Pay Without Borders with Deel, GitLab, and Safetywing

Host (Steph): So a lot of top talent are entering the remote market, and they're specifically looking for organizations that not only offer or allow remote work, but empower people through remote work, as in they do remote work really well. So the bar has continued to rise for organizations which are remote. It's no longer good enough to just be remote.

Today, we're talking pay without borders, and we're doing it with three individuals: Darren Murph from GitLab, Alex Bouaziz from Deal, and Sondre Rasch from Safety Wing.

Before we dive into the meat of this episode, I wanted to give a little bit of history. We're all familiar with the 21st century of the office, but the office has actually existed for hundreds of years. Seriously, in 1560, we saw the predecessor to the office, which was Florence's Uffizi Gallery. In the centuries to come, we saw work reinvented many times over, with perhaps the most well-known iteration being the 40-hour workweek by Ford Motors in 1926. Then came the cubicle in 1968. We all have Robert Probst to thank for that.

But it wasn't until the 80s when we saw the internet appear on the scene, and Wi-Fi was released in 1997, forever changing the way that people work and live. Since then, many companies continue to adopt practices from the 20th century, despite the possibilities being fundamentally different. Just think about it: we have internet, we have phones the size of our pockets, we have 3D printing. The technology that exists between 1926 when the 40-hour work week was invented to today is just fundamentally different.

Of course, COVID sent a shock into that system, forcing many people to adopt a distributed model. Despite still much debate about what the future holds, this episode will highlight the many ways that companies are being forced to continue adapting. We'll cover topics like how distributed work completely reshapes the way we work and hire, how you can still attract top talent, and whether remote is the only benefit that matters. We'll also talk about what types of workers and companies come out on top of this sea change, and what missing infrastructure is needed in this new environment. And of course, we'll tackle the question: is the office dead?

With that said, I'm excited to present Pay Without Borders. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com slash disclosures.

Why don't we start off with a couple quick intros? Each of you give your name, the company you work for, and where you're calling in from, because we are recording this remotely. Darren, why don't we start with you?

Darren Murph: Yeah, thanks. I'm Darren Murph. I'm the head of remote at GitLab, calling in from North Carolina, USA.

Host (Steph): Wonderful. Alex, let's pivot to you.

Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm Alex Bouaziz. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Deal, and I'm calling you from Paris.

Host (Steph): Amazing. And Sondre, let's, as they say, popcorn to you.

Sondre Rasch: Great to be here, Steph. My name is Sondre. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Safety Wing, and I'm calling in from San Francisco, the old town.

Host (Steph): Yeah, the old guard. Still got some people there. I hear it's bouncing back, but let's jump into this idea that is circling the internet. It's maybe a silly question to start with, and I hope we go a little deeper than this, but I do want to ask: is the office dead, or at least on its last leg?

Darren Murph: The difference there is when you talk about mentality, it's about the lifestyle you had to live or the persona you had to carry to fit in and enable yourself to have a career. That's gone, especially in the knowledge working space. Distributed work has enabled companies to focus on results and create atmospheres where people can do their best work from wherever they are.

This leads to two new realities. One is that the actual physical office really has a new lease on life. I'm actually excited to see what people do now that you don't have to use physical real estate the same way you once had to. There are interesting things you could do with that, from experiential spaces to bringing people together. The other is that it enables companies to attract and retain talent from all over the world and build a culture focused on results. You're going to get an amazing tapestry of people that want to come work for companies all over the world when you remove the physical office from the equation.

We're at the earliest stages of realizing that this is all about how work happens and much less about where people are. That's really what's at the heart of that question.

Sondre Rasch: At Safety Wing, we have a location in San Francisco for gatherings. We have gatherings around the world with our whole company or individual teams. That's what in-person means in the future: what do you do when you gather? But in terms of what is killing the office, I think the economic reality is what's really killing it. If you're a startup and you choose to work in an office, you can still work remotely. The difference between starting a company in some Midwestern small town and the labor market available there versus New York City is as big a difference as from New York City to hiring on the internet.

The ability to hire the best in the world is the economic thing that will ensure remote companies outcompete those who aren't, because they will hire the best in the world versus the best in their town. Similarly, from the employee side, you can apply to the best companies in the world instead of just the best in your town.

Alex Bouaziz: I have a very biased opinion. I've never worked in an office in my life, so I don't know what you mean when you say the office is dead. My perspective is there are different work environments, and people have things that are more convenient for them. Companies are going to have different setups that work best for them, whether it's based on the founder or the type of people they have.

In our case, we have 1,300 plus people and no offices. We work in 80 plus countries internally. We found a good balance with having people on WeWork memberships, which they can do whatever they want, whenever they want. That's what fits us really well. The definition of the office is kind of fuzzy for me. Is it a place where you sit from nine to five with an assigned desk? That's maybe dead in a lot of the industries we're in. My definition of an office, given that I've never worked in that environment, is just the ability to meet people, have my laptop, and sit wherever I want to work.

Host (Steph): I love that you mentioned that. I worked in an office for one year, and I've since worked remotely for many more than that. So I have this perception of how could you not work remotely? But similarly, people who have worked their whole life in an office for three, four, or five decades and now have been forced to work remote, that reality also seems just as far-fetched. So I do think it matters when you entered the remote workforce, and whether you did it during COVID.

What I'm hearing from all three of you is this idea that the office we imagine from the last hundred years since the 40-hour workweek was invented is being disrupted. That doesn't mean physical space won't play a part in our future. But it also means we have the opportunity to reinvent both the physical space and this digital office space we all operate in. That's something I'm really interested to hear from each of you on: this idea that we can rethink the way people work, not just digital or physical.

One example I'm seeing more of is this idea of asynchronous versus synchronous work. When you are in an office, you are forced to work quite synchronously. Everyone comes in at nine, everyone leaves around five, and you have to use that overlap effectively. But when people are distributed with the technologies we have today, you can actually work at nine and have someone else work at one and someone else in the Philippines working on the complete opposite time zone.

I want to hear from you, Darren, on this subject, because you are the head of remote at a pretty large organization, but you also work quite asynchronously. Can you talk specifically to the way your organization thinks about asynchronicity? And specifically, I'd be interested for you to speak to your meeting policy.

Darren Murph: For context, GitLab has over 1,600 people. We're a public company, and we have people in over 60 countries all over the world. You mentioned sync versus async. We try to look at it as sync complementing async. They are two tools in a toolbox. Sometimes you need the synchronous tool, sometimes you need the asynchronous tool. But we've been very intentional about weaving asynchronous workflows into the culture at GitLab and creating massive tailwinds around this to really galvanize people to learn to do things very differently, maybe even counter to what has gotten them to a certain point in their career.

