200K, $300K per year to come and work at your startup where there's no chance that that could happen. Um, yeah, it, it, it's, uh, it's just a much different mentality of like what it takes to build a startup and live that bootshop life. And there's definitely people around the world. I mean, there are people in San Francisco that can do it well. And so I'm not just saying everyone in SF is like that, but yeah, there's definitely that concept of should you be— I think what you mean by missionary versus mercenaries, a missionary is someone who's willing to like take that, you know, that cut in salary to build something that they believe in and that, they can stick with for a long time and it's seen as, this is a company that I want to be with and be there from ground zero until the time that we IPO or beyond. And whereas a mercenary might want to just come in, get the cliff from equity, and then leave and join another startup after a year or two. Right.

And I think, at least in my opinion, startups can't ever compete on the mercenary front. Going to be competing with corporate cars and first-class tickets and healthcare— or not healthcare, sorry, I meant to say childcare— and that kind of stuff. Right. And that's going to be really hard. And a place like San Francisco, it has just been an arms race. Right. If you Google some of the stories, the perks that were going, which is great for the workers. Right. But it also just creates this— it creates a lot of mercenaries that are not gonna be available to startups, right? And for you guys, and this is how every startup should kind of look at things, right? Like you do want missionaries, and I think you were able to find people that you believed in and that still had the same skill sets, still had the same talent and all this stuff, but just didn't happen to be in Silicon Valley. Right? And how did you guys initially start to do that?

Yeah, so for us, I mean, we focused on the areas that we already knew people. We started with, like, when we went to go find, like, initial teammates, we started with, okay, who in our network could help us solve this problem? Like, how can we reach out to people? I mean, we did talk to a lot of engineers in SF, told them about the idea, got great feedback. But it just doesn't make sense for them to go and work with such an early startup that hasn't figured out their idea yet sometimes.

It's too risky, right? And I know, Sam, and for everybody in the audience, Sam and I are talking like San Francisco specific here, but it's gonna be similar in any big city or in any market where there are big companies hiring, right? Like, they're gonna be providing perks and salaries that you can't provide. Provide.

Right, right. And so that what you have to do, what we did is go through the areas that you look— focus on your advantages. Do you know a lot of people from, for example, my hometown is in New Jersey. Do I know anyone in New Jersey who would be like, who knows how to code, who's been coding for a long time, who might be open to something like this? My background My parents are Nigerian, so I actually have a lot of family in Nigeria, and my two younger brothers actually moved out to Nigeria after they graduated college to work on a company. And so I went through their networks as well, and I said, hey, do you guys know any engineers in Nigeria? Um, who could you connect us with? Um, my co-founder, uh, his background, his family's from India. Uh, likewise, we hired in India because we had some initial connections. So Our strategy for us was going through the people that we knew, and, you know, just like you would try to find someone to use your product in sales, you would go out and message all your LinkedIn connections and say, hey, like, will you give feedback? Same thing, you can take a similar approach where you say, hey, so we're doing, we're looking for these kind of people. Start with your strengths, and then as you dive into those networks, you're naturally going to find different pools of people and talents and groups, organizations, Um, ask the people that you find initially, even if they're not willing to work, ask them who they enjoyed working with who might be interested. Um, you can also dive in and find networks of people, um, if they're in like any engineering groups or any coding groups, um, you can then go and reach out to those people and you kind of have to build those relationships and those, uh, those connections and that's how It worked for us. Hopefully that's—

yeah, no, it's— and this is— yeah, so Steven was asking where did Sam source his team members, and a lot of people are asking the sourcing part of it. And what I'm seeing here is sort of an interesting dichotomy, right? Because a lot of people with traditional hiring, right, meaning like in person, it's very network driven. But I definitely see that most people when they go to remote hiring, they look to online tools, right? 'Cause they're like, all right, well, if we're gonna work with this person online and virtually, we're gonna look for virtual tools. But what you're saying is actually you were routing to all the same ways that you would have hired somebody locally except to networks that weren't local.

