The tendency is to always go back to what you’re good at and do it. So it’s more of a Zen thing where, once in a while, you have to step back and think, “Okay. Am I doing anything? Am I helping?”, or, long-term, “Is this what I should be doing, or should I train someone else to do this part?” So this sort of strategic long-term thinking is something that, I think, comes with practice.
Today I’m joined by Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni, the CEO of Balsamiq. In this episode, we talked about Balsamiq’s culture (specifically around the core value of continuous learning and the importance of experiments), the growing pains Peldi experienced as a leader, and more.
We also had a quick peek into Balsamiq’s hiring and onboarding process. We also talked about why Peldi strongly prefers to employ remote team members, rather than have them as contractors (which is a common practice amongst remote/distributed companies).
I really admire the self-aware nature of Balsamiq, which is a byproduct of Peldi’s personality as a founder and a leader. Hope you enjoy it too!
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- 02:31 — Why Peldi moved back to Italy to build Balsamiq
- 07:26 — What Balsamiq does to maintain a self-aware and continuous learning culture
- 10:16 — Why “experiment culture” is important in Balsamiq
- 13:35 — Why Peldi prefers not placing too much weight on his own “voice” within the company
- 21:15 — The un-sexy part of remote hiring (legal challenges, paperwork, etc.)
- 28:05 — A peek into Balsamiq’s hiring process
- 29:50 — Balsamiq’s onboarding process and how it has evolved over time
- 32:46 — How Peldi moved away from doing the things he’s good at
Mentioned resources:
- Balsamiq
- Peldi’s Indie Hackers Interview
- Balsamiq Career Page
- How TaxJar Creates a Remote Company Culture with Mark Faggiano
- Baremetrics
- Josh Pigford’s tweet
- Zapier
- Know Your Team: The Heartbeat podcast episode with Peldi
- Buffer
- Buffer’s co-founder Leo Widrich
- Peldi’s Twitter
- Peldi’s LinkedIn
Full transcript:
Jovian: Hello, world. Welcome to another episode of Outside The Valley podcast, where we interview remote startup leaders, remote workers, remote work advocates, and companies who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. This is the podcast where remote companies share what works and what doesn’t so you can do it right. Outside The Valley is brought to you by Arc, a remote hiring platform that helps you hire remote software engineer and teams easily. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. Today, I’m joined by Peldi, the founder and CEO of Balsamiq.
In this episode, we talk about Balsamiq’s culture, more specifically around the core value of continuous learning and the importance of experimental mindset inside a company, the challenges Peldi experienced as a leader as Balsamiq scaled, and more. We’ll also have a quick peek into Balsamiq’s hiring and onboarding process, why Peldi strongly prefers to employ remote team members rather than have them as contractors, which is a very common practice amongst remote or redistributed companies. I really admire the self-aware nature of Balsamiq, which is a byproduct of Peldi’s personality as a founder and a leader. I really enjoy this conversation, and I hope you do, too. So here we go. Hello, Peldi. Welcome to the show.
Peldi: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Jovian: Great. It’s really great to have you here. And I’ve been really following your podcast, even before I launched the podcast, especially your podcast with Indie Hackers. It’s just amazing. I love how I described you to my colleagues here. So, before I started the podcast, “Hey, I’ll be interviewing Peldi from Balsamiq. He was a very cool guy. He is a very cool guy, and he sounds like this great Italian uncle, that he is so good at business.” I hope this doesn’t offend you.
Peldi: That’s nice. Thanks.
Jovian: Right. But, yeah, I think that’s also…other than the fact that Balsamiq is a remote team is also the fact that your philosophy and business actually are quite fascinating. We’d love to go into that in a minute. So before we start it for the audience here, can you tell us a bit about the history of Balsamiq as in, like, “Why did you start it?”, and more importantly, “Why did you choose to return to Italy instead of staying in the U.S.?”
Peldi: Sure. So, Balsamiq, we make low-fidelity wireframing tools. So I don’t know if your audience is very technical about user experience or not.
