Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of be remote podcast. I'm your host Pushpak. And today we have with us Mr. Shyam nagarajan. Shyam is a CEO and founder of gofloaters. And go floaters is India's largest on demand Office Space Platform in India. Welcome to the show...........
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Hey, thanks for short. Thanks for having me on your podcast. And the remote is one area where that me and entier team at Coppola's extremely passionate about so extremely happy to be on a podcast that is also on this topic of being remote. I'm doing good. Thanks for having me. And how are you doing?I'm doing good, it is a pleasure talking to you. And thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah, so tell us about go floaters like what exactly go floters? And like, how did you started it? And what were you doing before? right. So So I became an entrepreneur in may 2017, to be more precise, right. And prior to that, I was actually having some leadership roles in Cognizant. So I was the head of innovation at Cognizant insurance practice. And the director there at Cognizant so. So I've been, and I entered the workforce in 2000. Joe, so it's so after roughly around 20 years of working for Infosys and companies like Infosys and Cognizant I decided to kind of kind of call it quits of the corporate world and then said that I'm going to kind of try some something on my own right. So the CIO kind of held various leadership positions in Cognizant did a lot of interesting stuff, there was an intrapreneur at Cognizant, which is where I actually got the Holy Spirit, the confidence, the courage to kind of become an entrepreneur, right. So I had developed a product and it kind of took the product to the market, me and my team to create and then we were able to get a good revenue from that, right. So after doing a lot of these things, to in 17, the right time came for me to kind of look beyond a job, right, look beyond that, and kind of look at entrepreneurship as a way to address some of the aspirations that I had in my mind, right. My first startup was not go floaters. So in May, I had started another company, or another startup, which is the insurance space, it doesn't insure tech startup in short, what I was trying to do is like make insurance easy for companies, right. So insurance companies is still very complicated in India. Only 1% of companies in India, SMB, specifically in India, have a have an insurance 19% of our underinsured or don't have insurance, which means that any loss hits them really hard, right, thereby reducing their ability to bounce back from from a catastrophic event, right. So I started to address that gap that is there in the Indian market. And in the process of doing that is when the opportunity of CO photos kind of surfaced, right, or kind of became more apparent and more clear in my mind. And in December 2017, I decided to put a pause on my insure tech startup, and then focus full time on co floaters. And ever since December 2017. Me and my team have been working on core floaters full time, right. Now, the question, why did we start go floaters? That you asked me, right? So basically, after he became an entrepreneur, right? See, I mean, traveling back and forth to an office has always been a painful point for me, right? I used to live in one part of Chennai, my office used to be another part of Chennai. On every day, I would waste probably two hours of productive time and just traveling back and forth, right? I lost a home half date and not not have energy to do other other things that I would wish to do. Right. So office, traveling back and forth from an office was always a painful experience for me. But I can have some some hope. Let it be that way. But the moment I became an entrepreneur, having an office kind of become became a lot more counter intuitive for me, right? Because here I was, I was traveling, I was meeting a lot of people across Chennai, I was traveling on an everyday would be traveling like, on my bike or my car, I would travel like critical amateurs meet like 545 people in that they would be mentors or they would be potential investors, or they would be potential co founders or be interviewing people or interviewing potential customers, or talking to them, right. So I would be traveling right? So it kind of hit me hard saying that. I didn't have a waste. I didn't have a place to go to be productive. During that my travels, right? The only place I could go to a cafe coffee day or a Starbucks and order a coffee or order a frappuccino and sit there like drink it really really slowly so that I can I can get one hour of time towork on that then there was a there must be this co working spaces.So they were co working spaces, right but you had to kind of get into a contract with them. You have to get into a lease with them right? Or they were very few I'm Rachel Dixon, I had like four or five co working spaces at that point in time, and every city had a few co working spaces that their current time rate. So, but wherever I would go, right, if I had good if I went to one production a that that area wouldn't have anything off the chart, right? So I had to kind of get into a Starbucks or a cafe coffee or a similar outlet, spend 500 rupees, right just to sit for one hour, right? So that entire thing kind of got extremely frustrating for me to said, then they start to look for alternative solutions, like you said, co working, do co working facilities offer me the solution that I want, right? They didn't offer me the solution that I want, right? Are there other other platforms like an Uber or Ola that have something like this, right? So I couldn't I couldn't get anything there. So for one month, I was trying to figure out a solution for this. And suddenly, in