Daily Matters - Episode #41 - Wade Foster

In some ways, remote takes away the facade of good management. So a lot of managers have bad habits around accountability and trust. They use things like what you're talking about. Oh, I saw them sit in a chair for 8 hours, so they must be working hard. When in reality, they might be on Facebook or they might do another random stuff. Just because you saw them sitting doesn't actually mean that it correlates to actual output or work achieved. Remote really does force you to pay attention to the raw output, the raw deliverables. And if those things are happening, then it's all gravy.

I'm Jack Newton, CEO and co-founder of Clio, the world's leading cloud-based legal software provider. In each episode of Daily Matters, we'll explore what this new normal means for law firms, how legal professionals can find success while working remotely, and how lawyers can best serve their clients during this unprecedented situation. Today's guest is Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, a remotely distributed company that helps businesses sync data between web apps. Wade, this week we're talking about transformation in the legal industry, and Zapier has absolutely played a vital role in fostering that. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jack. Uh, should be fun.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to it, Wade. Uh, let's start off with a really important question, which is what is on your mind most right now?

Oh boy. Uh, you know, I think for us You know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. You know, stay-at-home orders came in, I think, 2 months ago-ish for most of us. So we're 8 weeks into this thing. For me, the critical thing that we looked at as soon as we sort of saw that like, hey, we're gonna be dealing with sort of something bigger than what we normally deal with was one, how's our team doing? Like, can we be there for our team? Like, we wanna make sure that we, are responsible in how we manage the company. We want to make sure that folks don't have to worry about their jobs through this thing. And so we looked really close at what's going on there. Once we realized that, like, yes, we're going to be fine, like we have— we've been profitable for a long time, like we've got a lot of cash in the bank. From there, it became, OK, we feel like we can take care of the team. Next, can we take care of our customers? We've got a lot of folks in a lot of different industries that use Zapier, and a lot of them are small businesses. And, you know, many in industries that were hit very heavily by this, you know, folks in events, folks in retail, folks that are in sort of the physical economy. And then we started to say, okay, how can— what can we do to help those folks? So we set up, you know, a program for rapid response to help with like people on the front lines. We set up a program to help support the small businesses that were doing that. And so really, our perspective through this whole thing has been, we're set up as a distributed company, we're set up profitably, we're in a position of, I think, privilege compared to most. And so we tried to just take the vantage point of how can we help? What can we do to help our customers? What can we do to make life even just a little bit easier for them? We know that we're— it's not like we're in biotech creating vaccines for this thing or on the front lines delivering packages or whatnot. With what skill sets we have and what we can do, like, can we try and just sort of help, right, be a good steward for folks? And so that's been our perspective for, you know, I guess 8 weeks now, basically.

And I'm sure many of our listeners have heard of Zapier, but maybe you could walk us through at a really high level, what does Zapier do and what kinds of capabilities does it, does it provide your customers and in what ways are they maybe using it to help them amidst the COVID-19 pandemic?

So Zapier is like a workflow automation, task automation tool. It helps you connect all the things you might be using at work. So obviously tools like Clio, but things like G Suite, Trello, MailChimp, QuickBooks, like, you know, people use all sorts of different tools. We connect into 2,000 of them. We help you create automation between these things. And so, you know, a simple use case might start with something like, hey, every time I get an email in Gmail that has an attachment, I want to get that saved into Dropbox, to more complex workflow where it's like, hey, every time someone fills out a form on my website, I want to make sure that creates a new lead in my CRM. And then when I close that lead, I want to make sure it creates a project in my project management software. And, you know, just sort of helps you handle all these back office things in a much more automated way. And it's been interesting to see, you know, I think in a time like COVID-19, to see how different customers have been adapting to using software differently. We had a customer recently that runs some wine bars in Milwaukee. And, you know, COVID hits, no one's coming to the wine bars anymore, like just can't. Overnight, this person has the idea that like, okay, my business is going to be really struggling if I can't sell. And he says, how can I figure out how to do curbside pickup for the community, for folks who want to still get wine from me? And through Google Sheets, Stripe, Zapier, and a few other tools, overnight he gets up an ordering system for curbside pickup for this thing and now has done over, I think, $100 grand in sales since he did this. Wow. Based on the back of just like these simple tools. And so that to me has been the fun part is to watch the creativity of these small business owners sort of take over and realize like, you know, I don't need to be a, you know, software engineer to sort of get stuff done or to do creative, interesting things. I just need some of these basic tools and these building blocks and I can, I can make stuff happen.

And I think of Zapier sometimes as a bit of glue that you can use to combine individual tools that are maybe great point solutions at doing one thing really well. But if you have ever wished, I wish these 2 or 3 systems talk to each other, Zapier feels like a way of accomplishing that for almost every tool on the web, right? You integrate with thousands of tools right now.