The best way to do that is to integrate it into your values and operating principles. It's non-optional. If you look at the GitLab values page, you'll find an operating principle of bias toward asynchronous communication. We actually bundle that within our diversity, inclusion, and belonging value, not our results or efficiency value. The core reason is that if you are thoughtful and deliberate enough to move a piece of work forward without commandeering 30 or 50 minutes of someone's day, you are fundamentally being more respectful of their time. For us, async is about the work, for sure, but it's also about showing respect to other people.

Now, what do you need to do something like this? It's quite difficult to stand it up, and I think that's why you're seeing a lot of organizations who have gone remote essentially copy and paste the office environment into the virtual environment and not really take advantage of what's possible when you are globally distributed. The core reason I have found is that most management philosophies prioritize the speed of knowledge transfer: how fast can person A tap person B on the shoulder and transfer something from one brain to the other. But to do this well, your management has to optimize for the speed of knowledge retrieval: how fast can person A and person B seek and find information on parallel tracks without needing each other to be online or awake or fully brought up to speed.

This gets at the heart of building infrastructure, building systems that optimize for that. It's a completely different way of thinking from the co-located norms of getting people together so that knowledge is always in physical proximity. When you're working across the globe, you can't assume someone's available, that they're online, that they're in the same time zone, that they're not on PTO. So now we're seeing companies scramble to build knowledge management systems so that information isn't just in someone's head. That's how you scale knowledge in a global space.

You asked about meetings. At GitLab, all meetings are optional, and we're very intentional about what a synchronous meeting has to have before it can even be accepted on a calendar. All work meetings have to have an agenda: no agenda, no attenda. This is being respectful of someone's time so that even if they can't make the synchronous meeting, there's an agenda there from the start. They can input their questions. They can input a Loom, for example. They can contribute to the meeting without physically being there. Also, this is how we scale information. Even after that meeting happens, the agenda is still there. We can go back, reference it, see what decisions were made. If there's anything crucial the entire organization needs to know, we can document that in the handbook. That's how we enable meetings to be optional.

We also document what good meetings look like and what things shouldn't necessarily be a meeting. Organizations ask me all the time, how do we reduce meetings? My friends at Levels Health have this concept of memos over meetings, which I really like, instead of the term asynchronous, which feels very big and weighty and nerdy at times. Things like FYIs, status updates, and recurring meetings are the low-hanging fruit. If you're listening and wondering where to start, status updates, FYIs, recurring meetings are usually the first that can go.

Host (Steph): GitLab has a handbook that covers a lot of this information. It's eating its own dog food in the sense that it focuses on documentation so that anyone, no matter where they are at what time, even years from now, can go back and leverage the information or knowledge from GitLab, having been a remote company for several years. But I want to hear from Alex and Sondre. Hearing this idea that you can work completely asynchronous is not something many people are used to. When I had a friend from GitLab share that meetings could be completely optional, that was a reality shaker for me. I was like, can that work?

Alex Bouaziz: I dare you, Darren, to come work async on apparel and compliance and visas. I think every industry has different things. There's work that can be done async, and there's work that can't. There are different stages at a company. When you're very early, I don't think async work is the right way to go. You need to build fast and get things done. But as a company scales, the way GitLab has done, and also it's very anchored to GitLab as a product, being able to write async is very core to your product. So this is something you can achieve, and something you can't.

It's important to be realistic about that and set the right expectations, whether for founders or companies later on. What are the right stages for you to really be async? What parts of the business can truly be async? If you set the expectation for the whole company to be there, my guys on customer support or on the operational side are not going to live the same life as you. So it's important to set the right expectation and have the right mix of things at the company. As much work that can be async, why not? There are different people living in different time zones. But as a whole company, it's a bit more complicated.

Sondre Rasch: I am actually on that side. Normally, I'm the only one who's not pro-async in these conversations. But I built my previous company fully async, meaning zero meetings. Often when you have the async conversation, I agree with 90% of what Darren is saying. You want to minimize meetings, you want to do documentation. We've chosen the path of not full async at Safety Wing for the reason Alex said: it slows you down. On a particular project, it can be slow.

Instead, we end up in a situation where we do bracket meetings. We constrain them: 8 to 11 a.m. PST is when meetings can be booked, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. So it doesn't slide out into your whole week. I think you get the best of both worlds. You get that necessary time for coordination and fast project moving, while at the same time giving people time to work and complete their tasks.

Host (Steph): There's not necessarily a correct answer of sync versus async. There's a big spectrum in the ways people operate. For me, I first worked remotely at a remote-first company that had been remote from the ground up, and they tended to be more async. When I joined companies that previously had offices, I was a little jarred by how synchronous things were. Again, it's not about being fully async or fully sync, but one interesting note is this idea of being able to reshape this digital office and not having it be copy and pasted from the original office.

Another thing that commonly comes up when people speak about remote work and its downfalls is culture. Culture is notoriously hard to build, even synchronously within an office, and it becomes that much more difficult asynchronously or online. Something I've noticed is this idea of copy and pasting. A very simple example is what people do when they want to run a happy hour. They say, everyone go buy some alcohol, sit in these squares on Zoom, and we'll bond. Very little bonding happens that way. I want to hear from each of you how you've seen culture facilitated remotely, because this is one of the things I hear the most from people trying to pivot from the office to online. Sondre, why don't we start with you, as you've built up your company? How have you been able to facilitate that?

Sondre Rasch: The basics of a great culture are the same remote: your vision and values. Are they worthwhile? Are they conducive to joy and productivity? Then it's about how you reinforce that and ensure the norms and the way people treat each other in the company are the way you want to work. A lot of that translates. What you have to do in addition is you need more norms of written communication because more stuff is done in writing. So you need a culture of written communication, not just verbal communication.

I also think you need to build a broader lattice, a framework. We're a small company, but we're 180 people from 70 different countries. We're really in many places. When you build a company in a city, you can build on top of the cultural lattice in that city. You don't have to say those things that are shared cultural norms. When you are global, you have to build that foundation for everyone. So culture becomes more important. You have to emphasize the full shared cultural lattice that people can opt into and get onboarded onto.

From the start, we took it incredibly seriously and have been able to build a great flourishing culture. That's also the feedback from the people who work here. So I do think it is completely possible and necessary.

Host (Steph): Just to quickly double click on that, when you say you are outlining your culture or being really discreet about it, what does that look like? What I'm imagining is a culture page living on a website that says, we care about empathy and we care about productivity, hard work, all these terms that are kind of amorphous. Honestly, every company cares about productivity. Every company cares about empathy in theory. But there is a hierarchy within every company. I also wonder how stating those on a page does not actually disseminate within an organization. How did you actually go about these high-level ideas of what your culture should be and implement them, making sure they're phased into the organization?

Sondre Rasch: These things I'm about to say are not remote specific. One is you have to believe in your values and be a great example of them. Then you have to hire for them, and then you have to reward them in how you promote and build people in your organization. You have to trade on them and make choices based on them. When people talk about a soft value, what they mean is it doesn't matter. Then your values aren't being disseminated.

