4 Ways to Get to $10 Billion by Working Async (Without Burning Out) with Loom CEO Joe Thomas

So we are here to talk about four ways to get to 10 billion. Just 10 billion by working asynchronously. And we're going to cover a couple different sections. One is the current state of work that we're all experiencing and why asynchronous is so important in that context. And some of the companies that have been deploying certain strategies that help them get to that coveted 10 billion. So I hope that you all have your coffee, I got my notes and let's roll. So remote and hybrid are here to stay. I think that for most people in the audience, that's especially true. And we fundamentally believe that flexibility is the future. Can we all agree with that? Yes. Awesome. Thank you. What we believe is that flexibility means freedom. It means that you can actually work when you want to work and where you want to work from. And we believe that freedom is worth fighting for. But what exactly do we mean by fighting? What are we fighting? And it's actually that more so than ever, people are experiencing burnout. That 85% say that their work stress is greater today than it was five years ago because you have message overload. You are constantly on that 60% report a significant increase in meetings that we are in back to back to back all day long. And the counterpoint to that, which is kind of crazy, is the fact that 52% say that even though they're in back to back meetings that they're experiencing workplace loneliness. I think that there's been a little bit of euphoria coming to SAASTR because first conference in a few years, but unfortunately we can't do Saster every week. So we're going to have to figure out some sort of other tactic. And I think that it's important that we adapt to remote and hybrid because of that flexibility and freedom that we were talking about right before this. So something has got to give because this is unsustainable based off of the stats that we see here. And so I want to go through four examples of modern work, which is modern work is directly correlated with asynchronous. And it's more than just thinking differently. It's actually putting asynchronous at the heart of your communication and collaboration. And that's why there's so much excitement and investment and adoption of asynchronous technologies. But my personal belief is that we are still just in the earliest days of what asynchronous can do for the modern work revolution. So I'm going to tell you some stories about GitLab figma of course, got to touch on Loom and then also upwork. But before we get into the story specifically, I actually want to level set because had a few conversations over the past few days and when we were saying Async video for Loom, they're like, can you explain what Async is? And we're like, sure. So let's level set on what synchronous versus asynchronous is. Synchronous is real time communication. It means that two or more people are communicating at the same time. And this is like some examples of this are in person, virtual, scheduled or impromptu. Examples are meetings and phone calls. And it's actually, studies show that it's best utilized for bursty communication. If you can imagine having a ball in your hands. And when you're in a meeting, you want to pass that ball to as many different people as frequently as you can because that means you're exchanging ideas. That is what synchronous time is all about. But it's also for culture building. Like, everybody feels like getting together in person is incredibly powerful. Okay, now on Asynchronous or Async, this means that it's not happening in real time. Somebody is documenting something, sending it to somebody else, and then it's consumed with a lag time in between. The classic example of this would be snail mail, when people used to send letters, handwritten or now email, or things like company wikis, like Notion or Confluence and project management or Trello or asynchronous video like Loom. And what it's best used for is for deep work. And it's also best used for information dissemination. How do I get an idea from one person to another? And what's fascinating now that we're a little bit deeper into this modern work revolution, is that there's some middle ground too slack being a great example of messaging at work. And there's an element of like, I gotta reply in real time. But you can also use it for asynchronous or figma. You can use their software to collaborate in real time on a board, but it's also used for designing deep work as well. So we believe that asynchronous, the most important thing is that it enables you to work from wherever, whenever you want to. And whether you're in a home office or whether you're like our roommate Jess, who's in an RV touring around the country with her family, it truly asynchronous allows you to work from whatever, whenever. And so now we'll get to some of the high growth, high value startups that I'd mentioned before that are adapting asynchronous in specific ways and that my hope is that you understand that at every stage of the company life cycle, whether it's building great cultures or building great products, building great teams or scaling external resources, that you will see how asynchronous can truly help empower your company. So let's start with the asynchronous employee experience. Building a really great culture. We hear it's the biggest pain point for our customers and from our peers at this point is how do you do this in a digital HQ world? Well, GitLab is a great example of this. They are constantly on top startups list of Fortune and Quartz, FastCo. They actually just were on LinkedIn's top startups for 2021 last week when it rolled out. So they're a great place to start in terms of what are they doing, what's working. And the crazy part is they're the world's largest remote company, fully remote, 1300 employees that are in 65 different countries. So they've had to be deliberate from day one about their processes, how do they build camaraderie and culture in a remote world. And it's just hard. The employee experience is a nuanced mosaic and they've clearly done something right. So GitLab has defaulted to Async first. They are one of the pioneers of this. It has been one of the trademarks of their employee experience from the very