Totally, I think all of us like to use software that we love, And turns out there's a lot of best-in-breed software. You look at like what Clio has done for lawyers, it's focused on really doing something very specific and at a high level of quality. But if you're a lawyer, you're probably not just using Clio inside your practice. You're using a whole host of other tools that serve a different need. And at times, Clio needs to be working with these other tools and Zapier sort of helps that happen in harmony.

Yeah, I think the idea of notifications and workflows are so powerful too, where you can say when something happens, I want this other thing to happen, even if that's as simple as a text message. That can really help you deliver better client service or just be more responsive. It's, it's really a pretty powerful tool. So we'll talk more about Zapier in a, a few moments, Wade, but the, the main reason I wanted to have you on the, on the show was, was not so much about Zapier the tool, but about the way Zapier runs as a company and You have been around for— I've known you for, for years now, and as long as Zapier's been around, you have run as a distributed work-from-home team. There's, I believe, no Zapier office, and yet you've grown to 300+ employees and this wildly successful company in a, from the start, purely distributed way. So can you tell us a little bit about that story and maybe what some of the motivations were behind that, that working model from the get-go?

Yeah. So we started in late 2011. Zapier was a side project and just basically you can't— side projects don't have offices, you don't have money for them. So you just work on them when and where you can. And so for us, that was our apartments and coffee shops and just whatever. And it was a fun project between friends. It was like, this seems like a cool thing to work on and maybe it'll be a business. Like, that was sort of our That's as far out as we thought.

Maybe someday.

Yeah, maybe. Like, hey, that could be fun, but it wasn't like this thing that we were driving towards.

And were you kind of scratching your own itch? Were you wanting to glue together some tools?

Yeah, so we had some freelance clients that had asked us for this stuff, and we were like, man, it would really be easier if they could just set this stuff up on their own instead of having to come to us. They don't like to pay our rates. We don't actually really like to write the code for these types of projects because it's not a lot of fun. And so, of course, we picked to do it for a career, to build a company around doing that. But, you know, it was that. It was scratching the own itch. It was saying like, hey, we can probably come up with something that's better for a lot of folks in a lot of ways. It puts them in the driver's seat. They don't have to be beholden to talking to an engineer to get this stuff done. And so that's where we sort of approached it from. And, you know, that's kind of why we had an inkling that maybe this could be a business because we had some clients that were asking for it. And, you know, once we started to get some momentum under us, we were like, okay, this— yeah, I think after a few months, it was pretty clear that like, hey, this could go somewhere. So we started putting just more hours into it. It's still a side project, but we were just a little more serious about it. We did that for maybe 6 to 8 months, honestly, side project style. And then eventually we applied to Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator out here in the Bay Area, moved out, and that summer was the only time where the whole company was together. It was the 3 founders living and working in a 2-bedroom apartment in South Bay in California. And honestly, it was a lot of fun. Like, I have a lot of fond memories of that. Either that or I sort of like, you know, flushed the bad parts out of my brain. Somewhere. And, but at the tail end of that, Mike, one of my co-founders, moved back to Missouri to be with his then-girlfriend, now wife, as she was wrapping up law school. And so we were like, hey, you know, no biggie, like we're used to sort of working from wherever. Like, you know, this is not— this doesn't need to be like the end of his time with Zapier. We'll just sort of go back to that way that we had been working. And we also started to think about bringing on a little help. We were doing customer service like probably, you know, I'd wake up at like, you know, 8 or 9 and I'd do customer service until maybe 3 o'clock and then I'd be like, oh, okay, now I have to actually try and fix some of the stuff that people are complaining about. And it felt like a little help would go a long way for us. But we'd never hired before. And so as we thought about how to hire, it's like, ah, we asked some folks, what suggestions would you give us? And they said, well, why don't you work with folks you already have a relationship with? You already have a relationship. It's going to be a little less risky. And I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Well, turns out all of our network is back in the Midwest. None of it's out here in California. And so we thought, well, why don't we give that a try? So we hired a former colleague of mine that was in Chicago. We hired another one that was in Missouri. And then at Five Folks, we've got, you know, in 3 cities and we notice products getting shipped. Customers seem to be happy. The customer counts are going up, the revenue count is going up, team seems to be happy. Like all the sort of core things you look for in is the business working seem to be fine. We were like, right, I think this is going to work. And so at that point in time, we were like, let's do the remote thing. Let's do the distributed thing and see how it goes. You know, this is 2012, got a lot of people looking at us kind of weird, being like, no big company's been built that way. You're off your rocker. But we looked at our business and we're like, I mean, like, you can say that, but it seems like it's working. So that's kind of what set us down this path.