But if people can see that in Safety Wing, for example, we might say, "We ended the relationship with this vendor because we were not able to lift them up to what we want to do on the value of authenticity, because they were just giving us bullshit marketing language." When people can see that this is not just a vague aspiration but a hard constraint, something we're willing to take costs to achieve, then it becomes enforced and something to emulate. It also becomes something people can rely on because they understand that the written, explicit statements about the culture match what they see in the behavior of the founders and the choices made in the company. Then it permeates.

Host (Steph): Darren, I want to hear from you. How did you go about that same process of building culture within your company?

Darren Murph: It starts with defining what culture is at your particular organization, because everyone will join with a different interpretation based on past experience and personal beliefs. Step one is actually defining what culture is. At GitLab, this is documented. It's composed of three things. One is values and operating principles, which Sondre already emphasized. The second is building camaraderie. You have to formalize ways to encourage informal communication. The third is how you work, defining how work happens. This goes back to the sync and async conversation. Customer service, for example, works far less async than other organizations. You have to understand the ebbs and flows between the organization and hedge against the friction that will find its way in if you don't. Defining how we work plays a big part in culture. A lot of companies don't pay enough attention to how work gets done and how communication happens. That is critical to culture. Being very intentional about that is a massively important third leg.

I do want to say two things on that. I mentioned operating principles within values. This is how we create behaviors out of those words on a wall. If you look at the GitLab values page, it doesn't stop with the six core values. There are literal behaviors you can practice. "Short toes" is one of those. One of the examples is you have permission to give feedback or input on anyone else's function or domain, and they should collaborate with you with short toes, as in you can't step on anyone's toes. That's very operational. You'll know if someone is receptive to input or feedback from another function. If they are, you're doing it right. If not, you're doing it wrong. That's how you operationalize the values.

You mentioned the Zoom happy hour. I want to give one example that leaders can implement tomorrow. I came up with this idea called a community impact outing. If you're going to invite 1,300 people to a Zoom happy hour, as a management team, that's 1,300 sunk hours. You're never going to get that time back. If you're committed to that, here's a better way. You give people an hour of their week. It doesn't have to be on a Friday. Time is relative. An hour of their week to go do something meaningful to them. Maybe it's volunteer at a food bank. Maybe it's reading at a local library. The only thing you ask them is to wear company swag and take a selfie while they're there. They spend that hour doing something uniquely meaningful to them in the community that matters to them. Then they share all this content back in a public channel. Instantly, you build authentic bonds.

For example, I'm an adoptive father. I might choose to spend my hour working at an orphanage or in the adoption field. When I share that back, if someone else on the team is considering adopting or was adopted, immediately we have a connection. Now there's instant community build. This is real, genuine, authentic relationship in the workplace that you probably won't get out of a Zoom happy hour. Same hour spent, much higher impact. This is something that would be very difficult to pull off in a co-located space. For leaders who are becoming remote or have been forced remote, these are some of the opportunities you can lean into to do things differently and build culture in a new way.

Host (Steph): I like that you shared that. There is this immense opportunity to rethink how you build culture. Some examples: I think Hotjar was a company that gave their employees a stipend and said, "We don't think you're going to build culture in these digital Zoom happy hours. We actually want you to go and hang out with your coworkers to co-work with them." It was $1,000 or $2,000 a year, and they could fly to wherever their coworkers lived and spend time with them. Or if they lived close, it could go towards a dinner or things you could do in real life. Many other companies rely on quarterly offsites.

This idea of copying and pasting is really important because it's the natural tendency to just replicate what you know. But what I want to see more companies do is instead of Zoom happy hours, throw your team in Fortnite or something digitally native where they can have fun. That's where you bond. Where I've seen people bond in these happy hours is when they're doing a game or a digital escape room. Throw them in something where they can do something together, because that's where camaraderie is born. It's not born by forcing people to awkwardly talk together.

Sondre Rasch: A couple of examples that I think can be helpful. We have on Monday, the first 20 minutes, people get distributed into random groups of three. Then we give a prompt, and we've thought about these prompts. That's our one kind of cohesiveness thing. It actually receives really high scores. It sounds like a waste of time, but it's really good. We also have these value talks on Monday where someone gives a five-minute take on one of the values themselves. That's another one we've had a lot of success with.

I think you're a customer of our product, Darren, right? Connections. We acquired a company called Roots. They have a plugin that plugs into Slack where they invite two people from the same company at the same time so they can get together. We're obviously big fans because we use it and we acquired the company because of how great the team was. That one has helped quite a bit.

Host (Steph): Alex, can you explain a little bit more about what that tool does?

Alex Bouaziz: It's super simple. Roots has another plugin. Whenever you're on Slack, you've got 100 people, 200 people. Every week, you can define the cadence, but every week they just take two people from the team and match them together across the whole company. They push you towards having a conversation and meeting with people across departments. It's very helpful. People at the company really love it. They create meaningful bonds and understand each other better.

Host (Steph): If you're able to build good culture, that naturally incentivizes people to want to stay. But another big question within this idea of distributed work is how do you actually incentivize people to join your company in this much more competitive landscape? Every company has a big question of how to attract top talent. I want to hear from Darren first. Did you see a shift when COVID happened and many more companies went remote? Did you see a shift in your ability to attract top talent? I ask because for quite some time, there was almost a bundle of companies that were fully remote, sizable, and had a unique position in the market because there weren't very many jobs out there that were fully remote, remote first, paid well, etc. For a period of time before COVID, those companies could attract top talent quite easily because they had this one benefit. I've heard some people say the one benefit that matters is remote work. Things have clearly shifted, right?

Host (Steph): The supply of remote jobs has gone through the roof, as has the demand. But I think the supply has shot up more. So I want to hear from you, Darren. Have you seen a shift in your ability to hire really top talent remotely? Has the marketplace become more competitive?

Darren Murph: Interestingly, it's yes and yes. So the market has become more competitive for the reason you just mentioned. All of a sudden, there are far more options for people to work fully remote. It used to be a very small pool of employers. Now it's much larger. But what has also happened is that people who were absolutely committed to co-located or maybe didn't even consider remote work a feasible pathway for their career are suddenly considering it a feasible pathway for their career. So they are going out and seeking employers that are fully remote. And interestingly, were fully remote before COVID, before it was cool, because they've had a taste of what freedom and flexibility and truly getting to design your life without sacrificing your career. They've had a taste of that.

And especially for employers that are forcing teams to return to an office, that becomes the trigger for them to say, okay, I've proven to myself that I can work remotely even under very suboptimal conditions. Now I'm alert to this potential that my career won't necessarily be squashed or thwarted if I work remotely. There was a bit of a negative connotation with it before, not so much anymore. So a lot of top talent are entering the remote market, and they're specifically looking for organizations that not only offer or allow remote work, but empower people through remote work, as in they do remote work really well.