Jovian: They’ve probably heard about you, so…
Peldi: Okay. Great. So I won’t go in too much detail. So I started 11 years ago. I was living in San Francisco, but I decided to try starting a business, and I couldn’t afford to do it in San Francisco. And so I thought I could move back to Italy and try to do it from here, where cost of living was much, much lower, and try it for a year or two. And then, if it didn’t work out, I would move back to San Francisco and get another job. So that’s the main reason why I moved here.
Jovian: So when you got back to Italy, in Bologna, at that time…
Peldi: That’s where I grew up. That’s where my family is.
Jovian: Right. And was your first hire also based in Italy?
Peldi: Yes.
Jovian: Right. I suppose he’s a remote hire, right?
Peldi: Well, first, he used to come to my house. I had a room that was my office, and so he would come in the morning and go through my bedroom and wave at my wife, and then go get to the office. So, at the beginning, we had an office, so to speak. But my second hire, which happened maybe a month after the first hire, was in San Francisco. So fully remote from the beginning. And then we have been sort of this mixture of remote and Bologna office since then. Right now, we have a beautiful new office with 35 desks in Bologna, but usually around three or four people show up every day, and that’s intended. Everybody has their own office at home, and we’re optimized for working remotely.
Jovian: So I found it interesting, because there are some companies that deliberately start as a remote team in the beginning. But there are some companies that just, “Oh, this is just how I hire. The so-called remote work is just how I did in the first place. It’s just natural to me.” So you mentioned that your second hire is based in San Francisco. Was there any thought, “Hey, this guy is not in the same space. He’s not in the same country as me. How do I make sure that he will do the job?”, and so on, and so forth? Was there any thought, or just, like, it just came natural to you?
Peldi: Well, yeah, first of all, it was a she, the second hire. It was a woman, but that’s okay. The decision to hire someone in California was very deliberate, because that’s where a lot of our customers were. And so the second person was a support person. And so I wanted to have a distributed company so that we could support customers, both in Europe and in the U.S., very well. So, for a while, I worked every night, and I would answer the phone in the middle of the night here in Italy. I did that for, you know, eight months, and then I decided it’s better if someone who lives there can do support. So that was the primary reason why I wanted to have a remote employee, in that case.
The issue about managing was never a big issue for me. In my previous career, I was never a professional manager. I was a programmer. I led a team, and we were all in the same office, but we had collaborators in India, etc.
So I wasn’t afraid of the remote part, and it has never been a big problem at all. I don’t know why, but, you know, I put a lot of trust in my employees, and they rise up to the occasion usually, and we just collaborate. I don’t have to micromanage anyone.
Jovian: How big is Balsamiq now?
Peldi: We’re 33 people right now.
Jovian: Right. So when I was doing research, so I found this. Balsamiq, in my opinion, has some kind of unique company culture. I’ll describe it as self-aware and honest. That’s the two things that came to mind. Self-aware, honest, and, fun, like not taking yourself too seriously and whatnot.
Peldi: Tell me how you came to those adjectives.
Jovian: Right. Okay. I think it’s on one of your blog posts about the company culture. I probably have it. About policies and there is this…Okay. Actually, I’ll pull that back. The first one is from your career page. You started by, “Why you probably won’t like it here.” And it’s a long list, and it’s not a BS list. Like, this is something very honest, in my opinion. And the second one, and then you start, “Why you probably would like it here.” And there’s another post that is basically saying, “Oh, okay. We share all of this, but we’re afraid to be seen as humble bragging.” Right?
And I think that is very self-aware, because a lot of companies are trying to be, you know, an open startup, and transparent, and it actually is good for the marketing. But I feel like Balsamiq has this self-awareness like, “Okay. We are not perfect. And there are chances that you’ll see us sort of humble bragging and so on, but it is what it is. And what we are trying to do is just learn along the way.” So that was the culture that I found very interesting in Balsamiq. Does it make sense?
Peldi: Yes, yes. I’m glad, because I like all those adjectives that you used.
Jovian: Yeah. Yeah. So what I want to ask is because, right, for these cultures, right? If you’re a group with, like…I think the one that sounds the most is self-awareness and a continuous learning. Was there any deliberate practices or things that you or the Balsamiq team do, either as company policies or communication policies that helps maintain these cultures, if that makes sense, some deliberate things?