I think, so half of that is true. We did start with our local network, but at some point you will exhaust that and you don't wanna be asking the same people But to get, to get started, that's where you would start? Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think one really important reason for that is, uh, at least the reason that we did it that way in the beginning is we wanted to still establish that sense of trust, which is much harder to build in remote teams, but obviously very important when you want to build a business. And, you know, you might not feel comfortable giving your code to someone else to start iterating on until you've really validated that, can I trust this person? And so in order to build that trust, we did go through our network. As you become more mature of a business, like Facebook, for example, wouldn't care as much about that trust aspect because they've really developed their systems internally such that that's not a problem. So yeah, I would just say depending on where you are, the stage of like how much would you trust someone new to come and work on your code, that can also inform heavily how you hire. If you don't have that much trust established, then you'll probably want to start with your networks, or people that you kind of know, or platforms or tools that provide that sense of trust. But then as you get more, you know, further along, you can then go and work with— I think there's multiple ways to do it. I'm not saying this is the only way, but that's one reason for it.

So I want to— so something that Sam shared with me right before we started this webinar was that they've hired, um, 4 engineers, like, just in the last couple weeks, and they're onboarding them as quickly as possible. Um, this is a time of growth for their company. But so I want to get into sort of the onboarding and the vetting and that's— and that stuff in a second. But before we do, I know even though it wasn't like the main source of recruitment for you, uh, the most questions that I'll get is like, okay, is there a website? Is there something like, where are the types of places I may want to find some remote people? At least, at least for us, like we found some engineers on, uh, toptal.com. Um, uh, Sam and I were discussing before, you can find, uh, some, some great people on some of those channels. And honestly, those channels sort of act as a a middleman in the beginning, and then if you want to bring them on full-time, you sort of have to buy them out. Like, that's, that's, that's their business model. Um, but if there are other places for, you know, pre-seed entrepreneurs that they, they want to start finding people and, and, you know, have, have a platform kind of take care of the search and some of the, the red tape and stuff, are there any others?

Not even that you necessarily recommend, but just Yeah, I would actually recommend looking into Andela. It's— Andela is like, they help you hire specifically in Africa. I think Nigeria is the focus right now. They help you find like really good engineers there. I'm sure there's similar tools to Toptal and Andela focused on specific markets, which might be interesting, like looking into searching like hire remote engineer platform Brazil, for for example, might be really helpful to find people in the same similar time zone. And there's also definitely a lot of listservs that I know that I've seen like so many listservs of people who are recently laid off from different companies and looking for remote work. I've also seen like remote-focused hiring boards that existed pre-COVID. I think, I forget the name, but maybe WeWork Remotely or something like that. Yeah, there's, I think there's a lot of resources, so definitely rely on Google as that. But yeah, for me, I think if I had to choose one, I would just say check out Andela.

Okay, and we're gonna go into a speed round here in a second. It's gonna be like a video game. I'm just gonna like throw you questions, all right? But before we do that, you did touch on one other thing there, which was just like the geography. Right. So, um, how did you choose kind of— well, I guess I'll, I'll rephrase the question. Uh, did you, did you go into trying to find remote people, uh, with a specific geography in mind? Um, and, um, you know, as an ancillary to that, like, how would you recommend others kind of go into that thinking?

I would say do it you're most comfortable with. We did not go into it with the geography in mind. We don't care if someone works East Coast or West Coast hours. We, although a lot of people in different countries will change their schedule to fit your hours.

Yeah.

But we don't really care about that. We instead are focused on building remote where you can work whatever time that feels best for you. We don't track when you're online. As long as you're there when it matters, in terms of meetings that are pre-scheduled, or if for some reason you're a support engineer and you have to be online at certain hours. As long as you're— but for most of the team, as long as you get the work done, that's what we measure you on. We don't measure you by the time that you spend. And changing that measurements standard actually helps us eliminate a lot of the annoying parts of work, like having to sit there in front of your screen for hours, maybe not doing anything, when you're ready finish your work or something. It actually helps our employees feel a lot more, we look for independent leaders who can proactively manage their own time, and who are responsible and can get their work done on time, so that we don't have to micromanage them. And so, change, and that like, idea informs how we hire, how we onboard, and how we work. And so like, for example, the past 4 engineers that we brought on these past 2 weeks, All of them have been CTOs in the past, and that's a specific trait that we look for. We look for people who can communicate effectively, who can self-manage themselves, their own schedule, and yeah, for us, that's been a good way to continue scaling our remote team without adding a lot of micromanaging and overhead complexity.

That's interesting. So you're looking more at, um, at sort of soft skills, so to speak, than necessarily, oh, you're full stack or whatever, right?