December, I decided, Okay, I'm going to build a solution for myself, right? I don't have a solution that fits my need. So I'm going to, I'm going to, and while I was getting frustrated with this problem, that I also started to think deeply into this problem, right? technology is helping us work from anywhere, right, or when we are not at the same room, but we still like conversing on a video call, right? So there is no need to actually have an office and make everybody go to the office and make them work in a nine to six chagrin, all that work for the industrial age. If you have a factory, if you have a paper based setup, that's all fine, right? But for a knowledge working company, right, specifically for a startup, right? Having an office does not have a lot of sense. Any financial sense to have an office, right? So I can have predicted five years from now, right? If people are going to be distributed, people are going to work from wherever they want, people are going to work from home, or the people are going to work from near home facilities, right? Our current commodity of office does not currently office is available to all of us is not actually going to fit the need of the future. Right. So this kind of was interesting problem for me to solve said, Okay, how would office look like five years from now, right? Or 10 years from now? How would office look like it would still be something that you would take on on the on a lease or on a long term contract? Or would office be like an Uber or Ola, right, I just go to an app and just say I need an office and they get an office, right? So that was very exciting and interesting. And me and Trey Watson said, Hey, that this is a problem that's like worthy enough of spending time and energy and money in solving it. And that's what we started to solve in December 2017. Right. And we were projecting a world 10 years from now will be remote, right will be semi remote or hybrid reward, right? And COVID has just come in and then change the entire equation for us. And suddenly, like everybody's talking about robot working every company, irrespective the size of stock, working on that, so So things have gotten extremely fast paced, because of the pandemic. So that's a silver lining.So hoping my new started go Florida, so that you started from office, or you were a distributed team at that time, only at that time also. Soyeah, like I said, right, so having an office did not make sense from the day one. So from day one, we have been remote, we never had an office, obviously, we had an office to register the company as a virtual office. But beyond that, we've never had an office to call, call it our home, per se. Before the pandemic, in each city, the teams, the team members were in that city would meet once a week and once a week in one of our spaces and sit together and work, right. And so the five days will all be like working remotely, right. And during the pandemic even that has come down. So we've been 100% remote through the pandemic and even now, right so yeah, so we never had an office. And this kind of meant that we could actually hire talent from wherever we wanted. So I have a developer from Jodhpur, I have a developer from erode, which is down so we have a we have a core team member operating out of Hyderabad, they have another core team member have operating out of Bangalore, my own co founders in Dallas in Texas, in a completely different time zone. Right. So so we are kind of, in two continents across six cities, across to say the beauty of remote work. Yeah, I mean, that's so the moment you kind of moment, you kind of take the mindset of being all together, right? And making all together work, right? The moment you kind of take that, take that out, right? And say that, yes, being together as a great being coming together and sitting in one place and working is great. But you compromise on so many other things to be to make that happen. Right? So rather than making those compromises, if you can just make your team work around this 100% remote model, you get to gain a lot more things and you lose eventuallyas well as I thought because I think starting a remote company from the scratch and building the team remotely. It is like it is also a big challenge right? So how or like so when you started it, and it was your first company and it was completely remote. So I think it must be a huge challenge for you like hiring Different from other things. So how was that? You know, the one a coupleof couple of things that helped us right one, first and foremost, me and my co founder, right? Because that's the, your founders or your partners or are we have to gel together through all situations, right? Or good or bad and, and lockdown was, was extremely bad for us, because we are giving space and all the offices that appreciate all the CO working space attention on all the other parties. So basically, so you I mean, the the test of your team actually happens when when you're going through a bad patch, right? So first and foremost, me and co my co founder, were extremely comfortable. Because we have worked together in the past, right, both of us started our careers together in forces. We both have worked together for three, four years. First, first few projects, we both are our teammates in the project, right. And I've known Shri Watson for almost 20 years, ever since right. And both of us from Infosys, we both joined Cognizant, we were in the same department. So we have so basically for me, and she wasn't being together or not being together, did not matter at all. So that's the first thing, right? Because it all starts from there. Right? If if the founder is not comfortable working remote, then your team is not gonna be comfortable working remote. Right? So that's the first thing. Second