Peldi: Sure. Let me see. So the culture of continuous learning has been sort of part of our DNA from the very beginning. That was and still is the main thing that motivates me in life. So I think, over time, as sort of part of the company’s DNA, I’ve been able to pass that love of learning and no fear of experimenting to my team, and we sort of hire people who like to work that way as well. So I think, you know, that came from me from the beginning, but it’s been amplified by other people coming. As far as deliberate policies, etc., you know, we have these models, and these company values, and we do say there that everything should be treated as an experiment.
You know, it’s a big part of our company culture, for sure. And so we reinforce that in our handbook and in our actions.
And we celebrate when someone experiments with something. And even if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter as long as we learn. We use very few outside contractors, for instance, because we want the learning to stay in the company. That’s kind of what’s fun.
We also choose to do things ourselves, and we don’t do them as well as an expert would, but the fact that we’re learning while we do it matters to us. It makes our job fun, and so that’s part of the equation as well. It’s not just about the polished output. We also care about…In fact, we care more about how we got there, and what we learned, and… Yeah.
Jovian: Yeah, I totally noticed that, like you mentioned, the DNA of continuous learning. I feel like it came from you as the founder, because from our interviews, like, you repeatedly mentioned, like, that this is your value. And that’s how it become the DNA of Balsamiq itself. So, other than continuous learning, is there any other thing or any other of your character, so to speak, that became the DNA of the company?
Peldi: Yeah, I mean, for sure. For sure, especially at the beginning. I mean, we’re bootstrapped. This is my first business. You know, we try things out as we go. So, certainly, aspects of my personality or how I think a business should be run has become part of the Balsamiq culture. But, you know, it’s also been 11 years and a lot of people. So, now, I feel like it’s less and less about me, or how I want to do things, and more about how as a company, as a group of people, we like to work. And it’s changed a lot over time, so that line between, “We do things this way because me, the owner, wants to do it that way,” versus, “Let’s do it this way, because we collectively think it’s a good thing to do,” has blurred a lot. In fact, more and more, I try to make my own opinion count less than it did in the past.
Jovian: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that. So, before, I was talking to the CEO of TaxJar. He’s CEO and founder of TaxJar, Mark Faggiano. And he actually had exactly the same feeling like when you’re, like, 10 people… And there are actually now 100 people in TaxJar. And there’s this feeling of, I wouldn’t say, desperateness. I wouldn’t say it in a really negative way. Desperate in saying that, as a startup finder, you have to accept that things will take longer because you need processes and whatnot. Now, you are like 33 people, right? If you look back from where Balsamiq was like, let’s say, 10 people, and now, you’re 33. As you’re growing, was there any some kind of growing pains or challenges that was quite vivid in your mind?
Peldi: Always. Always. Even going from 1 to 10, or even 1 to 2, or even… Absolutely, always. It goes through phases where we think we have it figured out, and then we grow, and things change, and we have to come up with another way to work, another way to collaborate. And so then that’s painful. And then we change things, and adapt, and spent, you know, six months doing that, and then we feel good again. And then we figure it out, and then six months later, we got to do it all again. So we say that, as a company, I think we’re on version five. So about every two years, we have to come up with a new version of the company. And I think that’s because it grows. The growth is what drives this transformation.
Jovian: I wonder if you can recall specific examples on…probably it seems kind of like code refactoring in a way, right? Is there any specific examples where you think, “Okay. This doesn’t work, and we need to do…,” like, big, quote-unquote, “refactoring of the company” as you’re growing?
Peldi: Yes, I’ve spoken about these phases before. But, you know, even doing the first hire, that’s a huge, scary thing. I didn’t sleep for a while before pulling the trigger, because I didn’t want to hire anybody. I wanted to do it. My dream was to have a single-person company. Then we got to five people, and I thought, “This is it. Forever.” But then customers kept coming and coming, and I didn’t want a big team. I didn’t feel comfortable leading a bigger team, but we had to because we were struggling under the demand. So I had to let go of my dream and do it. Later, you know, we went from 10 to 16 within a year. That’s almost, you know, what, time and a half, almost two times as big, and that changed everything. Then we decided, “Well, we need to write a handbook,” because we can’t just do word-of-mouth and talk to Peldi about everything. Right?