beginning. They quite literally wrote the book on operationalizing and mastering asynchronous communication. And their ethos has always been what we talked about before, which is empowering employees to feel as fulfilled as possible by working where they want to work from and when they want to work. And what I find most interesting, beyond their asynchronous onboarding or learning and development practices that are largely asynchronous are the rules that they use to bring asynchronous as default into focus and truly make it a reality. I love, I genuinely love elegant, memorable and powerful questions. And from a communication and collaboration perspective, the one that you see here on the screen I believe is one of the best. And it's directly from GitLab's employee handbook. So let me read it for you. How would I deliver this message, present this work, or move this project forward right now if no one else on my team or in my company were awake? Maybe they're at Saster and they're not replying to Their messages as quickly as they could have. How do I move work forward? This is it. This quote, this question underpins the async mindset. And their employee handbook is 13,000 pages. That is not an exaggeration. It's an open code repository. It's way too much to read end to end. But I really do believe that if you practice this question, if you personally practiced it, if your team started practicing it, or ideally as it scales up to the company, you will get pretty far along in your async journey. But I think that there's some other best practices that I want to cover from them as well. A single question can't answer it all, unfortunately. So a few other async best practices that they have is one that's called share knowledge. They make information transparent and available to every employee by default. Like I said, their employee handbook is open source. Anybody can commit to it and anybody can read it, including the public. You all can go to employeehandbook.GitLab.com and they also have the practice of communicating publicly. We don't just send internal emails. Here is the quote. Team slack channels. And then later team leaders actually decide what information needs to be permanently available and then integrated into that employee handbook. So they are always communicating publicly. And then they also clarify what needs to be synchronous. They are very specific about the times in which you should use synchronous versus describing all the times that you should use asynchronous because that's your default and we lost the slides. So what I would say is that by defaulting to asynchronous, if they were to have. All right, we're back. Cool. I think I could have gotten it the rest of the presentation. They specifically say kickoff meetings, roles and expectations and deadlines is a really great use case of synchronous time. They also say that if you're communicating with clients, default to what they're comfortable with. So have client meetings synchronously, but everything else should be async. And then they also encourage every single employee, regardless if you're an IC or a leader, to challenge existing norms and assumptions. They actually go as far as to provide copy and paste text in their handbook to turn down meetings, saying that this just isn't useful for us to do synchronous. We should do asynchronous. So clearly I am a big fan of that employee handbook and that you all should go check it out if you're interested in a 13,000 page read. All right, so speaking of being a Fan. I am also a fanboy of this company that you see up on screen. I think that we're generally all familiar with figma. They are building delights and purpose and excitement in software that you don't really see as much these days. And they're also building products largely asynchronously. They're empowering their customers and users to do the same. So we've all heard the stories about building garages with Woz and Steve and Larry and Sergey and Hewlett and Packard. Everyone in a garage. But what about building products asynchronously? What about building products distributed? I think that they've proved it with folks Big Jam when they built it entirely remote and largely asynchronously. So figma, like every other company, went remote at the beginning of COVID and the pandemic. They. About three or four months into the pandemic, they were fully burnt out on meetings. Figmates started thinking about how do we bring products earlier into the product process? But we didn't want to do it with a ton of meetings all the time. So they came together, they started sharing ideas on how to connect. And what ultimately became the idea of Figjam that launched in 2021 is the opposite of what they did with their original products, their flagship products, which took years to build in stealth. They built from end to end in six months, that was out in private beta. So that was quick pace. And they also got high praise from harsh critics, which are designers, no offense to any designers in the crowd. So by using Asynchronous, they were able to move very quickly. They accelerated feedback loops, they used it for internal and external feedback. And they also had better coordination across the board, ultimately enabling figjam to get to product, get to market faster with higher confidence. So let's zoom into a couple different ways that they use asynchronous feedback. The first one is they did it for internal. They actually created a slack channel called figjam Dash Feedback. And while most companies probably have that, what they did was they made it a public channel and they actively, proactively tried to get as many Figmates to give feedback in that channel as possible. And, and what that allowed for is what they said, that they had more representative voices across the entire company than they had ever had across different product experiences that they built, which led to faster feedback as well. They had all Figmates, not just pde, give feedback. It was sales managers, it was their communication directors, it was their support team. Literally everyone across the company was giving feedback on Figjam and it had over 100 unique figmates and over 2000 messages just in the internal dogfooding phase. And that included bug reports and feedback, new ideas and small but really