So the bar has continued to rise for organizations which are remote. It's no longer good enough to just be remote. You have to be intentional about investing in teams and leaders and tooling to build the infrastructure to make it an awesome experience. I mean, Sondre mentioned this. Even though there are certain elements of the company that they love having synchronous moments, the backbone of that is a rigor around documentation. The backbone of that is the infrastructure is there so that even if you are in a different time zone than the founding team, you can still function there and function well and enjoy more flexibility than you could in the past. So it's yes and yes. There's more people now looking for great remote jobs and remote companies are now held to a higher standard because just having remote is no longer good enough.

Host (Steph): Yeah. As we talked about before, there's a huge spectrum in how people operate remotely. I'm sure you've all heard of companies that are tracking their employees and making sure that they're productive within certain hours and measuring them in those ways instead of measuring them through their outputs or their impact within a company. But I also want to hear from you, Sondre, as a company that provides healthcare or insurance, which you could say is a benefit that many companies offer. Do you have a take on the changing landscape of benefits and that just being one aspect of what talent is looking for?

And just to set this question up a little further, in the past, you had companies like the FANG companies being able to attract top talent because they gave huge packages, but they also gave all these wild benefits within their offices. And some people may still be looking for those precise benefits, but I wonder if you're seeing a shift in the types of things that talent is looking for in order to join one company over another. And I also would love to hear just how you're seeing SafetyWing play into that as well.

Sondre Rasch: Yeah. So what's happening there is that you both have the kind of FANG-like modern benefits being built, but you also have the basics being built. So when we ask people who, for health insurance, what they had before, the most common answer is still nothing. And for contractors, it's almost all of them. This has been incredibly difficult to buy before. The basics of benefits like health insurance and retirement is still not really available. It's very difficult. So you have, of course, options. You can use services like Deel that does make it much easier to buy. But for a large part of the internet labor force, just building out the basic infrastructure is still where we're at.

A lot of the Silicon Valley benefits have kind of come their way into the remote workforce: unlimited holidays, minimum holidays. We do have that at SafetyWing and various other fun ones like personal development budget or buy your own plans. Or indeed, like you said earlier, expense trips to colleagues, expense virtual meals, etc. But it is the kind of basics like can you work remotely, holiday, health insurance. Those are the things that people really care about and become motivated to apply somewhere in order to do.

What we want to do at SafetyWing is to kind of build out one part of that infrastructure. We started with the health insurance. We're continuing with retirement, disability, so that you can offer the same basic benefit suite as a remote global company. And we continue onwards to the future we see, which is something like a global social safety net, where in the end, these services will be bundled, not unlike the way they are bundled in countries today, and that you will have a membership in one. And indeed, we think that we're saying in our vision statement, we're building the first global social safety net for the first country on the internet.

Host (Steph): Alex, Deel has this unique insight or oversight into how different companies are hiring, whether they're hiring part-time roles, contract roles, or full-time. How are you seeing this landscape shifting? Are companies offering different types of benefits? Are companies rethinking their need to bring on certain types of talent? What are you seeing in that market?

Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, I guess for context, at Deel, we help companies hire around the world. We basically build the whole infrastructure for them to be able to do so without having any. So as you said, they can hire people as independent contractors. We've got over 90 plus entities around the world. So you can hire people as FDs and give them benefits as if they were locally hired. Or now we actually even help you manage your own entities. So we're starting to build a full stack of HR for global teams.

I mean, there's a different perspective. I think right now we're very biased in both. We serve about 10,000 customers from small customers to large companies, publicly traded companies. And I think overall in the tech world, like Sondre said, it's the same type of benefits that are trying to be given out across the board. When it comes down to contractors or employment, our employment infrastructure is pretty new in this space. Contractor was kind of the default model because the EOR space, the employer of record space, just wasn't as built out. So it was either I hire people as contractors or I open a country, an entity and go really hard in that country.

Now that things have shifted, there's a different perspective to the conversation. There's of course the benefit aspects, but there's mainly the compliance aspect of how am I operating in the country? Every company has different types of models on how they do that. I think more companies were interested in the employer-friendly model recently because it is brand new and the ability to hire people as employees. And again, there's technicalities as it's easier to get a mortgage if you're employed versus being a contractor. So there's lots of those different technicalities to it. What we're seeing now is kind of a healthy mix of both. And when it comes down to benefits in general, people have a tendency to try to give more or less the same thing and be fair across the board. That's kind of what we've seen.

And I think the interesting part, and by the way, that's something you guys are discussing and we'd even love to hear your thoughts on that. For me, remote work is not remote work, it's just work. And I'm hoping the term remote work kind of disappears over time. It's more about how you're doing work and how people are structured and the output that they have. And I think the key thing that we're seeing is people, because they're starting to look out from their 30-mile radius, they're starting to hire globally. And hiring globally means that you're starting to have more consideration for what is standard in one country compared to another from a benefit standpoint. But at the same time, as you scale, you want to be as standardized as possible. So that brings a lot of interesting and complex challenges which we're having fun solving.

But yeah, overall, the world is a big place and there's amazing talent everywhere. And I think more and more people are realizing that it's about working with the right people. It doesn't really matter where they are as long as you've got the right talent. And I'm not saying anything new here, but that's really the trend we're seeing. From small companies all the way to—I mean, we onboarded a Formula One team yesterday as a customer. So you've got a big breadth of products and people.

Darren Murph: Yeah, I will agree that long term the word remote goes away and it's just work. What we're talking about is the workplace. We're still going to use the term remote for a while because we've done it the other way for so long that it's a necessary qualifier in the language of work. But my son is three right now. It's highly unlikely that he'll ever see work any other way. I'll have to show him YouTube videos of millions of people getting in a personal vehicle and driving to somewhere they don't live to open a computer that they carried with them. And it's going to blow his mind. It's going to require an explanation. It's going to be one of those generational things where you can show a pencil and a small circle and a cassette. Do you know what this is? Oh, yeah, I used to rewind cassette tapes using that. This is the workplace cassette moment or fax machine moment. And it's very much a massive shift that shouldn't be underestimated.

Host (Steph): Yes, I remember talking to a friend recently and I was like, I wonder when they're going to stop teaching kids handwriting in schools, which sounds crazy given our generation because that's so foundational to at least my education growing up. And I don't know if that'll disappear anytime soon because it is also a cultural signifier or it's almost like a step to learning to read, which then leads to comprehension. And so it's all interrelated, but I do wonder what things we're used to, really foundational things in our society, which of those will be relics.