thing is like, since we had decided to be remote from day one, right? So we will also hiring for people who who were more of individual operators, right? People who could take take things on themselves and run around the race for themselves, right, rather than somebody sitting on top of them and making them drop, right. So a lot of people that we hired were actually independent professionals, or they were freelancers, right, who are running their own, who are responsible for their own time and money that they generate and all that. So these are individual performance. We just had to assemble them and bring them together and make them work, right. So a lot of the people who who we hired had already experienced remote in a particular way. Right. And we ensured that as we as part of the hiring process, we also took only people who were self starters, right? Who could, who could, who could break things down, right? You give them a large initiative, you can break things down, you can plan it, well, who can orchestrate it? Well, who can take full ownership of whatever they take up? Right? And so we hired only those people who could really do that, right? And like I said, this COVID the entire pandemic is, like, all those people who could do do it really well have kind of stayed on, right, who who have like, survived through the same people who couldn't manage that. had to leave, right, so. So that's that, so things happen, right. And there's still a very small team, we was we were a small team, before pandemic, we are still a small team after pandemic so. So a lot of things start to break when you scale really fast, right? When you add more team members, you have to like add a lot of people and you don't have a face to face, right the distance between your the junior most person and the founder that distance if increases then things get get really messy, right. But we are fortunately not in that situation yet to kind of let those things happen.So what was the best and worst aspect of you know, working remotely for you and for your employees for the for us.So the best part is like we're all we're all a sync right? So and so not everybody needs to start the day at the same time, not everybody needs to end the day at the same time, we all have the flexibility to start stop, start stop whenever we want. So I have my own schedule. My co founder has his own schedule, everybody has their own schedule right? So that's the best part right all of us have flexibility to work the times that we are most productive at right rather than kind of sticking to a nine to five or nine to six so that's number one. Number two, I already mentioned the variable to be able to hire wherever the talent was rather than only hiring people who can come and join us in a city right so so flexibility of tapping a global talent actually existed and financially speaking since we are a startup you saved a lot of money not paying rent to somebody right So on one hand we are having an office and manage the office ensure that wifey is running AC is running. The maid comes in cleans the floor, we don't even think have to think about the entire thing is like the whole thing is unlocked unlocked for us, right. So those three would be I think the three biggest advantages of being remote. Right? The biggest The disadvantage is being at the end of the day, all of us are human beings, right? We do belong we do on for sitting with somebody, right? pulling their leg, right? Having a coffee conversation, right going out for lunch together. So those are things that you do you do miss sometimes right when you are not when you're not physically with it with your team, right? And certain things do get a little bit more trickier. Like for example, during the pandemic, we're actually pivoting to a different company so those brainstorming sessions were a little difficult to do remote without whiteboard without a common shared mind space. It's difficult to kind of throw ideas, react to ideas or experiment with ideas and all that. So things do get a little tricky when you when you do everything remote, which is why I actually go for it as is helping a lot of companies be remote when they want to be remote at the same time be co located when they want to be co located. Right. So we are able to help a lot of companies solve the problem. But we ourselves are not in a position to do that. Because we are not in the same city in the first place. Right. So we're all like, so widely spread across that. Meeting everybody. Everybody coming together is like once in a year event for us.Yeah, so do you guys have this kind of meetups, like once a year you want me?Yeah, so once a year touchwood. So far every year for the last three years. We meet fortunately, we did this before the Lord don't. So January, my co founders had come down from the US. So we all met in Chennai. We were all together in one room for like a week and a half to two weeks, right and sat together, fought with each other, resolved all the conflicts that we had. So every year year we make it we make it we ensure that we all meet in one place. Each year the city is different sorts of last year it was Bangalore or last year last year it was Bangalore last year it was Chennai so we cannot keep keep trying to ensure that we are we meet in different cities so that those city members don't have to travel that either, right. So that's that's the pattern. And like I said before, pandemic, before the lockdown, we each city we used to meet every week, sit together and work Kerberos and CNA would meet in Chennai, one day, one day of the weekend, to sit together and work and all that that we have stopped doing now, because of the health concerns and allthat good. Yeah. So how do you measure productivity of the employees? Ifsee, for us, like