I can empathize when we— I think especially when you're looking for funding, VCs are pattern recognition machines and they kind of think, hey, the last multi-billion dollar company wasn't work from home. So part of you being the next multibillion-dollar company means not being work from home. I remember in the early days when we were fundraising for Clio, you know, we're based in Vancouver, BC, which is in Canada, obviously, and we got a lot of pressure to relocate the company to the Bay Area and get an office there. And, you know, that was something we pushed back against, I think, to our ultimate benefit. But it was certainly, you know, a bit of an uphill battle, as I can well imagine, back in 2012 especially. Being fully distributed looked like. So from 5 employees all the way to 300+, you've been remote, you've been distributed, work from home. What are some of the learnings you've had over that, that 9+ years? And, and maybe tell us about how the technologies have layered in to help support that over, over the 9 years. But maybe also I'd love to hear about the non-technology part. You know, what part of running a distributed team is, is kind of invariant regardless of the technology you're using.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what for us, the learning that I have, a couple of learnings that I have. So one, I think running a remote distributed org requires a level of discipline to be successful. When you're in an office, you can get away with certain things. You can sort of be lazy, not in a bad way, but just sort of in a like, you know, more like, well, it's just not required to get things done, especially when you're small, right? You can go tap someone on the shoulder and be like, hey, can we fix this up? You can go have a side conversation in the hallway. You can do some of those things to patch up things that aren't really working the way that you hope.

Yeah, there's almost an informality, you know, the water cooler conversations. Can you take care of this thing that just doesn't exist in a work from home environment?

Exactly, you don't have that. Yeah, get-go, you're having to lay down some principles about how you work and how you get those done. And those principles need to be, like, exported to your org, and they need to be part of your onboarding process to help folks get oriented to this style of work. And, you know, for us, we've, we've sort of made those canon in our values. So we hire with our values in place. They're part of our scorecards, and then they're part of our performance review process. Process as well. And our values are like opinionated. They're prescriptive. They say, hey, this is, you know, other companies might choose to work in a different way. But at Zapier, we think these are the best ways to do it, what make us successful. So, for example, we have things like default action. We sort of feel like in a remote org, this is really important because you don't have someone sitting next to you that can sort of help you sort something out. You kind of have to take on that resourcefulness. You have to figure out problems on your own. So when we're looking for folks to join the team, we're trying to figure out, are they a self-starter? Are they independently motivated? We have questions to try and detect those things. Then alongside of that, we have another value, default to transparency, which basically says, hey, we want to put our systems and processes, our success metrics, our finances out there so that everyone in the org can see that stuff. We feel like that's important because if you're asking folks to default to action, you need to equip them with all the information they need to make good decisions. You know, if you want someone halfway across the world to wake up and make a choice on your behalf, you want them to have all the best information at their fingertips. You don't want them to be defaulting to action, but doing it with—

right—

only half the context that you have.

That's good, right?

That's gonna make bad decisions. So we designed like our values to try and help people behave in ways that, like, you know, us as founders would think about making decisions and how we would act in certain situations. And so as we've grown, we've realized— we kind of lucked into it, honestly, but we've figured out that that actually has been an important ingredient for us because folks cite that all the time. They talk about those in our employee surveys. You see it happen in Slack where, you know, a decision comes up and someone will like we have emojis for it. They'll respond with it and be like, hey, default action on this one is a sort of tacit way to say just, you don't have to ask, just go. Like, you can, you can make this happen on your own, right? And so those little things have helped us, um, you know, have those set of principles that allows us to operate really in a sort of— everyone can kind of be an independent autonomous piece that ladders up into something that's more than the sum of its parts.

Part of what I hear you describing as well, Wade Foster, is, is maybe an architecture for working in an asynchronous way. And I think so much of the way that many workplaces make decisions and execute against plans is in a fairly synchronous way. And these are, I think, maybe more common terms in the technology world, but Synchronous being let's, let's get in a meeting and not leave that meeting until we've made a decision as kind of a synchronous decision-making.

Hash it out, right?

Let's hash it out. That's the synchronous world. In the asynchronous world or async world, sounds like what you're setting up, which is default to transparency, share information fairly freely and make sure that people create context for making good decisions. In relative isolation, and maybe, maybe they're halfway around the world and they're, they are in isolation in some regard where you're just not sharing any time zone overlap potentially, but you need to make them set up for success from an information standpoint. Can you talk a little bit about that, that, that move to async and, and how you support that and maybe what some of the pitfalls can be in that mode as well?

Yeah, I think that the tooling becomes really— this is where the tooling becomes important. And, you know, for us, we use things like Slack and Google Docs, but it's not so much the specific vendor as it is that you need certain solutions for certain things. So you need like a team chat tool. You need like a way to document, you know, resources and things like that so that you can share links back and forth and say like, hey, check this link out. Let me know if you agree with the plan or not. Google Docs is great because you can come in and comment and suggest and all that sort of stuff. And people can go, okay, thanks for the feedback. I'll take another pass at it, do a revision on it, and things get better. But we never have to have a meeting on it. You send me the link and I'll say, great, you know, I'll have some feedback for you later today. I, at my own leisure, take some time, give some feedback to you, and then I shoot you notes. They're like, hey, here's some feedback for you. Do what you, do what you will with it, right?

Right.

And we never had a meeting.

Don't have to, yeah, don't have to sit down. Yeah.