important details. Like the fact that the support team member and their communication director both said that it was hard to pick a different color on post it notes. So everybody just kept using the same colors. That's something that they cross referenced across the feedback and was like, this is really important. And they were able to prioritize better as a result of of that. And then on the external side of it, I thought what they did was really clever and smart. They actually created figjam boards and had all of their customers give feedback asynchronously directly in figjam. And that was alpha testers from companies like Discord and Netflix, Square and Stripe. And by doing so they were able to collect hundreds of comments, including video comments that were super rich in detail. And so the big takeaway here is that more asynchronous leads to higher volume, higher quality and faster speed of feedback, which leads to better product faster. Again, naturally, have to talk about loom, this is our bread and butter, but we got employee experience down, we got building products asynchronously in the books. Now how about hiring great teams? A quick show of hands in terms of who's struggling a little bit to hire for their teams right now. Yeah, I mean it's almost universal. We're feeling this too. And so I wanted to share a little bit about some of the things that we do in our interview process that helps us hire really great people faster. And if you're not familiar with loom, we're actually an asynchronous video product. So we allow people to record and send out videos not in real time. And we're also, to be clear, I wanted to establish the fact that we're a remote first company. It's one of our five cultural values. And that doesn't just mean that we don't believe in offices and everybody's remote. We actually do believe in offices. We want to get people together, we want to enable them to socialize and have camaraderie. But remote first means helping everybody engage as a first class citizen, no matter where they are. And that means leaning into asynchronous in the same way GitLab has, including and especially during our interview and hiring process. So a huge benefit of hiring talent from a remote first perspective is that we got to tap into a global talent pool from the earliest days that we were able to find roommates that have been on the team for years now at this point that we wouldn't have otherwise considered or other companies didn't consider. And this is changing for most all companies as we go to hybrid and remote. And you realize that, oh, this actually works. We don't have to be scared of it anymore. And so how do we set up our employees for success here? And I think that this is so exciting from a humanity perspective, which is divorcing physical location from opportunities. And I think that that should be an exciting prospect for everybody, is that we get to work with the best people, no matter where they are. And I think that Marc Andreessen actually said it really eloquently, which is that we may at long last be able to shatter the geographic lottery, Opening up opportunity to countless people who weren't lucky enough to be born in the right place. That's pretty profound. And it's something that we want to amplify as much as we possibly can at Loom. So today's market is that great talent have choices. That's why it's a struggle to hire people, is that they have choices. And what they're looking for is they're looking for great roles, they're looking for great brands, they're looking for great opportunities, and they're looking for a team that they can actually vibe with. And they want to find those companies and opportunities and brands that stand out. And so we think about, how do we connect with our potential loommates in a deep way during the interview process. And for Loom, Remote has not been the rule, or it's not been the exception. It's been the rule for us. And we've needed to be great at remote hiring from the earliest days at loom. And so five years doing it, it's not bad. We have a 93% satisfaction rating for our interview experience. So what specifically do we do in order to get to that 93%? We use our own product. We use asynchronous video, which helps us establish connection with candidates. It helps us better assess candidates during the interview process, and it helps us stand out from the crowd. And that starts with candidate outreach. We actually have a loom video associated with every single job description that we send out. And we also have recruiters send personalized looms saying what we like about their backgrounds and why we think that they might be a great fit. And so immediately, they should have watched at least one Loom and before they have their first conversation. And this actually enables them to build a More keen sense of what it would be like to be on our team. I think it's humans. A lot of people quote that people are the most important thing when they're looking for their next role. So how do you get them insight into the people? You also give them more insight into the interview process. So they go into it eyes wide open of what it exactly is that we're putting them through. And then it also gives them a sense of of what it's like to be a lumate and how we work. And I'll get into that a little bit more. So specifically, one of the interviews that we do, and this is across all different positions, is that typically you have some sort of take home that is part of your interview process. And we actually ask our candidates to do this asynchronously. And from our perspective, it's a win win from both sides. It actually reduces our overall synchronous meetings that we have to do during the interview process. And it also helps candidates put their best foot forward. They don't have to rely on nailing it in those 45 or 60 minutes. That's make or break for their career. So we believe incorporating asynchronous video will have candidates present on their own terms more so than they are right now versus submitting an artifact and presenting live. And it allows us at Loom to get a better sense of their skills. So we also hear from candidates that it helps them feel more confident than doing a live presentation of their work. And I think that it's a huge bonus that it's representative of the way