And it actually reminds me also of something I saw recently, which was a tweet covering a newspaper article from 1891 where someone was slamming the office because that person felt like we should all be hunters and gatherers and outside and in the wild. And so I wonder if we're seeing certain permutations of that today where what we think of as work, say 200 years ago was not the office. And then 100 years ago, it was the office. And then today it's something else. But to both of your points, that is work. Remote work is just a modifier that we've added in this current juncture when there's a debate about what work should be. At its core, it's leveraging technology. Remote work is a product. So humankind invented the internet. We're finally using it and leveraging it in a way that helps people live better lives and leaders build more durable organizations. So it's been a long time coming.

Yeah, and I think we're seeing this technology reshape the competition that we're seeing in the market. We've already alluded to this, but I want to hear your take, Alex, in particular on what you're seeing in terms of pay. Because as this market has so many different participants from many different countries, there is a question that has come up, which is location-based pay. Do you pay someone based on where they live or do you set a standard rate based on what your company is willing to pay? And there's arguments on both sides of the aisle. But I want to hear from you specifically on what you're seeing. What are companies doing currently? Not what people want people to do, but what are the actions truly being taken within these companies? Are companies falling towards the side of "we're going to set a rate and that's going to be the rate for our employees"? Or are companies adjusting based on location?

Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, and that's an interesting question in general. We actually released the Satter Insights tool based on our data set. We've got hundreds of thousands of people hired. So if you use Deel, when you create a contract or even outside of that, you can see based on the role, the seniority and the location, what on average people are paying for a specific person and a specific role. Obviously what we've seen over the last few months, and I think that's also tied to how much venture capital money was available as well. So we've seen a lot of people around the world, very talented people get hired and just generally the pay rate increase quite a bit. Then we've got some hard data. I think you mentioned that at the very beginning, we released a global report on the data trends that we're seeing from a pay scale perspective and from a hiring country perspective.

But I think that makes a lot of sense. Some very talented people are starting to work for larger companies and whether it's the best practice of the company or their work, different people have different perspectives on how to tackle it. Internally at Deel, we generally pay based on country rates. I think we pay usually top of market, but still within the market. I think one of the reasons why a lot of companies have hired around the world is because local talent tends to become very expensive. If you want to hire an engineer in the Bay Area, a lot of the businesses I love and know don't actually make sense. When you run the numbers, if you're a software engineer, level two costs you $500k a year. Going global is just redistributing wealth and redistributing opportunities. It has definitely balanced this out a little bit, where very skilled people tend to get paid higher, but at the same time, you're not paying those people the same that you'd be paying in San Francisco.

I do think some companies are trying to do that. I'm not really sold on the long-term aspect of this. Again, I think businesses need to be profitable and you need to pay people fairly. And I just think various salaries are just out of control and that everything will come back, hopefully, to an equilibrium there. But in general, obviously, as large American, well-funded companies have entered markets, it's a great way to get people to leave their company. The company they leave locally is to pay them a lot more than what they would get paid there. So yeah, the trend is obviously right now, there's some form of a recession happening. So we've seen some people being like, but there's still a ton of money on the table that have been raised over the last few months. So we still continue to take that trend with data.

Host (Steph): Got it. And I want to hear from both Darren and Sondre, because you operate companies at scale with many employees, distributed all across the world, across dozens of countries. Sondre, why don't we start with you? How do you think about that within your organization?

Sondre Rasch: So we have opted for flat. And the argument for it would go something like this. Remote has made the world into a global labor market and most people just haven't realized that yet. So when we hire an extremely talented Bosnian genius software engineer, at the moment we hire them, they may be partly in their local labor market. But by the time they have SafetyWing on their LinkedIn and they know about working remotely as a software engineer and they're very good, they're in the remote labor market and they can apply to other jobs. So then I would say suddenly they're underpaid because it is a different labor market. The labor market is what are the participating employers and employees in a particular market. And they are of course affected because they also have the local employers that are competing at their salaries, but the global ones is where it's at. So I would say that's the direction. So we chose to skip to the end of the market equilibrium immediately, and we have a flat salary.

There's also some fairness, and I can understand there's pros and cons like the fairness argument in favor of local pays, living conditions. But with the people who work at SafetyWing, they're so mobile. So they move around the world, and it seems a bit like subsidizing a lifestyle choice. If someone chooses to move to San Francisco, yes, indeed, the salaries are off the hook there. The living costs are also off the hook here. Just like you wouldn't subsidize someone moving to an expensive neighborhood if they can—maybe we won't see the same about subsidizing moving to an expensive city. I think that fundamentally, it's the value of the contribution that will determine the market equilibrium over time. And so that's the choice we made.

Host (Steph): So if you're choosing this flat approach, how are you setting that? Is that based on where your HQ is? And if it is, if it's not an SF, are you finding that it's tough to hire some of the talent that is at those upper echelons?

Sondre Rasch: That kind of depends on what talent we're looking for. In our case, we are within the SF band, yes. But we're not on the top of the SF band. We're not competing with the highest paid engineers at Walmart. They have to pay more, but we are in that range, yes. And I think that seems to be where it's going right now. I kind of like Alex a bit baffled by that. I saw some data from Carter last month, which saw that U.S. jurisdictions were actually converging on San Francisco salaries in their data set, which is, of course, just a national U.S. data set. It's possible that is what will happen for the top talent in knowledge work. Because even if you live in some tiny town with 5,000 people, if you are an amazing machine learning engineer, you can still have a great job at Google. And maybe it is the most productive companies like them that will compete for you. So that might be what will happen, that we will converge on the top talent on the Bay Area salaries.

Alex Bouaziz: Well, it's mainly because people move and they don't know their managers, or people move and their managers are too scared to say, "You're now not in San Francisco. You're in a place that costs half the price." Having the conversation of, for fairness, I need you to re-equilibrate is very complicated as well. So I think that happens quite a bit too.

Host (Steph): I love that you brought that up because there is almost like a gamification of whatever system you're in. Where people are debating, both the company and the individual are debating how much information to share. Should we share exactly how we're calculating how people are paid? Or should we tuck that behind the belt? Should I tell my employer that I'm living actually in an outskirt of SF so it's not as expensive? Or should I tell them I'm living in SF? Or should I tell them I'm planning on moving to a much cheaper location? That information sharing is being adjusted because there is this very complex calculus that I think every company is going through now, at least the companies that are choosing to be distributed.

And Darren, I think you're the perfect person to speak to this because GitLab, at least for a period of time, had an open calculator. It actually showed exactly how people at GitLab were paid. Of course, names were removed. You don't know who's making this money. But you could actually say, "Hey, I'm a product designer of this tier living in this place." And it would spit out a number. And it was fascinating because it was open not just to employees, but the public. So I remember looking at a job a while ago, being like, "Oh, maybe I should work at GitLab." And I plugged in my information and I was like, "Okay, I know what I'm going to make if I work here." And I think GitLab maybe pulled that back a little bit. It might be public to your internal employees, but it's certainly not public to the outside world. But how did you think about that or how did the company think about sharing that information and how or why has that thinking maybe been adjusted?