And so that gives a lot of flexibility in how work gets done. Like, we don't have to sit, and as a result, it happens faster. Because if you and I had to schedule something, all of a sudden I'm like, well, this afternoon's packed, um, maybe tomorrow. And you're like, well, tomorrow's no good for me. I think it'll actually have to be on Thursday. And so by the time we actually have Thursday rolls around, like, you know, multiple days have gone by and we're still no better off than we were on Monday versus if you just send me this thing and say, hey, take a look at this. And then Monday afternoon, I might have had a little bit of free time, had some stuff and got some feedback for you. Tuesday, you can be off to the races and going. And so it frees up your org to move a lot faster because there's a flexibility to fit stuff in. Now, you asked about downsides. There is some downsides to this model, which is that you do have to know when to escalate to synchronous work, because it is possible that as I'm giving feedback to you asynchronously, you might go— we might start talking past each other. Like, you might go, I don't— what is he talking about? I don't get this. I think he's totally wrong. And you, you know, you see this most often in Slack, where you start to see like two people like you know, long thread, people going back and forth, and you're like, I don't think they're listening to each other. Like, they're mostly just typing. And so we've had to train the org to recognize those moments. And so it's not uncommon for folks to say, hey, let's take it to Zoom. And then we just jump on Zoom and you get a chance to, like, lean back, see the body language, see people talk. And that synchronous is better at dealing with some of the the stickier, thornier types of problems that might come up than asynchronous. So you do have to pay attention to some things because not everything works that way. But by default, it's a pretty good mode.

And it allows, as you pointed out, so much work to happen on schedules that, that don't need to line up. The scheduling Jenga of trying to create that synchronous meeting, like you said, can often almost stale date the decision, right? If you're making it 5 days after you had all the information to make the decision, it's just a matter of writing down the information. Can you talk about what ceremonies you have set up around your workday and workweek to support a fully distributed team? And the answer may be none, but I'm curious. There's a lot of talk of daily standups and other types of ceremonies to help keep people aligned. Maybe you could walk through what some of the successes and maybe failures have been in terms of the experiments you've done on that front.

So we have a few, relatively few ceremonies, but the ceremonies we do have are pretty important. So first, managers, one-on-ones weekly with your direct reports. This is sort of a commonly cited, like, management best practice. And I think it holds in a remote environment is really important. You want to have— your manager is your connection point into the company. It's how you— they're the face of the company to you.

Yes.

You literally don't see anyone else in a given day. So that manager relationship is a really important one to foster. And so you need to make sure that on a weekly basis you're just checking in with each other. And it's more there for the direct report to just honestly get, quote unquote, FaceTime and get feedback and get their issues out on the table. It's less so for the manager to, like, get status updates or try and delegate work down. Managers can do that at any point in time. So it's really more about giving that direct report a moment where they can sort of advocate for themselves. Second tool is the staff meeting. So that's also a weekly thing. And it's for a similar need. Like, if you don't— you want people to build relationships with their peers. And so for me, this is the exec meeting. I don't want the exec meeting or the exec team to be solving problems through me, saying like, Wade, can you figure out this thing with marketing? Or Wade, can you figure out this thing with product? Instead, I want them to have strong relationships with each other so that when product and marketing need to work on a thing, you know, my CMO and our CPO just go hash it out. And they sort of say like, Wade, we did X. And I'm like, sounds great.

Wonderful.

Right. And so you have that staff meeting to help build those relationships cross-functionally. The third thing we have is a weekly all-hands hangout. So this— we did this on Thursday. We record these so that if folks can't come, they can get it. This is really important because we have time zone differences. Not everyone can come to it. It kind of feels like— probably the best way to describe it is like a local news program a little bit, where sort of like you show up, it has like a fun— like some weekly segments that are sort of like— some are like updates on some stuff, some are like more fun and silly, and then there's like a main segment every week, and the main segment rotates amongst our exec team running whatever it is, and so they're bringing just something interesting for— that the whole company needs to know about. And then it wraps up with an AMA. And the AMA is an important part of the transparency where folks can ask myself, the executive team, any question that's on their mind. And we try and answer them honestly and truthfully as we can. And so, you know, not all the time do we get softball questions. Sometimes we get really tough questions and we try and, you know, just say like, hey, you know, either we don't know or we're looking into it or here's what we think on this. I know that you may not love the answer in this specific situation, but hopefully you can trust that we're considering, you know, a lot of the different viewpoints here. So that, that is a really important thing. And then the last important ritual we have is our Friday updates. So at the end of every week, everyone in the company writes a quick Friday update that sort of outlines, here's what my top priority was this week and how far I got on it. And then here's what I've got as my top priority for next week. And then there's a segment where people can share any other details they want, which oftentimes is like, here's a picture of me and my kids, or here's what I did this weekend, just to sort of build some relationship stuff. That Friday update acts as a really important public accountability to the rest of the company. It's just sort of putting a flag in the ground and saying, here's what I did, here's how far I got, I committed to this and I'm owning my work. And it also acts as a really important just get to know other people in the company. People do share a lot of personal stuff, which is nice. When you're a remote team, you need to build some rituals that help people get to know each other.