Yeah, we look at soft skills. We also do hire specialists, like, in certain areas. So we brought on one person on security, one person on frontend, one person on backend, and one person on integrations. But we use, like, to determine— so, like, we For a lot of the process that we run, we, um, uh, we, okay, so we have a couple steps where we filter out like based on resume, based on what the past projects are, based on recommendations, and how they write in their application. And then we also do a technical challenge every time so we can immediately tell, uh, how well they are coding and what their style is and how well they're documenting. And then we check, and then we do the checkoffs for like the soft skills, and then we bring them on, and it starts off as more of a trial period where for the first couple weeks or potentially months, it's more of like a paid trial where they still work full-time, it's still paid, but it's, it's not as if they're part of the team. It's kind of like a contained contract, and then during that time we're able to assess the technical part of it. To the full degree. And so with this process, we're able to like meet a candidate, interview them, and hire them sometimes, or always within a week, but sometimes within a day. And yeah, it's a, it's a much more reliable way for us to determine is this person a good culture fit, do they have the technical skills needed, do they have the communication skills needed, are they able to manage themselves independently, and can they grow. Into a leader on our team.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And Jean here was asking like, what were the first— so she was asking, you know, where was your first overseas team located and what were some of the first difficulties that you encountered in that process?

That's a good question. First overseas team was actually located in Russia, I would say this is, I mean, because our journey has been super long, we've had a lot of different experiences. So we, at first we hired on Upwork, we hired someone in Russia. We gave them like a list of specs. At the time, I actually didn't even know like how to code very well. I like did a lot of my learning on the job. And yeah, it just, didn't come out the way that we wanted it to. Communication was a huge issue. We didn't document everything as full as we should have. We had a call. Here's one challenge. We had a call, we like told them, explained the problem multiple times. They said that they got it. And then like a week later, it turns out that they'd been actually going in the wrong direction than we had originally communicated. And so we didn't, really value documentation and communication and doing the work ahead of time, um, when we first started, like, working with remote teams. Fast forward till today, we're a team of 20, but we have the documentation of, like, a 60-70 person company. Every, every process is documented, and everyone on the team knows that if you ask a question, you should first check the wiki. If it's not there and you get an answer, add it into the wiki. And so, like, this is, like, a loop that we've established, which is necessary to scale, but it's not a common thing for a small company. So I guess my point is, yeah, so some of the first challenges came because we didn't approach the communication and documentation as a process that we had to consistently improve. So that is something that we focus on very heavily today.

Okay, and I'm going to jump to some other questions from the audience here in a second, but I just want to dig into that a little bit because At least this is often where I find some of the best insights, right? It's like, okay, this is something that when you look back, you're like, wow, we really mucked that one up, right? So now, right, now that you're not mucking things up, how are you, your current organization, dealing with documentation, dealing with making sure that people— and it sounds like you're doing a lot of asynchronous stuff too. Right? For anybody else on the line that doesn't have offices in California, we're one of the worst time zones to be a global business, to be honest, because we're always late. Right? Hawaii, I think, is the only other major place that's later than us. Like, we wake up and we look at our email and there's fires we gotta put out everywhere. So how are you guys dealing with this documentation? How are you dealing with communication now and all the lessons that you've learned?

So we definitely primarily use Slack for our communication. The thing that we try to do is keep as much context as possible and keep trails to any information that we can access. And so we are heavy automators, we try to automate everything. So that comes from like I mean, we definitely automate everything on the customer side of things, but then also internally, we also try to work on how can we improve and automate the documentation for the future. So the tools that we use, including Slack, our Google Docs, Loom, we use Notion. We also are heavy users of our own tool, Fireflies, for documenting. So we record all of our meetings, whether it's like one-on-ones with engineers, any hiring calls, onboarding calls, customer calls, customer feedback calls, VC calls, and yeah, customer support calls. So, and so the goal for us is to be able to provide the full context of why a decision was made at any point. And so either, I think when you first ask a question, the first resort for a teammate is usually to search through Slack. If it's not there, they'll search through the Notion. If it's not there, If it's a technical question, search through GitHub, look at the issues, look at the code comments. If you still can't find an answer, then, you know, message out to people who would be involved for that, and then after you get the answer, put it in the relevant place. So, yeah, our toolset is pretty simple, but it's more the mentality of let's just make sure that— [Speaker:JASON] Right.

It's the culture. It's the culture that you create where people actually document stuff, right?

Right, right.

Yeah.

And so like, even when we bring on new employees during the onboarding, we're like, uh, you're, you are onboarding into our team right now. Here are the onboarding documents. If there's any question that is not answered while you're onboard, add it into this document. So from day one, they know that they need to start documenting and improving the process even as they're doing it for the first time.