Then, as we got longer, I had to give up several parts of my job. Several, like, different jobs that I did. And some were easier to delegate, some were harder.
Then, right now, we’re in the middle of an experimentation phase where we still don’t have people managers, but we feel the need for someone to do those kind of jobs. And so, right now, we’re trying different things on different teams to see how we can solve that problem. We split into teams.
That was a big change. We didn’t do that for a long time, right?
So, you know, as you grow, you kind of have to organically come up with new solutions all the time. Maybe there’s a better way where you get VC funding, and they give you a CEO that knows what they’re doing, you know, and a whole executive team, and they’ve done it before, and they know what they’re doing. But that’s not the goal for me and for us. In fact, these are great. The growing pains are… As long as the market allows us to take our time and figure it out, that’s exactly what we want.
Jovian: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. And I also think that getting back to the DNA of continuous learning also helps. Like you mentioned that, right now, you’re experimenting with having teams or having people managers. But before, even on your website, it’s basically saying, “We don’t have managers. You all directly work…” But now you’re experimenting with it, which means basically you’re open to change. Balsamiq team is open to change opinions whenever it’s needed. So, yeah, I think it’s a really good reflection. In my opinion, it’s a really good reflection of the DNA.
Peldi: In fact, I was a little cringing when you mentioned the jobs page, because when I read that now it feels very outdated. I have it on my list to update it in the next few months, because the company has changed a lot since. We have other pros and other cons to list on that page.
Jovian: Right. Right. Dang, my research is outdated then, but yes.
Peldi: Well, it’s my fault, it’s our fault.
Jovian: No problem.
Peldi: You know, some things don’t change, right?
Jovian: Of course.
Peldi: The company values, the honesty is gonna be there, even if the data changes. But even the company values can change over time. We did an effort a few months ago to redefine the company values internally. Because after 10 years, the values that I wrote 10 years ago when I was a one-person company don’t make sense anymore. Also, it’s not proper that the company uses my personal values from 10 years ago, right? They’re called company values. They’re not called Peldi’s values that the company uses, you know?
So we just did a big effort where everybody was involved, and we came up with a new set of values that are more reflective of how we actually work right now. But, at the beginning of it, it says, you know, “In 10 years, we’re probably gonna throw these away and do it again.” And we have to. You have to evolve with the company.
Jovian: Yeah, and that’s what I call the self-awareness part. That’s where I got the adjective from. So I want to move a bit about on Balsamiq’s hiring process. So, before, you mentioned here and there about the tricky legal stuff that you had to go through when you’re hiring a remote team or building a distributed team. Can you share a bit more about that shortly, or what challenges you faced, and, potentially, advices for entrepreneurs that want to build their remote team?
Peldi: Well, I mean, you probably know more about this than I do because you’ve interviewed more people.
But, basically, the crux of the issue is that national laws exist, right? We live in a global society. The internet is all, you know, more or less the same. The tools are more or less the same, but the laws are different locally.
So, when you hire someone, you have to abide by their local laws, right? So you have two ways to do it. One is you sort of force this person to create a business and do a business-to-business transaction. Basically, they’re contractors with their own business. And those are better defined, because business-to-business commerce has been going and consulting has been happening for a long time. Those rules are well-defined. Taxation is easy. So a lot of remote companies operate that way.
The other way is to use employment laws, right, where people are actually your employees. And so, to do that, in every country, state, province, and city where you hire someone, you have to abide by the local laws, and you have to register, get a tax ID. You have to pay sales tax in that location. You’re basically establishing what’s called a nexus in that country. So that means you have to make sure that if the law changes, you change your practices. If the taxation changes, you change your taxation. So what it really means is that you have to hire an accountant locally that knows about foreign companies hiring local people. Then you have to hire a payroll person that makes sure that you follow the local laws, and they calculate the net amount to pay and the taxes to pay every month. So both approaches have their pros and cons. We tend to favor the employment part, because it’s a closer relationship.
Jovian: Yeah, I agree.