So that Friday update, all 300 people, including yourself, post that.

Yeah.

Here's what I did this week and here's what's coming up next week post.

Yeah. Yeah. So we have an internal tool called Async that we built this and it sort of looks like public email a little bit. And so, you know, I don't read all 300 of those. I couldn't. I wouldn't if I tried. But I read all of my exec teams and then I cherry pick a few others in the org that I'm like, you know, maybe a specific project that I'm paying attention to, or I just want to pull some random ones just to see what's happening in different parts of the org. And then everyone can come read mine so they can see what's important for me in a given week. And it helps build— that also helps build an alignment across teams where it's like, oh, this is the things that are really important inside of Zapier at this point in time.

Yeah, love it. And the all-hands meeting, is that an hour-long meeting? How long do you shoot for?

Yeah, we shoot for about an hour. Or a half hour of content and then a half hour of AMA. Okay. So it ends up being about an hour end to end.

Great. And, you know, I think one thing, especially for many of our listeners that are predominantly legal professionals, they're, they're thinking about how does trust and accountability look in a, look like in a distributed work environment where I think for, for many work environments, you kind of assume somebody's working because they're sitting at their desk, you know, for 8 or 9 or 12 hours a day. And, you know, there's, there's many law firm environments that, that bias towards those physical in-place environments where you can monitor how, quote unquote, hard somebody is working due to the hours they're putting in. And I think one of the things that most people struggle with in thinking about a work-from-home environment is How do you build trust? How do you know the person is doing their work? And can you walk us through what that looks like? You know, the Friday email or Friday check-in is obviously part of that. But what else do you need to factor in to build that kind of high-performance distributed team?

I think it's a very important topic and very important question. In some ways, remote takes away the facade of good management. So a lot of managers have bad habits. Around accountability and trust. They use things like what you're talking about. Oh, I saw them sit in a chair for 8 hours, so they must be working hard, when in reality they might be on Facebook or they might do another random stuff. Just because you saw them sitting doesn't actually mean that it correlates to actual output or work achieved. So when you're in a remote setting, that facade is totally torn away. You can't even pretend to know how much they sat at their desk or not. They could have sat at their desk for an hour a day. They could have sat at their desk for 16 hours a day. You just really have no clue. And so it really forces you to pay attention to the output. What work is being delivered? Now, the good news is in these remote environments, the work happens in the tools. So if you're an engineer, it's happening in GitHub. If you're in support, it's happening in your, your desk, your help desk. If you're an attorney, It's probably happening inside of Clio. You can see what's going on. And so if you're a manager of one of these folks, it's not hard to assess, did they deliver output or not? So at the beginning of the week in those one-on-ones, if you sort of said, hey, this week I think my top priority is this and I expect to deliver this, at the end of the week you go look in the tool and you see, did it happen? If it happened, you're like, great, I feel good about this person's trajectory. I feel like they're on, on pace for like helping us hit our goals. If it didn't happen, you know, you're going to have a conversation about it next week and be like, hey, so what happened? Like, we fell short of what I thought we agreed to. Is there something I can do to help you out? Like, you know, did, did we not have good enough guidance? Like, what happened? I want to know. Then, of course, if it repeatedly happens, now you've got a performance conversation that you're digging into.

Right.

So I think remote really does force you to pay attention to the raw output, the raw deliverables. And if those things are happening, then it's all gravy. If you did it in 2 hours, amazing. I'm glad.

Like, that's right.

You're excellent at your job. If it took you longer, like, it really just doesn't matter how much time you put into it. What really matters is the quality of the work that's done and the output that's there. So I think that's the, the upside. And it really forces your managers to pay attention to that stuff and less so of the you know, things that might— the appearance of output. It's the actual output that matters.

Yeah, well, like you said, I, I think it's the comfort you take in seeing somebody sit at their desk for some amount of hours a day is, uh, is maybe a false sense of security that your brain is— right, right. And I, um, I, I do think that the, the silver lining for many law firms that are going through this work-from-home transition. I've heard many, many law firms and legal professionals relay this feedback to me through this podcast and elsewhere, which is, you know, we never thought we could work in a distributed way, but it's actually working really well. And to your point, it actually forces you to focus on the important things, which is, are you getting the work that matters done? And if not, that's one conversation. Or conversely, if you're getting the work done in a quarter of the time we thought it would, let's have that conversation and figure out if you can take on more work or a different kind of work or whatever the case might be. But it really forces you to think about the outputs that matter to your organization and then leveraging technology to monitor what those outputs, how they're progressing and if they're being realized.