Darren Murph: Yeah, so because GitLab is so rigorous about documentation, you can Google and find old blogs about how we call it the compensation calculator came to exist. And the calculator that you mentioned, Steph, it is still there. It is behind an employee firewall now. So everyone that works at GitLab has access to it. If you're a recruit, you're a candidate, you'll have access to it as well. In becoming a public company, there were certain things that were connected to that that just made more sense to have it there. But we still believe in the ethos of it.

Look, situational leadership applies here. The answer is it depends. It depends on the company. It depends on your industry. It depends on if you're already profitable or not. It depends on so many market factors. And it will probably change in a quarter or a year. We are at the earliest stages of a massive globalization shift. So pay attention. The one thing that I advise to leaders is to pay close attention to how expensive it is to rehire or regain top talent. There was this push early in the pandemic to think about cutting salaries if people moved from a high cost of market region to a lower cost of market region. But the truth is there are some ancillary costs with that. Rehiring, retraining, institutional knowledge that is lost, all of that ends up factoring into it.

Host (Steph): I think those are good points. And it isn't as simple as just location-based or not. But I do think that it's fascinating what you mentioned, Sondre, about what you're seeing about things actually moving to that upper echelon, because I think many people would expect the opposite to happen. Because as you make everything distributed, you do get access to talent elsewhere. And I'm sure many people have heard the trope of, you know, you can get equal talent for a third of the price. Maybe a trope may not be a trope. I've certainly heard of examples where that is true.

And on that note, Alex, I think it'd be interesting to hear from you about your global hiring report. How are we seeing different regions of the world shift based on their ability to be hired places or to hire from other places? Are there certain regions that we're seeing grow or shrink? Or how are those dynamics playing out at the larger level?

Alex Bouaziz: Yeah, in general, it depends on the roles. And generally, what I look at the most is engineering, because that's where talent is the most scarce. And we're definitely seeing quite a rise in salaries and in location. I'm saying that too much, to be honest. I think people are going to start really looking at the country. But Brazil, for example, has been an amazing place for talent from an engineering standpoint. And salaries have definitely gone up there. And you've got other amazing places like India, Colombia. Those are great places and a lot of people are hiring there. And in general, there's also different trends we're seeing around people going into more remote-friendly cities. That's also another thing that's quite interesting from a movement perspective.

But overall, the way you need to think, and the way I think about it, you're seeing definitely large hubs being created from top companies having been built in the market. So if you look at Brazil, you've got Nubank, amazing alumni, super great talent. They've built out the infrastructure. Same thing happened in India. Same thing happened in Uruguay with the local. And those talents are starting to spin out and realize, "Okay, I've learned a lot. I've worked in very successful companies in tech. I can now work for a global company that's going to increase my pay because I'm not locally competing anymore and have the same standard and the same approach and the same mindset and culture." That's very important. The same culture that a lot of the global employers really have. Generally, we're just seeing that all over the world, the top talent gets to work for the best companies. That's what we're here for. That's what we enable. It's been really interesting seeing some very obvious winners, which are just very tied to one strong rigor and strong engineering or strong educational ecosystem, like Eastern Europe or Latin America and others.

Host (Steph): Another thing that that reminded me of is in the effort to find top talent, companies also seem to be shifting their approach to vetting top talent. So something that I've noticed in the industry is a move from not necessarily getting rid of interviews, but also inserting a lot more assessment in the process of vetting top talent. And in addition to that, I've also seen some companies bring on someone as a contractor first because that infrastructure exists before they actually hire them full time as more of a vetting period. Have any of you seen elements of that within your companies or otherwise in terms of how people are actually shifting their approach in, again, not just attracting top talent, but vetting that talent?

Darren Murph: We like to say that no one accidentally ends up at GitLab. You very much self-select into it. And for us, it starts with documenting our strategy, our vision, so that there aren't any secrets. The worst possible outcome is you join a company and then six months in, you think, "Huh, their thought on flexibility isn't exactly compatible with mine." At the root of unhappiness is this misalignment between expectations and reality. And so in hiring, whatever you can do to create a clear view of what reality looks like at your company, the better.

So two great ways to do this. One is to pull up the values and operating principles page at some point during the interview and ask people, "What resonates? What do you love about this? What don't you love about this?" And you want to get clear early on if it's going to be compatible. You want to make sure that there's as much values and operating principle alignment as possible. And I've also spoken with some leaders at smaller organizations, some of whom are transitioning to remote. So part of their remit is going to be being a part of a massive company-wide change management program. And I've advised them to implement the boring solution, which is add a line item in the job description that says, "You are excited and enthused about being a part of building a new and innovative culture." And you want to bring that up. If someone shows up and they say, "No, I want to work in a place that's fully baked," then this probably isn't going to work for you. And especially for transitioning orgs, write it into the job description. You want people that will be galvanized, that come in as tailwinds, not apathetic or headwinds. And it's really critical if you're transitioning to make sure that you bring people on that want to be a part of that change.

Alex Bouaziz: When it comes to the technicalities themselves, you ask contractors, employees. I mean, this is something we deal with quite a bit. It depends on the infrastructure that people want to use. It depends on also the total cost of the person. Employing in France is much more expensive than employing in the US, for example. So I think most companies, most HR leaders, most CFOs, which we work with pretty closely, have different approaches that they built in terms of how do they scale their workforce in the country. So it's less in the case that we see, they don't really use—I mean, sure, I've seen some companies do a couple tests and pay you as a contractor before they bring you on as a full-time. But full-time in the remote work doesn't mean a full-time employee per se, it might mean different types of infrastructure which we support.

And to Darren's point, one of the things that's been really fun at Deel is now that we're starting to get larger, we've been working with Fortune 500 in terms of helping them understand what the future of work looks like. It's becoming very obvious that my sister, who's a couple of years younger, does not approach work the same way I did. And I don't approach work the same way my parents did. And it's very important for them to have the flexibility of understanding how do people work today? How do they set up from a compliance infrastructure? What do you need to do right in order to give the right flexibility to people to make sure that you can attract the top talent? And that's very, very much top of mind. And we're seeing much more organization being more mindful of that because the cost for them is not as large. It's just understanding to some extent what work structure balance means to those people and how to best facilitate that. And I mean, it does come down to what you mentioned earlier. So that has been quite a bit of fun. It's my new role.

Alex Bouaziz: working with those bigger companies and help them understand how to best play out the next couple of years when it comes down to how to roll out your organization.

Host (Steph): What are some of the gaps? Let's just take someone who works in the Fortune 500 who's been doing that for the last 30 years and who has a very concrete vision of what work has been in the past. Alex, what are some of those gaps in terms of things they might not know, things they might not understand, maybe things that they should be thinking about? Like how many days of the year can my full-time employees from a specific country be in another country? Are there things you're uncovering as you go through these conversations that you think more of these leaders should be thinking about?