That's super interesting. Honestly, I'm going to implement that into FI immediately because if you think about it, right, I mean, there's so many benefits to working from home, right? So it's just like, look, this may seem a aggregious, right? Cause I think that's every startup, every small business is moving quickly. So to document stuff can seem like, oh really? It's, it's all, it's like paperwork, right? It's digital paperwork. But it's also like, hey, like this is like when we have a distributed team, like this is just what we have to do, right? It's just a little bit of the trade-off and the trade and the other side of the trade-off is much more valuable than you just sort of documenting everything, a little thing every once in a while.

Right. Exactly. I guess along with documentation, our future goal is to keep improving this process. We actually care a lot about the experience, so we never want someone to think, "Hey, the documenting is so annoying. This is not what I want to do." We actually want to take the approach of how do we automate these things and how do we add data and add context very, very easily. And that's kind of a long-term goal of Firefly. Where if someone's on a meeting and they say, "Hey, I need to like get back to you on this task next week," that automatically gets documented in the calendar with the context of the meeting, with the context of the task, maybe the link to Trello or GitHub. Right. And so like that automation mentality that we're trying to take is also helping to inform how we build a company in general. And then I guess the other last piece is like data-driven decisions and Even if you document everything, I mean, you still have to make decisions and that's always going to be hard. And so for us, we try to, number one, actually before I even get into data, we define the high-level goals for the company overall. And we try to make sure everyone is aligned and knowing the North Star for our success is if we're able to achieve these goals and these metrics. And then we aggressively, like we obsessively and aggressively use data to measure and to be the arbitrator in potential arguments or decisions that we have to make. Whether it's, should we take this feature out or should we build this feature? We look at how many customer queries are asking about this or how many people are actually using this in production. So I think the last piece to make smart decisions as a company for direction and to align the team that you have to do is like use data because I think there's no, there's no politics with data, right?

And if you're not, if there's not interpersonal communication, it's just like, okay, well, I didn't see you today, but, and we didn't talk for the last week, but we can still see the same data and we've all agreed that this is where we all want to go, right?

Exactly. And yeah, taking out, yeah, trying to avoid like those issues where you get mad at someone just for speaking in a certain way. You want things to be more objective. Different people might communicate differently and the message might get muddled when you're talking, like typing remotely versus being able to communicate in person.

Yeah.

So we try to just avoid as many of those political challenges as possible.

Okay, so I'm learning a lot here and I am going to get to this speed round of audience questions in a second, but just really quick, Sam, for my own edification, you know, we're talking talking about just the digital communication. I definitely could seem like a bit of an a-hole in my text communication, email communication, right? Because I tend to be very concise and stuff. Do you— that has to be something that you guys have tackled, right? I mean, do you have any insights on something like that?

I have insights on this. I think it's an active work in progress. I think the main difference I mean, you've said it yourself, the issue is that you're very concise and some people read the conciseness as being an a-hole, but in reality, that's not the case for you. I hope not. But still, people will still perceive it to be that way. So I actually learned this from my co-founder, Krish, 'cause he's a genius at this. And the way that I've seen him address it is just to include as much information as possible as soon as you get a question and just over-communicate, The real answer to that is just over-communicate, and at least in our experience, and like send a video, send like 3 paragraphs of text, send links to the documents, links to potential, like even questions that you know that they might ask as a follow-up, answer those in advance. So, and also what I've also seen is that this is a more common problem for like people who are managing others. So for managers, it actually requires in my opinion, a slightly different way of communicating, which is to over-communicate as much as possible and send as much information as possible. And also speed matters a lot for managers so that you can just unblock others who are waiting on your response. Like it would suck to be someone, right, they send you a really thoughtful question and then you respond in like 3 words, like 3 days later, and they're just like, ah, screw this, you know? So for what I've seen from this, and we're still learning, is just like over-communicate and be very, very fast in your communication. Invest, I guess, in the tools that let you over-communicate, like wikis and anything that would help with that. Okay.

All right. So, Sam, speed round here. Anuja, Christine, and Mario, and David all had a very similar question, which was sort of going back to the Nexus a little bit. Was— were you still bootstrapping at the point that you started bringing on these remote team members, is the first part of the question.

Yep, we were.

Okay, and were you— were all of these— was this a straight, you know, hourly or a salary deal, or were you offering equity or anything like that, anything like unique to get them on board?