being a very small team? Like I said, right? First of all, if you've done the hiring correctly, right, I said like you hire people who take full ownership of what they what our job is given to them. Right? And who know the importance of what they're doing, right? who and who know the larger picture, right? Why are they Why is this important to the company? Right? Why is this important to this initiative, right? We just measure it by I know it's a cliche to say we measure outcome. But basically, hey, this is what we need to do. This is the timeline, right? As long as you get it done, that's fine, right? Whether you're spending five hours a day, or you're spending 10 hours a day, or you're taking ministry is often working on on a Saturday, or working on a Sunday, we don't really care either. We meet every Monday, where everybody is everybody's accountable to everybody else in the team, right? We do a zoom call, we do a google meet video call every Monday, sorry, every Tuesday, sorry, every Tuesday we used to do on Mondays, but we do it on Tuesdays. So today, we have a call at six, six to seven o'clock. So that everybody is accountable to everybody else. So everybody can report what they have done, where they are, where they are with it, and how long they think it's going to take and all the rage. So And apart from that. So we don't assign tasks to people, we are saying initiatives to people. So we don't say hey, you have to write this blog, right? So to my content person who just say, your initiative as to why you should drive traffic to the website, through blogs through solid content, right. And you drive that initiative, right? So I don't care whether you write 10 blogs, or you write five blogs, whether you produce two blogs a week, or you produce like one really good blog one week, I don't really care it objective is to increase traffic. So our website traffic on blogs should increase from this percentage, this number per month to this month number per month, right? So that's all we do, right? Or we are launching a new product, and this product has to go live with the state. And which means that these five things have to happen. And that's given to somebody right? So then we don't kind of go and say, Did you did you do this task? Right? Or were you supposed to do this last week? You don't do it? Why did you not do it? So we don't get into that kind of discussion? Again, because we have a fairly experienced team. Right? So you know, really what they have signed up for, right? And who really know what they their roles and what their contributions mean to the company. Right? So they're able to kind of self actuate themselves and self motivate themselves to get get the work done. Right. So and I The other thing is like once you've done that, you just need to trust people and let them be there themselves. Right. So we I really do have me and my co founder did do this mistake earlier on where sometimes sometimes when things were a little rough, we started to kind of micromanage stuff. And then we got a very solid feedback from the team saying that, Hey, you, you hired me, why are you Mike micromanaging? Great? I know what I have to do, right? So some of our team members came back to us and gave us a very strong answer. And very, very strong feedback saying that don't micromanagers you're given us a job you hide you, as long as you trust us. And you know that you've done that right hiring, just leave it, leave it to us, right? Don't Don't be so protective of your baby and try to know when managing Yeah. So So the moment we realized that we were doing that we let let it go, right. And things have been perfect from that. Right. So so so rather than worrying for the heavy slip today, we slipped yesterday, or we're behind by two days of time or whatever, right. So we don't we don't get to that level at all right? Are we? Are we going the right direction? Are we making Prague significant? significant progress? Is the progress are we proud of what we're doing? Right? Are we doing justice to what we're doing? That's all we can try and measure? Amazing.That's really awesome. So what's one thing that we're really curious about remote work and the future of work like this industry, basically?Yeah, so I think it's going to be extremely interesting to see, see, remote working, we're just peeling the onion on that, right. So helping people work from anywhere is just the just the starting point of it, right? There are obviously going to be a lot of lot of things that have to come into place to make remote working really work, right. One thing is to just I mean, forced work from work from home has its has its own pluses and minus rate, of course, so I think this entire space is going to have a lot more innovation coming up to help people work from anywhere, really, at the same time not have the challenges of being feeling lonely, or the mental wellness challenges that we see today. Right? The board of the VC with people a lot of productivity dropping, because people are just too stressed nowadays, because of them and all that, right. So so it will be an interesting time has to how each company configures their policies, their way of working to remote working right. And the good thing and the bad thing is that there's no one solution, right? have a solution for crew scale cannot work for go floaters, reticle solution, the cofounders desk cannot work for anybody. We just have to inspire, get inspired with each other and try, experiment, experiment that in our own companies and see what sticks and what works, right. So the next five years, I believe, are next at least two years for sure. If not, but five years is going to be like every company is going to experiment with this remote work model. And they are going to go to bring in technology to help