that we work at Loom as well. We tend to send out a Loom video before every meeting. So that way everybody's on the same page before that meeting. And that should be representative of how we do our interview process as well. And what this leads TO is a 50% higher pass through rate versus when we've done live Take Home presentations during our Super Day process. And the reason being is that we take some of the interview process and we make it Async is that we review that take home in advance of us scheduling that Super Day. And what this does is that it minimizes those unnecessary interviews by not scheduling the second or third interview after Take Home as a stacked Super Day. We break that out, we do the review, we give them the feedback and then we say if you are a pass, then we'll come in and we'll just discuss what you sent in versus having you present. And candidates felt like by turning in asynchronous video. It was their absolute best shot because unfortunately, sometimes we hear that people will record three, four, five times and they want to put their best foot forward, but that also means that they probably would have done that first one synchronously, and maybe that wasn't their best version of themselves. So asynchronous is incredibly powerful. And so this is one of my personal favorites in the interview process is the fact that we use looms at the offer stage. We congratulate people on why specifically we're excited to work together for every loomate who's part of the interview process. So it can be 5, 6, 7 looms in a page that we send over to them. And this helps get prospective loommates over the finish line. It builds a personal connection with them and the team and it shows why we're genuinely excited to work with them. And genuine excitement is infectious. It really is. So you watch that loom from somebody that's excited on your team and you're like, wow, I could really see myself working together with them. So our acceptance rate is 72%, which is 11% above industry standard in a really tough market. All right, so the last example that I want to walk through is a platform called upwork. I'm sure that you all have run into it as well, but just as a refresher is that they are a freelancer marketplace. You can hire people for whatever tasks that you may need to have done, particularly in the knowledge work space. And they have leaned into asynchronous work in a really powerful way over the past few years and seen great results. They try and make collaboration more efficient. And that's not just for, for traditional full time employees. This is for contractors. You're working with people that you don't really know. And the freelancer economy is booming. Their upwork stock was up over 600% in the last 18 months. So clearly something is going on with the freelancer marketplace. And I think that this has massive implications for the modern worker who is maybe more of a freelancer than they were traditionally and the modern company who needs to leverage these resources in a way that they haven't had had to traditionally. And so building the mechanics of a fully functioning, productive team and how you compose outsource versus full time employees, and especially if you're doing outsource, it might be on really difficult time zones. And so like, that adds to the complexity is difficult. And they said that asynchronous work is absolutely imperative to making these relationships work at scale. So what they saw in the limitations of Synchronous early on is that they ran extensive surveys and they did quantitative and qualitative analysis. And what it actually kept coming back is that Synchronous tools just weren't as effective as Asynchronous communication that they had. 21% of phone calls that were scheduled through the platform were never completed for whatever reason. Could be Freelancer, could be the client. They also said that any companies that provided a required meeting as part of their process actually significantly correlated to delays and slower project finish times. And so 50, they even built asynchronous video conferencing product into their offering. And 57% of clients only use it once and never again. So Synchronous was failing them. And what they did was they ended up putting Asynchronous into the heart of everything that they did by providing content that the freelancers needed at every single stage and that the client needed at every single stage. They focused on the asynchronous component of it. And they generally used the practices that I talked about in the previous three examples. And what this led to was faster completion of multi phase complex projects and a significant reduction of meetings or across the board from their platform. And so the companies that can confidently leverage Freelancer workforce with less meetings, clear communication and faster completion of projects will win. And they're gonna do it with Async. So my hope for you all to have takeaways from today is of course the principles and practices of GitLab and figma, Loom and Upwork. But more importantly, that there's a bigger trend at play right now. And it's that we truly believe that we're in the earliest innings of exploring that there's a better way to work that at Loom we like to imagine a world where teams have time for focused and fulfilling work. We saw that with GitLab in creating space for deep work with fewer meetings and less burnout. And that individuals can be seen and heard and that figjam giving equal voice to their customers and to internal teammates in order to make sure that everybody is on equal footing and that organizations are more transparent and human. And this starts with engaged, connected, global teams enabling understanding and seamless communication. Asynchronous has been and increasingly will be the enabler of the modern work revolution. So now go forth and what the heck, it's supposed to be Async like Asynchronous, not Async with a tap and drain. This whole presentation should have been done Asynchronous because then I would have stuck the landing. I would have sent in the best presentation possible. I know, dad. Joke. Sorry. Had to do it. So everyone here is now perfectly equipped to build a $10 billion company. So go forth and use asynchronous to do so. And thank you for attending my Saster talk, Sam.