We didn't offer anything like especially unique. We The way that we do it is we determine salary and package based on the location. So different places will get different salaries in accordance with what the standard is over there. So we kind of, we typically just look up like, what do engineers at Google or Facebook who live in these places make? And then try to match stuff around that. Obviously there's negotiation involved as well. But yeah, we kind of just document our process Okay, um, let's see here.

So what are some— and Dave, we sort of started to talk about this a little bit, but I definitely think it's a big point of contention, I think, for a lot of people that are thinking about going remote. You know, what are some of the other strategies Dave is asking for dealing with some of these time zone differences?

Um, I mean, this is an answer from a young naive founder running his first company, and the answer is stay up as late as possible. So I'm usually up until like 3 AM, 4 AM every day because that's when a lot of people in Nigeria and India are up and running. And so I just want to be awake when like they're most productive. I try to adopt my schedule to when they're most productive and then, you know, I can figure out myself on my own. I think other people do that too naturally, so I guess it depends on what kind of leader you are, but yeah, I think That works for me.

Yeah, for me too. A lot of our development team is in India and yeah, it's almost like programmed in my head now where I'll just open my eyes at like 5 AM or so and I'll just quickly check to see if there's any issues. You know what I mean? It doesn't— but anyway, so let's see, what about the cultural fit? There are a couple questions here in terms of cultural fit. Do you think it's At least I know hiring for an in-person team, cultural fit is especially in an early-stage startup where salaries are generally lower and stress is generally higher, culture is like incredibly important. Do you think that there's any difference of that in a remote team? And also the second part would be, how do you sort of ensure that as you hire?

For us, I mean, this is something that we're still actively working on, obviously, but We think it's actually pretty hard to determine the culture of someone from even a couple phone calls, video chats, until you really know how they work and see how they work. It's going to be hard to, like, know, even if, like, the words that you write about your culture and your idea of culture, and they say they have that same culture, and other people that you talk to say they have that same culture, it actually might still be a difference, um, in what you would ideally want. And so for us, we really just hire based on, like, our written criteria of what we are looking for in that candidate and how well they're able to execute on what we ask them to do. So it's really more results-driven. And then we actually found that if you go that results-driven way, you're actually going to start reaching that culture that you want. The example that I have for this is I actually went to Nigeria for the first time last August after we finished our fundraising round. We had been working with some engineers for 2 years, and I just met them for the first time. We all— we got an Airbnb in Lagos Island for a month, and we all just lived together and worked. And I was just blown away with how similar they were to the mentality that I had and the culture that me and my co-founder had. And yeah, for me, it felt like a shock. But I'd been working with them for so long, but it's just hard to like gauge that sort of feeling and vibe. So yeah, the answer for us was hire based on results, and then, and also obviously like share the culture and exhibit the culture and everything you do every day, and then I also fire fast if you end up realizing that someone doesn't match up with that culture. Yeah. To really use that as a filtering criteria early, early on is Okay, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

Okay, so let's see here. City Zine is asking, I mean, was intellectual property ever— I mean, you were hiring full-time people, right? Yeah. So was intellectual property, even when you're hiring full-time people, was that ever a concern?

Yeah, it is a concern. I touched on this a little bit, and it's kind of with, like, trust. Like, how much do you trust someone to, you know, do the right thing with your code? Eventually, you're going to need to give access to people around the world to your core intellectual property. Like, you're not going to be able to just do it yourself, and it's, it's always, yeah, it's just like a process. You have to just build that trust over time. Um, but yeah, I think There's probably differences with full-time versus contractors and how you approach that. In general, you probably just want to design your code and your IP so that it's safe by default. And then you're like, for example, when we sometimes like hire someone and we're giving them their first project, we try to make sure that it's something that they can do in kind of isolation or like it doesn't really touch other parts, doesn't have any risk for any other parts of the system. Right. So that's something you want to design into the way that you—

Right. It's sort of the digital equivalent to, you know, having somebody only be in like this room. Yeah. And it's something that we've found pretty helpful as well at FI and with a lot of the companies we work with too, is that there are, you know, some scenarios where you can work with some people on a like sort of a project basis, right? At least to understand the working relationship and that kind of stuff before you bring them on full time. So we've had a lot of questions about investors here too. You've raised professional financing from some pretty big names. Were there any red flags that were brought up about the fact that, you know, your team wasn't like in San Francisco and a bunch of Stanford grads and all this kind of stuff?