tide over some of these challenges, right? So it's going to be extremely interesting to see what kind of new solutions Come come come to light, right? And how companies are configuring reconfiguring the way they work and all that right. But then I feel that future of work, the question that you asked is like, I mean, extremely hopeful that the future of work is going to be a lot more beneficial to not just Metro cities and tier one cities, right? Because no talent has gone back to their native cities, right. So people who used to come and work in Bangalore have now probably gone back to Mysore or they're gone back to go, they've gone back to back whichever city they came from. Right. So which means that no, they are actually seeding an entrepreneurial culture within their own hometown, right? So somebody was gone back, like somebody who's working in let's say, Uber, right in Bangalore, right? Or Flipkart in Bangalore, let's know. They relocated back to Komodo, right. So now at some point in this person is going to start their own company, or they're going to venture on the road, right? And they will bring they will kind of it's more like germinating of seeds, right. So when, when a coconut falls in a river and it travels a few miles and then goes to shore, right, and you have another coconut tree down the shore. Right? So I think now that moment is happening now. Right? Where from large companies that were working in the metros, a lot of tech talent was concentrated these metros, a lot of intellectual talent and innovation was like, from there right now that's germinating and spreading to other cities in other parts of India. Right. So I think the the entrepreneurial startup ecosystem in India has to benefit from all of that, right? Where now it's like, it will be a lot more distributed than just the cities being the hub of activity, which means that they hire people from locally which means that quality of talent in those local towns will improve, which means that the colleges those towns will improve, which means the job opportunities will improve, which means a way of life instead of life will improve those cities. Right. So I think just this entire mode, working on hybrid remote working, and work from life has led to a lot more repercussions, positive repercussions than just the flexibility of people being able to work from anywhere, right. And, and, and it will truly become a meritocracy this world, right. Irrespective of where you are as long as you're you're a good salesperson or a good marketer or developer or a good team. Guy. Right You can you can work from anywhere. and succeed in your role, right? So it will be true merit than who is like closer to proximate to the boss, right? Who, who sees the boss every day or who, who's in the office and clocking like, comes in at 6am and goes at 10pm, right becomes the employee of the month or employee. That's not the case, it's to merit will survey. So that we like future work is super exciting for me. And from that point of view, of course, of course,because I actually am at a small town right now I work in our companies in Bangalore, and I am a small town where only 20,000 people live. But I'm recording all my podcasts from here only and like people from globally basically come like we are recording all this podcast on zoom meetings.So yeah, so that that's, that's all you need, right? So the moment you kind of retune your mindset, to remote work setup, right? I think will kind of fall in place them only when you're, you're in a confused state, a should a Hey, I want the office, but I have to live with this. No, this is a, this is a necessary evil. When you consider the war to work as a necessary evil, then things don't work. Right. But one moment you consider it as a competitive advantage for your company, or or or, or that's the only way that things will happen. Right? then things start, you start to figure out solutions for everything and anything that comes your way. Yeah,so what did you learn from starting a company like which you wouldn't have learned from anywhere? See,the first and foremost is like, like I told you, right, my, my first five of my 20 years of my professional life was working for companies, right? Where, where, even though I could call myself an intrapreneur, right, you're still a lot of support systems that protect you from a lot of things. Right. Right. And then when you're doing a b2b product, right? When you're developing a software for a large enterprise, right? You don't you're not actually working with the customer, right? You're not working with the user, you're working with a proxy proxy individual who claims to know what the actual user wants, right. But then the moment we started go for does it as a b2c company, right? So there was a lot of, so we we learned the hard way, by in terms of my first startup in Italy, which is an inshore tech startup, right? So I had a lot of learnings from my first startup, and which I could apply fortunately, to my second startup, so for example, so first learning what we would be to kind of launch as quickly as possible, right? Because you can't assume that you know, everything, right? The moment you assume that, you know, everything, that's probably the start of your end, right? You always have to kind of ask the question to your customer or potential customers to Is this what you want, right? This is what is going to solve your problem, right? And how much do you value? If I give you a solution for this? How much do you value? That solution? Right? So it has to be a constant iterative process in developing a solution or taking a product to a market, right? So with my first startup, I spent six months never launched. Right? Technically, the product never launched. Right? With my second startup, December 12, I