Peldi: You know, with a contractor, you can’t buy them a computer because, you know, they have their own business. That’s an expense that they have. Sure, you could give them a bonus or whatever. You can price it into their invoice. But, in theory, you’re not supposed to give them anything. They’re a different business, right? Would you buy a computer to your accountant? No. It makes no sense, right? You can’t buy them tickets to come and visit you, because… So they have to put all these things out of pocket, and then maybe you can reimburse them later. You can’t give them a Christmas gift because, you know, it’s like you’re corrupting another business. And, also, they’re not supposed to really only work for you as they have a business, consulting business. So it looks better for them if they work for more than one client. So it’s just not what we want in our relationship with our employees. You’re not even supposed to list them on your company page, because they’re not part of your company. They have their own company, right?
Jovian: True. Yeah.
Peldi: Sure, it’s a gray area. But, in theory, if it’s a business-to-business thing, you have to look at it that way. So we do that with one person, because that was their preference. They already had a business, and they’re still running that business, but they also work for us as a consultant, so that’s fine. But, in general, we try to go the employment route. So what that means is that, “Yes, we are remote,” but since we’re already set up in California, Illinois, France, and Germany, we strongly favor candidates from those four locations. Because if we had to get someone in China, we would have to register with the Chinese government, get a tax ID, figure it out, hire accountants, payroll people. So, between the five locations where we are, we think that there’s enough of a talent pool that we can hire from there. But, you know, for the right candidate, we might expand into another location, but it’s a huge pain. It’s a real pain.
Jovian: Yeah. Yeah, I think these are the unsexy part of a remote and distributed team. You know, a lot of people are just talking about, “Oh, remote teams unlock a pool of talent. It opens up opportunity and makes you more productive.” But, honestly, as the startup founder, entrepreneur, these are the things that you have to figure out first. It reminds me of a tweet, like, I saw a couple of months ago or from the founder of Baremetrics, Josh Pigford. He actually needed to pay a tax from the State of Texas or something like that. For the listeners, I’ll put the tweet in the notes when I find it. But, yes, this is basically one of the cases where it’s so complicated that it’s really almost impossible for him to figure out that this law exists, so that’s how complicated it is. But, in the end, he need to pay the tax. It’s [crosstalk 00:27:48].
Peldi: Yeah, but ignorance is no excuse. So every time you hire someone from another location, you’re taking on more risk, right? Because that means you have to abide by local laws.
Jovian: Agree. Still on the topic of hiring. So, when Balsamiq is hiring, right, is there any step in the hiring processes that you feel is quite unique to Balsamiq?
Peldi: So we don’t look at CVs. We don’t ask for people to send a CV or a cover letter. We also don’t do phone interviews right away to filter.
Basically what we do is, whenever we have a job opening, we come up with this very specific list of questions, and create a form on the website with all those questions, and the form takes about an hour to fill in. And that’s the first step, so that takes care of filtering. We only really get people who really want to work for us.
And, also, skip the whole first phone interview, because we learn enough from their answers to be able to really get a sense for each candidate, so it helps us narrow down our selection very, very quickly.
Jovian: Interesting.
Peldi: It’s asking a lot of people, but it also tells us how well they write, how well they can explain themselves. So it is a bit asking a lot of regular people who are probably applying for 100 jobs. But we’re lucky that we’re able to do that and people still apply.
Jovian: When someone is hired by Balsamiq, how do you do onboarding? Because this is something that comes up a lot when we’re talking about distributed teams. Like, Zapier has this Airbnb-style onboarding that they ship the person to basically be on-site for one or two weeks, if I’m not mistaken. And other companies have their own. How about you?
Peldi: Yeah, so we don’t do that. We don’t do that. In fact, often, I only meet new hires after 10 months when we have the company retreat once a year. So it depends on when they get hired. But, no, we don’t fly anybody anywhere, because we don’t need it. We’re optimized for working remotely, and so even this part should happen well remotely.
So what we do is we assign the new hire both a mentor and a buddy.
The buddy is somebody generally in their same time zone, and it’s someone who they can ask any questions about the company and how we work. It doesn’t have to be necessarily about the work itself. It’s more about, “Is it true that we have unlimited vacation?”, you know, this kind of questions about the policies.