Totally. And I, you know, it doesn't surprise me to hear you say that. Like, I think in my mind, the work of lawyers and attorneys is fairly well set up for this type of work because oftentimes you're working with clients that don't share an office with you. So you're on the phone, you're in email already when you're helping those folks out. So the work is already happening in a remote distributed fashion. You just happen to be commuting to an office to do it a lot of the times. So it doesn't surprise me to hear folks say, actually, we're, we're actually already doing this. We're already pretty good at this stuff. And so now it's more about dealing with like maybe inter-firm dynamics and like how do you sort through some of those things. And so maybe that part of it's new, but the relationship with the client and the work you're doing with the client is already happening in a remote setup.

Right. And in fact, what we've seen through our own research, and we've just published our first state of the industry briefing on this topic at Clio over the course of the last 2 weeks. But we're seeing a really accelerated willingness to adopt new technologies and experiment with things like Zoom from the client side as well. If that— if meeting with your lawyer means meeting with them over a Zoom meeting, the willingness to do that from a client side is higher than it's ever been. So it feels like the world's being pulled into the the future in a pretty accelerated basis. I think one important topic I want to dig into with you, Wade Foster, is this idea around what shouldn't some of your takeaways from this work-from-home experience be over the course of the pandemic. You've got the benefit of knowing what this feels like and looks like amidst the COVID-19 pandemic with something to compare it to, which were the 9 years pre-March 2020.

What—

compare and contrast what that, what that looked like for, for you and your team. And like I said, what you— what some of our listeners might want to avoid as takeaways from their work from home experience.

Yeah, I think that's a good question too. You know, I think it's easy to sort of look at the work— some of the work from home things that are happening right now and go, oh my God, I never want to do this. Because you've got kids that are at home, they're not— you know, childcare is basically disappeared, whether it's school or actual childcare, you've got maybe a partner that's at home and you don't have an office that's a home office that's set up to, you know, for you to work from. So you have all these other constraints on your life that aren't really there in a sort of quote unquote normal work from home arrangement. And so, you know, if you're looking at some of that stuff and going like, it's just not possible, I just don't see how it is. I think, you know, consider like, hey, what happens when your kids maybe do go back to school? Or what happens You know, if you do have a little bit more flexibility in where you work, maybe you don't actually have to be stuck in your house the whole day. Maybe you can go down to the coffee shop and like switch things up a little bit. So there are some things that in a normal work from home, you do have a lot more flexibility in how things go about. You don't have quite the same distraction level that you might have in normal situations. So I think that's a pretty critical thing to pay attention to. If those things are impacting your life. The second thing I think to pay attention to, which will be an interesting trend, and it's not necessarily something you can solve on a dime, but it's something like we're feeling in the Bay Area, is a lot of folks in the Bay Area are forced to work from home but realizing that because of how real estate and zoning and all that stuff works in the Bay Area, folks don't actually have space in their living area to work from home. And so all of a sudden people are like, well, what if I lived in Austin or Portland or, you know, Cincinnati or something like that? Yeah, it's like, I actually— that might actually be a better deal in a work-from-home setup because I can afford a spare bedroom or a den or something like that and afford a lot more house. And I can still actually keep my great job because work from home is a little more acceptable nowadays. And so I do think that that is going to be an interesting dynamic to see, you know, what happens with like real estate, both commercial real estate and residential real estate, as maybe fewer people go into the office. Like, what does that do for us in this dynamic? So that's a, that's a very complicated thing that will play out, I think, over the next, you know, 5, 10 years. But, you know, where we choose to work will change how real estate looks.

And maybe, you know, pulling at that thread and talking a little bit about what your feelings around what the future holds are, I'm wondering, do you have any predictions around the, the changes that were maybe already slowly underway, you know, broadly in terms of work from home and distributed work and, and so on, that you see the, the COVID-19 crisis accelerating?

I definitely think it's going to be a lot harder for employers to require folks to come into the office. I think they can say that they will require that, but there's going to be so many more companies that are open to it that it's going to create a competitive pressure that if you want to attract talent, you have to be willing to allow work from home. And so as a result, that's just going to be more and more folks let that happen. and it's going to create this interesting surplus of, like, commercial real estate where it's like we've got a lot of offices, buildings that are kind of, like, sitting empty or half occupied or whatever. So it'd be really interesting to see how that plays out, and especially until we have a vaccine, I'm not really sure how that's going to work. Like, you know, some of the stories I've read about how people are planning to go back to work is they're saying things like, well, maybe We'll have half the workforce come in on Monday and then the other half on Tuesday. And, you know, at lunch you have to sit at a table by yourself. You can't actually sit with your colleagues. And so when I start to think through like what that experience feels like, I'm like, well, isn't the point of being in the office that you're around people and that there is that social aspect? If I have to come into the office but sort of be secluded by myself and like have to sit lonely at a lunch table, like Why don't I just be at home where my family is?

What's the point?

Yeah, what's the point? And so I think there's some of these things are just going to push us away from the office over the long haul. And that is going to— something is going to change there. Like, I think we still inherently do like to get together as humans. And so there still is going to be some demand for that. But the, you know, 9 to 5, 5 days a week office thing feels like it's going to change pretty, pretty drastically to me.