Alex Bouaziz: I mean, there's tons. A very basic example is my employee wants to live in five different countries over the next year. There are much more complex cases than that, but that's a very basic one. We're seeing that a ton. A lot of people want to be digital nomads. I think Safety Wing started as an insurance for digital nomads as well. That was quite a while ago. And that's a super complex case. Tell a Fortune 500 CHRO, "I'm going to live three months there, four months there, three months there." You're going to give that team a headache. And there are so many of those cases. That one is the most obvious. But there are so many cases where those organizations don't even have the tools to support this type of infrastructure. A lot of the time, they don't even comprehend it. They expect you to come to the office from nine to five. If you're going past that, it's sometimes very complex for them to even process. So it's a culture shift that I believe is going to be necessary because of the workforce of tomorrow. But it's also a tool shift. This is why you've got companies like ours.

Sondre Rasch: I can definitely confirm that. For the Nomad product, we have 100,000 customers, and they cluster. Actually, Alex mentioned from his survey, you can see they're kind of choosing cities and countries a bit like people choose products. That's a secondary effect of remote work that is emerging. It's one of the interesting things about our time. You definitely see a lot of them struggling if they work in a Fortune 500, with frustrated HR departments trying to figure out how to square this new reality with rules and systems that are often obsolete to deal with it.

Host (Steph): It's so true that some of the rules and systems are either obsolete or outdated. There are terms like overtime which just don't really apply in many scenarios as it relates to remote work. To speak to some of the things you were mentioning, Alex, I worked for a large enterprise company prior to this, and they were figuring that out. They had a policy where you could spend 90 days outside of your country or your base that you're being paid out of. But they also had a restricted list. I'm Canadian, and Canada was on the restricted list. It was so fascinating to me because I was like, "Wait, I'm Canadian and I can't go back to Canada and work there?" They said, "No, because you're an American employee." I think they ended up opening offices in Canada. But there are just so many intersecting regulations and so many people, companies, and governments trying to catch up to what we're working with here. I like that you said "square the circle," Sondre. How do you actually figure some of this out? Because some of the rules are just not written yet. So, Alex, how are some of these leaders getting this information? Is it just about Googling the right things? Is it about talking to people like you who have the information from many other companies? What does someone do if they're in that position?

Alex Bouaziz: There are a couple of things. Most C-levels are heads-off. Companies usually have their own networks of people that they ask. Between sharing policies or some people will do the work and then share it with others. We've seen quite a bit of that. I think every company is adopting different types of policies. I'm quite close to a few people that used to be at GitLab, so I know the playbook pretty well in terms of contractors, employees, or opening your own entities. Each company kind of defines their own things and then shares it. There's no real source of truth for that, which we're trying to define to some extent. There are a couple of players in the industry trying to define the best practice on how to do this right. The complexity is navigating international laws at scale. They very much differ from a country to another. Sometimes they differ from a state to another. There is no right answer yet. It's just a matter of building the right content and working. We're at a stage where we're starting to work with governments in terms of establishing those rules as well, which is quite interesting. Instead of working in a gray area of, "Hey, my worker is moving from a country to another. I want to hire them in that country, but I don't have the right infrastructure." I think we're getting to a critical point where a lot of governments, not all yet, are realizing that there's an opportunity. There are a ton of governments that are being super helpful so that more people see them as attractive countries. There are a couple of things playing in their hands, like Brexit. I don't know if everyone would agree with that, but from a talent standpoint, a lot of amazing people left the UK and they had to find the next best place for themselves. A lot of countries, France being one of them, have an amazing tax incentivization to make you come back to the country or move to the country. Lots of countries are being very forward about this. Recently, we did a pretty large partnership with the UAE as they looked at the market and said, "We want the best talent to come, and we're going to make it easy for them to come." We're now able to process visas in like five to seven days for very talented people. That part is super interesting. As governments become more forthcoming on this and they really want to help, I think companies are going to get more comfortable with the models. That's why I love my job. We're exactly at the right place on that front. There were no rules years ago. There were no tools two years ago. There were a couple, but they were not to the standard that you and I are expecting. Now we're getting to build out the infrastructure that's very much needed. Similarly on the health insurance place, it's the Wild West. It's very hard to build a global team and give great health insurance. Across the whole stack, there are so many amazing companies to be built.

Sondre Rasch: I'd have to underline that. Being on that same frontier that Alex is, how fluid and willing the countries are these days to do things is actually amazing. We didn't invent it, but we've been a promoter of the nomad visa thing. The first country implemented it in 2020, Barbados. Now 50 countries have implemented it. A member of our team spoke at the floor of the United Nations about it three months ago, and multiple countries have reached out for us to help them set it up. Because like Alex said, they're looking to get the upside of this new world. They want to attract the nomads. They want to attract remote workers. They want to attract the remote companies. They see this as a great opportunity. That dynamic has really kicked into gear where people want to succeed in the new world, and they're so much more fast-moving than I thought possible just a few years ago.

Host (Steph): Well, competition will do that to you. Now that they realize they are competing for talent to a degree, I liked the analogy that one of you gave, which is that these countries or states or nations effectively need to orient as products. How do we reduce the friction for people to interact with us? How do we make our documentation really seamless? The same way we talked about documentation for a company. How do people know what they can or can't do with us? Because if that's not clear, they're just going to go to the next state and work with them. That's both on the individual level of moving to those places, but also the company level. Can we hire in your jurisdiction? Can our employees spend part of their time there? It's a fascinating question to ask, and we're obviously going to see a lot of new infrastructure come to be in the next couple of years.

[Discussion continues]

Host (Steph): I want to end off on this idea of infrastructure. We are in this new paradigm. We're seeing the sea shift of many people asking good questions about what is to come because not all of it is defined. We're not here to predict the future, but I'm curious to hear from each one of you if there are gaps, very clear gaps that you see in the current market. Whether it's the ability to hire, the ability to move or live in places as an employee that need to be solved or should be solved in the next couple of years in order to really elevate this distributed workforce. Just to give a very simple example, if we think about second and third order effects, something we've seen happen as more people start to work remotely and less office infrastructure is required, we see a big shift happening from office space to residential space. That's one industry where if people are interested, there's opportunity there. Are there other areas that you see almost being surfaced from this sea change where you think, "Okay, we need a company there. We need a founder to think about that question." What infrastructure is missing?