decided to work on it December 14, we already launched in two days, 48 hours, we are only launched right and the winner. So and the other thing that I learned and I corrected us like not to get fixated by perfection, right? Hey, this we are launching something it has to be perfect as to the blue has to be blue button has to be this color, this radius has to be this radius. So this screen has to load so fast. Now let's kind of trying to trying to optimize for perfection is the wrong variable, right? The only variable that you need to optimize for is to the speed at which you can launch. Right? And thereby, how quickly can you ask a question that you don't have an answer for it? How quickly can you validate your assumptions are how quickly can you validate your hypothesis? Right? So that's the only thing that you need to optimize your entire company for right? marketing Be it sales, be it product, be it operations, everything should be optimized to asking the question putting, putting in front of putting what you have whatever you want to put in front of the customer. And then would you pay for this right? Or would you do so basically, right, so that so that is my biggest learning because in when you work for a large company, right? To your projects, five year projects, multi year projects, kind of keep running. That's the that's the nature of the business when you have a new song from an enterprise. But a startup is exactly opposite of it. Right? So So now like we think of something in a week, we don't launch it, we're doing something wrong, right. So we think of something we put it to put it into the put it experiment launch right will be the beta content will be the website change or beta content marketing strategy, or beta social media strategy or beta product feature. Everything has to happen quickly, right? And that's one big biggest learning, right? And the second, the other big, big learning is like, don't hold, don't get fixated by the solution that you've built, right? always kind of look at the problem that you're solving. Because this pandemic has told us that we were approaching to solve, we were approaching this to solve it in a different way, right? The pandemic new opportunities come up right there. So if you're too quickly, rather than get a bottle, hey, I build this legacy. Have the so much of revenue coming from the seven year stream? Should I leave it right? Should I jump to something else and start from scratch, right? So all these things, the moment you kind of fix your mind on some legacy that you've built, right and attach yourself too much to it, right? Yeah, you lose the athlete, you lose the agility and flexibility to be able to kind of quickly adapt to a new opportunity. Right, right. That's another thing that we I learned the hard way that I could fortunately implement, we could fortunately be able to during all the times that we've had,yeah, so our last four questions for you. So what are you really into outside of work?Outside of work, few things, music. I listen to a lot of instrumental music. Singer few sing for myself, for my family play the bamboo flute for myself and my family. So generally, music is one part of life. I used to be a play a lot of table tennis, but logged on has put a little bit of a hold on that. But playing table tennis would be another recreation. I listened to a lot of podcasts, and a lot of audiobooks. Right. I don't read much, because the moment they start reading a book, I feel sleepy. So I read less, but I listened. Listen a lot more. Right? So whenever I'm driving, or whenever I'm sitting by myself, and I was about to ask you your favorite book? Yeah, yeah, I know. I can tell you my audio book, right. Like I said, I don't I don't read. I don't I don't read books so much. I would love to but just like, you I read, I read 15 pages, then there's a five week break. Right? Then I go back to the first page and read start again. Right. So just that does not work for me. Right. So yeah, so so those are the some of the other things that I get to do when I have never had time for doing that. Right. Yeah. So I listened to things that I'm so I listen to a lot of things that that I don't, I don't have any knowledge, I literally listen to a lot of marketing podcasts. Because I don't know anything about marketing. And I want to learn about marketing. So my guess on SEO or on performance marketing, around referral marketing, so we listen to a lot of podcasts in the marketing space. I also listen to a lot of podcasts and that talk about in VPS, and experimentation and scaling. Right? How do you scale your startup? How do you so those are some things that I listen to? Right? When I used to be pitching a lot of pitching to a lot of angels? Before that I used to listen to a lot of pitch related podcasts and videos and all that. Right. So now that's not no longer I'm listening to that. On the book front. I really love few books that have that have inspired me at a great deep, deep level as the first one is the purple cow from Seth, Seth Gordon. Right. So basically, with my with GoPro does with my previous startup, also, I wanted to kind of build the purple coat. Right. So I was inspired by this book so much that I said, I'm not going to incrementally build incrementally make something else better, right? Somebody else's build something that is already existing concepts, let me incrementally make it better, right. So my objective was always to build to build, build a bring a purple cow to the market, right? So kind of do something extremely different from what else, whatever else is available in the market already, right? And give an alternative perspective to the whole way of doing things. So probably go by Seth Godin is one thing, zero to one is another one that I I love. Right as a book