One, I think, is a tweet I saw recently that resonated was on-sites will become the new off-sites. You know, when you need to get your team together and make a big decision, you need that, that synchronous meeting. That's why you go into the office. But, but you're, you're not necessarily going to the office unless you really, you really need to. And I think the only other situation I can, I can think of to your point around what's, what's the point of going to the office is hearing, you know, especially from our employees, we've, we've been working from home for 2 months as well. There's, there's a really interesting spectrum in terms of where people are at from a mindset perspective. There's people that are saying, I love this work from home thing. It's incredible. And I never want to go back to quote unquote normal. And there's people saying, I need to get back to the office as soon as I can. You know, I've seen people running video conferences from their minivan in the garage because that's the only place they could get peace and quiet from their kids and dogs and everything else. So I think those are the two ends of the spectrum that you're, you're dealing with and thinking about how you best accommodate both of those groups of people. People that never want to come back to the office first for safety reasons, but maybe even post-vaccine they don't want to come back to the office and then again, accommodating those folks that want to come back as rapidly as possible, I think, is a really interesting problem to solve. You know, one thing I'm curious for your, your thoughts on, Wade Foster, is something I've thought about quite a bit, actually, which is to what degree are we coasting in the work-from-home distributed environment, thanks to some of the muscles we've built up in the in-person interactions we've had. And I kind of think about from a mentorship and leadership perspective, you know, like at a company like Clio, for example, how are we developing our next set of leaders? And a lot of that is anchored around shadowing people, seeing how people act in the office, spending one-on-one time with people, you know, in person. And, and I think there's a lot of organizations that are maybe 2 months into this work from home distributed thing saying everything is great. But maybe don't realize— cut to a year from now, for example— yeah, oh, we didn't layer in these things that will help us really do this over the long term if that's what's required. Or maybe that's the pivot you want to make as a business to a more distributed world. How do you guys think about the, the mentorship and, and growing your next generation of leaders? And obviously you've never had, you know, the, the in-person offices as a crutch, maybe, but tell us how you you approach that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think this comes back to that discipline that I sort of led off with, where it's like you have to have discipline even around things like this. Anything that sort of was happening informally that added value, you have to try and find a way to put some structure and a program in place, or you sort of leave it to chance. And if you leave it to chance, it might happen in some situations and it might not in others. And So you have to decide what situations you're okay with chance versus where you need programs. So for example, the L&D front, we've done a lot really in the last probably 2 years to advance what we do in a more formalized way. So we have a team of probably about 7 people in an L&D program, which is probably a little like, you know, that's sizable for a company of our size at this point. So that's 2-3% of our company.

Wade Foster.

And, you know, they, they have a whole suite of curriculum that is focused on a variety of skill sets. So they've developed a coaching program where everyone inside the company can get matched with a coach that can help them with career development. Some of those are external coaches, some of those are internal coaches. And so that's a great way to get one-on-one individualized attention. They've also got a series of sort of like group learning around a variety of topics. So we have like management track that focuses on things like difficult conversations is one. We've got another one that's like people hold accountability in teams. We've got one that's on unconscious bias. So it's sort of like we've identified a few set of core competencies and we sort of are systematically making sure that as many of our managers have those skill sets. We're trying to let, like, raise the baseline level of competency of all of our managers across the board. And so, those are the types of things that we're trying to add structure to. We've sort of identified it as, hey, this is a core thing. We need to make sure that this group of people or all of our people need these skill sets and these competencies. So let's make sure that we have something in the company that is providing a learning opportunity for those skill sets to help folks advance. So that's how we've approached it. And by and large, I'd say the switch from that has gone really well. I say pre-this investment, it really was left up to chance. Like, some folks sort of just through their own, like, self-interest in learning, their own natural aptitude, um, like, advanced their skills in certain ways, and it just worked out for them. And then others just like, without guidance or structure sort of struggle, and it was tougher for them. And since we added these things in, I think more folks are finding that they just— it's just helpful. It just, like, helps advance and it keeps everyone on the same page. So for us, that investment layer has started to pay off pretty significantly.

That's, that's an amazing initiative to have launched, like you said, a really significant investment from a headcount perspective relative to your size. I'm curious, a related question is maybe on the building trust side of things, you know, between individuals especially. Did you do anything to foster that, or do you find that, uh, that comes organically enough?

I think it kind of comes organically, you know. In a remote environment, you're sort of trusting people by default. It's like, hey, I never met you as part of the interview process, or I met you only on Zoom, really, and, you know, I don't watch you walk into the office. So by default, we just start from an area of like, I trust you and hopefully you trust me. And then as you sort of get used to those one-on-ones and the daily cadence of things, you know, if you keep delivering output at the end of every week, like, right, I feel pretty good with you. And so, you know, if you do that fairly consistently and then all of a sudden there's a week where it doesn't happen, my default reaction is not, oh, you screwed up, like, what's wrong with you? My default reaction is like, hey, what's going on? Can I help? Like, what happened? Like, that was weird. Um, you know, I want to just make sure everything's cool, right? And so I think just that, you know, as you start to develop that consistency with each other, that the trust gets stronger. So you start from a baseline of trust, and then it just develops fairly consistently.