And then there’s the mentor. The mentor is the person that’s gonna train you on how to do the actual job. Usually, it’s the person whose job they’re taking, because they are doing something else, or they have too much, or you’re taking part of their job. [crosstalk 00:31:26], right? So we set up an onboarding program for each new hire, and it depends on what the job is, and it could go from three weeks to six months. It’s on a case-by-case. We design…
Jovian: A lot of companies I interviewed, basically, they’re saying that onboarding is the most important part. Because, a lot of times, new hires, especially in distributed teams, they will kind of feel lost in a way, like, if the onboarding is not done properly.
Peldi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not something that I am good at. For instance, you were asking about the company culture, right? So my style of onboarding was, “Oh, you’re hired. All right. Sink or swim, here’s a bunch of work.” Right? Over time, I have been less involved with onboarding, because it’s just not something I’m good at. But I think, as a company, we do a good job now. Someone else set up some good policies for us.
Jovian: Right. Yeah, I think this is a good segue to my next question which is on a broader topic about yourself. And this is actually a bit selfish, because this is more like what I want to learn. So in terms of leadership… So on your podcast interview with Claire Lew in, you know, The Heartbeat podcast. By the way, this is the thing that I do in this podcast. Basically, we’re just promoting other people’s podcasts, because that’s how I do research. You mentioned about, and I quote you, paraphrasing you here, “Doing something that you’re good at actually can hurt the team,” right, in a way. So I want to ask about, “How did you realize that?” That’s the first question. And the second question, “What were the deliberate steps that you took to avoid doing that?”, like, doing things that you’re good at. Because it probably, like, second nature, right?
Peldi: Yeah, so it’s interesting, because it’s not intuitive right away. You think, you know, “You should focus on what you’re good at, and everything will be fine.” The way I realized this was I heard it on an interview with the co-founder of Buffer. He’s the one that was saying that, and that was kind of eye-opening. And the thing that I did to stop doing that… So it’s not one thing. It’s really a practice.
The tendency is to always go back to what you’re good at and do it. So it’s more of a Zen thing where, once in a while, you have to step back and think, “Okay. Am I doing anything? Am I helping?”, or, long-term, “Is this what I should be doing, or should I train someone else to do this part?” So this sort of strategic long-term thinking is something that, I think, comes with practice.
And, at least, I’m being very patient with myself because, you know, I go back, I fall back into the trap of working on what I’m good at often, and it’s also fine. Sometimes that’s what the company needs for a while.
But you can’t just do it forever. Or, at least, periodically you should try to think, “All right. Five years from now, should I still be doing this?” Because everything you do, you’re also learning and getting better. So, of course, you’re gonna do it more. You’re gonna be asked to do it more. So this is not just for the company, or, “This is for everybody,” you know. Never learn something that you don’t want to be asked to do twice, right?
Jovian: Right. Right.
Peldi: And so, as you’re working, as you’re learning, think about, short-term, “Yes, I need to do this project so I will learn this thing,” and longer-term, “Should someone else be working on this with me so that they can do this longer-term? Maybe it’s more interesting for them than for me.”
Jovian: My opinion is that when it comes to delegating or doing stuff yourself, like, the negative effect of doing that is more amplified when you’re in a remote team. Like, for example, my opinion can be something like, when you’re doing stuff yourself, apparently, you’re doing stuff, if you’re new to the team, it probably can be misinterpreted as, “Oh, he doesn’t trust us?”, or something like that. But I think that’s one thing. But, of course, it’s more a complicated thing. But I think delegating well, in my opinion, is super important in remote teams, because it’s not like people cannot see what you’re doing, right?
And if you’re in the same office, you can, “Hey, boss. Are you doing this?” “Oh, yeah, I’m doing things. It’s nothing. It’s a small issue. I want to do this myself,” and problem solved. But in remote teams, this is like exponential communication debt, so to speak. And then, in the end, it will make everything slower, and the morale is down, and so on.