right, then by Reed Hoffman blitzscaling is a book that I've read recently where I've looked at strategies of how startups have scaled, companies have scaled immediately companies have scaled so so these are three books that come to my mind that really have had a deep impact on my thinking. Is there any founder or entrepreneur that you're following was studying? I wouldn't say I'm following or studying somebody. But few people do inspire me. Right? Everybody's story, right? Peter, British British era with olio and his story and how O'Donnell became oil right? Or with the Mr. shaker of PTM. Right how his journey so so i don't i don't read about what they do. All right, what are you doing today I look at more of their starting stories and then how they started, right? how they how they kind of stuck on to their idea, their vision and their craziness that they had in their head. Right? So a lot of people navall Ravi Kant of Angel angellist. So a lot of people inspire, inspire you in terms of Google, but the same time I take a lot of inspiration from a lot of people who are my contemporaries, who do certain things really well, right. So I look up to a few people who do who do SEO really well for their own companies, or have done branding for their companies really well made horrible, have pivoted very, very beautifully, from one model to another model, right? Or people who have been who are so passionate about what they do, right? Sometimes when you think about quitting, you just look up. Hey, that guy did not quit even after going through all of this, right? Yeah.So you should not quit, right? So I look up to a lot of my controvert contemporaries or people who have just been out of my head of me in terms of chronologically being an entrepreneur ahead of me, I look up a lot of people who kind of do a lot of things great in their own in their own things, right. And you draw inspiration from the ecosystem of startups that you are you are a part of, and so that we like the hundreds of people that I follow. Technically speaking, where you kind of learn from each other that way, yeah,everyone has something to offer different things. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm your top three remote tools village immigrants.See, on the on the, on the so basics, right basics. We use Asana for project management, right? Anything if it's not an Asana doesn't exist, right. So it has to be an Asana. And, and I've been using Asana for like, for like, from the version one or so right? So I'm so in Amman, so excited about Asana that, we use it for restrict, so Asana is one great thing. The second fundamental thing is Slack, right. So again, any intercompany happens on Slack, so we don't email each other, anything. We just like each other. So slack is a big part of our day to day life. So if I don't see like 1500s in my Asana, then something is wrong. Great. So something is wrong in the company rate, so so as Slack, Asana fundamental, fundamental things, and obviously, we use other things like G Suite, motion for documentation, right? All these things. We do a lot of video communication now. So I record videos, using a plugin and then share these videos on Google Drive or through notion to other people. So we onboard people with video. So we've gone a little bit heavier on videos now. Right? So whether it is no more otherwise sites, so we do a lot of videos so that you document something that you're doing, so that somebody else can follow that and then do it right. So those are the those are the fundamental tools we use. Then, we have built, we built our own internal virtual water cooler, which we are now opening up for the world where like everybody within the team can virtually sit together and co work. Right. So we have a common music being played in the background that we all listen to, well, well, what is interesting, right, we have an ambient noise of a beach. So some one day we are by the beach one day we are by the heat station. So there's an ambient noise of rain or, or waves of the sea or All right, so we built an internal tool that we internally use. And now we are kind of putting it out there. So this is so we said this better, we virtually cowork later, even though everybody's everywhere, right? So we virtually co work using that right now we said Hey, everybody is no contract. So let's just put the tool out there and help everybody else also enjoy the virtual co working. So it's called at low. you've launched we launched, it's yet to be publicly launched. So it's running and it's in a closed beta right now at Lowe's, what we call it pillows, our brand ambassador, I mean, we have a dog in our logo. The dog's name is pillow, right? So we call it hate pillow as the is the app for virtual water cooler. So that's another thing that we internally use to kind of keep everybody kind of feeling apart. Feeling togetherness right there. So apart from the usual secatur, GitHub for source code management and all that, so we don't use a lot of other social I mean, Google need, right? So heavy need for anything that we do, right? So those are those are things that we use internally. Awesome. And we use Miro whenever whenever we have to whiteboard we use either jam board from Google, or we use Miro from Miro for doing whiteboarding sessions, where we had to brainstorm remotely and all of you use all of these tools.Amazing. date so thank you so much for all the insights and all the stuff good use of remote work and about hiring and about, you know, find building solutions for your own small startup and that we are given. It was really amazing. And I think it would help a lot of people, even if someone wants to maybe start a company, remote company, and does that is remote work, you know, in a proper way so that it will be really helpful