To use the language you were referring to in your other values, it sounds like default to trust is is almost the mode, right? That, yeah, it's just, yeah, you can't do it and you get curious if somebody's not delivering what you thought they would.

Yeah. It's just really hard to be in like a micromanager type mode in a remote environment. Like it's, it's just difficult for like the manager to do that. And it's difficult to be on the other side. It's like, this isn't really, it just didn't really work. So you have to kind of start from an area of like, I assume you're competent in your job and you probably assume I'm competent in my job and You know, if we just sort of start from there, it's probably going to go a little better.

Right. This has been amazing conversation, Wade. I think you've got so much to share and I could keep going for another hour with, with questions on the distributed work front. But let's pause there and conclude. Maybe we'll pick it up in a part 2 down the road. But I'd love to conclude just with a bit of a perspective. Perspective on your product, which is, you know, an amazing product that I'm sure you're seeing being used in all sorts of innovative ways in the pandemic, a tool that allows workflows to be automated and allows people to be wildly more productive, which is really, I think, a call to arms that many people are almost paradoxically experiencing in this crisis is the people that are busy are busier than they've ever been. You know, if they're lucky enough to be busier enough than they've ever been. I know that many of us feel that way at Clio, and I know many of us, many of our customers in the legal space feel that as well. And we see some practice areas, you know, just exploding in terms of demand and so on. So what I'd love to ask you as one of our closing questions is when you look at a macro level, what kinds of things do you see Zapier being applied against in terms of workflows or problems that you think might resonate with, with legal professionals and what kinds of opportunities for efficiency enhancement do you think most businesses have that, that are maybe not obvious at first glance?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things happening around like communication at its core. So, you know, simple things like, you know, when certain activities happen inside of Clio, like, hey, let's make sure we post it into Slack. And that sort of just gives visibility to teammates that like, hey, this, you know, we wrapped up this matter, we wrapped up this project, or maybe we're kicking off a new thing. And it just creates a lot of visibility around this stuff where you don't have to go manually personally inform all these folks. Heads up, we got a new project coming in, right? Let's kickstart like our intake form or let's kickstart our intake stuff. Instead, Zapier recognizes and sees that it's happening. It sends a message to everyone that's relevant in Slack and lets them know. And then maybe if you have like a project management tool or some other software where you actually execute some of those works, it spins those things up for you automatically. And so it just— things happen a little more fluidly instead of like humans having to be in the loop and just sort of checking all these boxes and making sure that, like, you know, little things are happening there. So there's a lot around just that communication, project management, workflow aspect that we're seeing attorneys— and honestly, a lot of industries are benefiting from that style of work.

And I, I guess it really fits into this asynchronous world as well, where you can just make sure the right updates are getting fed into the right Slack channels or the right Microsoft Teams channels and you, you can just know what's going on in a fairly passive way and sip from the firehose when you want to.

And that's what's great, I think, about being a manager in this environment is you don't have to constantly be asking your team for updates. What's going on? What's going on? Tell me, tell me, tell me. I like— are things on track? Are they not on track? Instead, you can just sort of see it happen. You can look at this, you know, in Zapier, we have things like feeds, like feed channels and sources like feed mentions or feed commits. And I can just go and see like, Oh, here's all the commits that have happened today. Okay, cool. I feel pretty good about that. Or like, whoa, nothing's happening. What's going on? Is something broken?

Is it a day off?

Is it a crisis? Yeah.

Is it a holiday?

Then I just didn't know. So, it lets me— it helps me get the updates that I need, but without requiring the team to sort of, like, you know, constantly, like, keep me up to date and manage my own, like, paranoia and psychosis around these types of things.

Yeah, no, super, super important observation. Well, Wade, this has been a terrific conversation. I've really, really enjoyed it. I think you've dropped lots of knowledge bombs on me and our audience. Thanks so much for joining us. And I was curious if there's a parting thought you'd like to leave our audience with before we sign off.

You know, I think I'm really glad you had me, Jack. And I think for all the folks out there struggling, like, just You know, keep at it, you know, keep trying new things and you'll find that with experimentation, things will get better. You know, it may not work the first time, but keep at it.

That's a fantastic note to end on. Well, thanks again, Wade. Really enjoyed it and stay healthy out there.

Awesome, will do.

Thanks for joining us on Daily Matters today, a podcast from Clio. Rate and review wherever wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Daily Matters is produced by Andrew Booth, Sam Rosenthal, and Derek Boland and hosted by yours truly, Jack Newton. Thanks also to Clio, the world's leading cloud-based legal technology provider, for supporting this podcast. If you'd like to learn more about Clio, please visit clio.com.