We definitely went into the process thinking that that might be a problem, and I'm sure we actually did talk to a lot of firms where that was a problem. I mean, they never told us explicitly, but they would say something like, oh hey, like, this isn't really a good fit. Like, I mean, we don't have the makeup of like a typical SF company with, you know, 10 Stanford, uh, Bay Area engineers. Um, but, uh, increasingly we found that I mean, we believe for sure that this is gonna be the new norm for every company in the future. And so it really becomes a question of conviction, and you'll definitely find investors who also believe that. So yeah, it's just a numbers game with investors when it comes to that.

Okay. And yeah, just before I get to this last question or two, so Rex was asking, like, you know, so you were saying that a lot of your culture your culture component was looking at output. How— do you have any strategies you can share about how you can keep that output high?

Um, yeah, I think, uh, what we do is we look at GitLab's, um, GitLab has a really, really great documentation for how they built their company of 1,200 people now. And they have a section in it where they speak about— they measure the rate of pull requests that engineers submit, and they have guidelines for what a good rate should be and what people should strive for. So, we also adopt some of those policies, and I would say that's a great resource for trying to establish what a good productivity output should be. But ultimately, there will be exceptions, and maybe someone's working on something that's really hard, And so it's up to you to like really know. I think for me, like I typically tell people on my team that I expect either productivity or communication. I like, if for some reason there's something that's really hard and you're not, or maybe you're sick or maybe something's happening, just communicate with me and let me know, like just overcommunicate and I'm sure it'll be fine. But otherwise, if neither of those two is happening, then If no productivity is happening and no communication is happening, then I feel very worried and concerned. So that's what I just kind of get across to my team, and I've documented my thinking on this, and I also share my, my thinking in advance when they first join the company, so they know exactly what I'll be looking for. I have like a guide to working with Sam, and Krish also has like a guide to working with Krish, and like what we look for, because everyone has like a different thing that they want with who they work with.

Um, and yeah, I would say that's been pretty good Okay, all right, so I'm going to get to the last question here, and for everybody else on the call, please do check out Sam and Fireflies.ai. If you, you know, believe me, this is something that we're seeing around the world, and even FI in particular, we are basically going remote. We were putting our office on the market, and that's not because of any financial hardship or something. It's just like, look, like, we've— we have a lot of people on the team that have children and stuff like this, and it actually— the productivity is increasing, right? And also it creates a lot of perks, right? Sam, I mean, I know that this is something that your company's written a lot about as well, how you can just— it gives you a little bit of a competitive advantage over a lot of other companies to be able to provide that, that perk to find great talent, right?

Definitely.

Yeah. So as, uh, so I guess in a nutshell, uh, for people, like, if COVID's going to do anything, it's going to teach us that, you know, you don't have to travel somewhere and be somewhere in person and do a crappy commute every single day, uh, to collaborate with people. Uh, there's a lot of other ways to do it. And, um, you know, Sam, is it any final pieces of advice for any of the entrepreneurs in line today that I guess number one are obviously, these are times when you need to be scrappy, right? And also, this is a unique time where you can, there's a massive workforce that wasn't remote before, that now is becoming remote. You know what I mean? So is there any final parting words you wanna give to some of the people and how they might start to embark on those different things?

Yeah, yeah, I would say that if I was gonna start a company today during COVID and I took all the lessons I've learned previously, I would do, um, an extra job in focusing on the fundamentals. Like, what is fundamentally true about your approach to your business and about your market? How can you validate that people actually want what you're building? Can you get them to pay for it right now? Is there something that you can do to get people to pay for it before spending any other money. Can you keep your costs as low as possible for as long as you can until you figure that out? And yeah, and through the process, I mean, obviously you want to have fun and not burn out, communicate well, and yeah, good luck.

Yeah, you're speaking our language, Sam, when you say get people to pay, okay? It's different to when your uncle tells you, hey, he loves your product, You gotta get that credit card. That's the ultimate validation and the quickest way you can design some kind of test, MVP, whatever you wanna call it, to see if you're solving a problem where somebody will take out that credit card. And the barrier between them taking out their credit card 2 months ago and now is a lot larger. But anyway, thank you, Sam, for joining. This was super interesting. Anybody else, please do check out Fireflies.ai if you're interested in joining any of our other free online events like this. I'm not always the person hosting them, but I often am. Go to onlinestartupevents.com or fi.co/events. All right, well, thanks everyone. Have a good evening, morning, afternoon, wherever you're signing in from. Thank you. Thank you, Sam, again.