Sondre Rasch: I'm a bit wild on these topics. City building is definitely opened up. I've seen resorts being remade into remote work resorts. I've seen hotels being remade into co-work, co-living situations across Asia that's happening now at a big pace. There are several cities being founded. There are a couple of castles in Europe being readmitted to towns. There's a city being attempted to start outside of Texas. This hasn't happened for 100 years. I think this is a fascinating development because I really want to see what kind of new cities people will build. It's been so long since the last big population redistribution. So that's one. Number two, I would say legal, law, credit scores. These are the basics of being able to enter into contracts. Imagine you sign a contractor agreement with someone today and you don't use any service like Deel, or you buy something on the internet. It will say this is arbitrated in Delaware. Not exactly sure what it says on the contract, but you're a company from Hong Kong and your customer or contractor is in Argentina. It's not going to work. So you need legal arbitration for things like labor contracts and other things. That's an area where I would love to see someone begin. As well as credit scores to unlock the ability for nomads or people who work on the internet to get loans and mortgages that haven't been made yet. The entire internet economy is still built on a kind of trustless basis. But you can unlock massive new categories on the internet once you solve the trust-giving infrastructure that's beneath it. So that's my third request.

Alex Bouaziz: I've actually been working on Exacit for a couple months now, so I'm very excited about it. It's a very simple idea: banks don't understand you because you're not an employee working 9 to 5 at a company in France. They don't understand you. That's why I've seen so many people want to work as independent contractors because it's a better setup for them, but they're being forced into an employer of record model or a local employee model because banks are just not going to look at them if they don't have the right credit score or the right infrastructure. So I actually love this idea. I'm very biased because I'm very focused on compliance and all of those things. There are so many things that need to be built there, from equity globally. We're trying to do parts here, but it's such an interesting topic where most people don't really understand. That's the next layer. You enable companies to hire, but then now they want to understand global equity issuing and how they actually do that. I think there's a huge market there that's up for the taking for a new type of company to go for. In my perspective, it's the rush to gold. Build shovels. There are so many things that can be built in this space. Even though it feels like there are a couple of companies building up that stack, there are so many smaller things, even at a country level, that can be built. There's a company called Rebase that just helped build a simple tool for you to set up in Portugal. Those are amazing companies that need to be built. I'm excited to see how many, especially as more people are starting to be much more entrepreneurial and willing to build smaller products. The whole bootstrap environment and wave in general is going to enable a lot of great entrepreneurs to build hammers in the space that solve one problem really well. There are so many of those. It's very exciting.

Darren Murph: All right, I'll give you two companies and a product. The first is a company that employs life designers, life agents. Think of a travel agent, but for life. In the past, you might say, "I have a week of vacation. I should call a travel agent and ask where should I go." But now, if you can live and work anywhere in the world, that's kind of daunting for a lot of people. What if you've never designed your life? What if you've just let an HR department tell you what city you're going to live in, and they significantly constrain your options? There's not a lot to think about. This is incredibly debilitating and perplexing for a lot of people. I think there's an opportunity there for someone to come in and ask people a lot of questions to really get a bead on what fulfills them, what makes up their purpose portfolio, and then give them a slimmed-down set of options on where they could go to have the most impact in a community, to be the most fulfilled. Help them think about things they might not be thinking about now that their career and physical location are more decoupled. That's one. The second one is a riff on something I heard on My First Million, which is Ocean's 11 teamwork, but for knowledge workers. In Ocean's 11, there's a heist that needs to happen, and there are a lot of backdoor conversations on getting exactly the right team together for exactly the right project. Now that knowledge workers can work anywhere in the world, I see an opportunity for six or seven people to only ever want to go in with the same six or seven people to be the absolute best at very specific projects. I think that's very interesting. There's some interesting arbitrage that could happen there. So that's two companies. The product: decision-making. I believe we have some massive challenges ahead of us as a society. I'm an adoptive dad, so the orphan crisis is front and center for me. I see tens of millions of people going remote, and I think they could use that recaptured commute time to make a big dent in the orphan crisis. People who may have been called to foster or adopt, but it's too hard, their schedule's too rigid, so they just opt out entirely. Now all of a sudden, these people are back in that market. There are probably a lot of other crises that I'm less familiar with. What's at the heart of stopping people from doing this, especially in organizations, is the speed at which they're able to make really informed decisions. As companies get more distributed, unless you're very intentional about that decision-making framework and infrastructure, this can become really complicated and difficult. It slows things down. There's less rapport. So I think there's something interesting in this decision-making framework that helps people really leverage a distributed network of people to move faster with smaller iterations through two-way doors. It's going to be a different management philosophy, but if we can make smaller decisions, faster decisions, and with deeper conviction, I think we can solve a lot of these problems that our society as a whole is challenged with.

Host (Steph): I just want to highlight something that relates to what we talked about earlier, which is the meeting philosophy that GitLab has, which only works if you have a clear decision maker. You can't have these asynchronous meetings where everyone gives their feedback, but then you have to do a decision by committee. The only way that works is having these clear decision makers who at the end of the day are required to take feedback, but are not required to incorporate it in the final decision. I thought that was an interesting way to think about that being foundational to that way of working even being possible. I loved hearing all three of you talk through different opportunities because even as you were talking through things that needed to be implemented or things that were missing in this infrastructure, the wheels were just spinning. There are so many interesting things from fractionalized real estate to land use policy. The final thing I wanted to say is I'm very excited about how our dependence on companies changes. I think it relates to something you're working on at Safety Wing, Sondre. In the past, especially in the United States, your ability to get health care or something you spoke to, Alex, your ability to even get a loan or a line of credit is based on your job, your employment relationship. That naturally will change as top talent becomes more independent and has many relationships with many employers and many other people, like your example, Darren. So I think that's an interesting thing for people to consider: how does that relationship change? How do people have a new type of model with work? Before we end things off, are there any closing thoughts on the future of work that any one of you wanted to share?

Darren Murph: I learned a lot. I thought this was awesome. I would encourage leaders who are leaning into the future of work to pay attention to folks on this call. People are being awesome about building in public. There's no defined playbook. We're building this in real time. Leverage that. Look at this as an opportunity instead of through the lens of scarcity and fear. This is an exciting time to be alive and building teams.

Alex Bouaziz: Add on to that. Remote work for me is just work. If you want to be a top-performing organization over the next few years, if you want to make sure companies like ours don't take your best talent, you've got to have the right infrastructure to be flexible. If not, we'll be there and we'll take good care of your employees.

Host (Steph): All right. On that note, we can close things off. If you don't keep up with the very quickly evolving space of work, not necessarily remote work or distributed work, some company out there will probably eat your lunch. Thank you, Darren, Alex, and Sondre for taking the time today. We will include where people can find you in the show notes, and we will include all types of resources like the GitLab handbook and the Deel Global Hiring Report. Thank you guys. This was very fun and informative.

Darren Murph: Thanks all.

Alex Bouaziz: Thanks for having us.

Sondre Rasch: Thanks everyone.

Host (Steph): Thanks for listening to the a16z podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com slash a16z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.