Peldi: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Absolutely. These are challenges, and there’s ways to solve them. You can communicate better, communicate more. You can, you know, be very clear about expectations, and double-check how are people are feeling about things. And people ask to meet me, you know, spot meetings just to see. If something doesn’t feel right, always double-check. Because, 99% of the time, it’s because of the remote, because we’re not in the same room, so these misunderstandings happen. So, you know, just double-check, and everything is fine, usually, right? So these are things that come with practice, I think, as people work remotely. And then, after a while, you get to know the people that you work with, so you understand.
You know, you fill in those voids with trust and past experiences.
Jovian: Right. Cool. Another thing I want to touch on is about team communication, right? I saw in some of your interviews that Balsamiq has this golden hour, so to speak, where everyone’s online. So I have two questions here. My first question is, “Was it always like that since it was, like, you know, 5 or 10 people?” And my second question is, “Are there any other communication policies that you deliberately implement?” For example, how to ask for information, “How do you talk?”, and so on.
Peldi: Sure. Yeah, so the golden hour is the only hour that we sort of have in common, working hour that we have in common, between California and Italy. So it’s 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. in California, which is 5 to 6 p.m. here in Italy. Now, 8 a.m., it is early. So we’re asking people to start pretty early in California, and some people start even sooner than that. They take 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. meetings because it helps. There’s no ways around it. It helps to have a synchronous conversation, so they’re just faster, right? Not necessarily meetings, even just Slack messages, you know? So this sucks. This is something that there’s no tool that can solve that because, you know, the Earth spins. So we do have that, but we don’t really require everybody to be online. It’s just that, depending on the job, that’s when we expect people to schedule meetings between us and California.
Jovian: Okay. That makes sense.
Peldi: Sometimes, I’ll stay later. You know, I’ll work until 7:00 to meet with people, or I will have after-dinner meetings less and less, but some other people will also do that. So that’s one thing that we do. It’s always been that way, because, like I said, we’ve had someone in California since the beginning. And then, communication policies, we try to stay very light on policies, because they just creep up, and then the tendency is to have too many. But what we say is that if you are in Slack in a specific room called “Announcement,” and your little dot is green, it means that you’re working, and you’re probably willing to be interrupted or, you know, if you see a Slack message.
If you’re working on something, focused, and don’t be interrupted, you just quit Slack and we can’t reach you.
So that’s really it. And then there’s people who manage servers. We have their phone numbers if needed. You know, we have those classic if-there’s-a-problem, on-call policies, but that’s really about it. We like guidelines more than policies, so I don’t think we have much about communication style. I think that’s kind of something that’s contagious, too, as you’re new, and you see how people communicate. You kind of tend to adopt that same style, so we don’t really have anything written about that.
Jovian: Right. Cool. So I think my last question for today is about… I’ve been thinking about this topic about employee happiness and customer happiness. Like, I have this hypothesis, as in, “If your team is happy, then your customers will be happy because…”
Peldi: Yeah, there was a title yesterday, a study that proved exactly that.
Jovian: Oh, really?
Peldi: I’ll look for it again. Yeah, it just came out yesterday.
Jovian: So, yeah, so I was actually thinking to write a blog post about this. So, yeah, the hypothesis is that, “If your team is happy,” which I think remote work provides that added value of, you know, flexibility, freedom, and so on, “it actually will cause your customers to be happier.” Why? Because even, like, if you’re a customer support or a customer champion, for example, because you’re in a good mood every day, you just have this extra friendliness when you’re replying to tickets, right? Or if you’re a sales team, you just have this energy to just do that one more follow-up emails, one more follow-up calls. My question would be, “How much do you agree with this? Do you also see this concept reflected on the Balsamiq team?”
Peldi: So I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise. So working remotely doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna be happy at all. In fact, it’s…
Jovian: It’s a philosophical question, even. Yeah.
Peldi: Yeah, but there is this misconception that, you know, “Oh, working remotely is so great.” You know, working remotely, it is great for many reasons, and I wouldn’t go back. And, you know, I’m talking out of my home. Even though we have an office not far from my house, I prefer to work at home. But it also has a lot of drawbacks. Loneliness. You know, humans are social animals. If you don’t see anybody all day, it hurts. It hurts your morale. It hurts your body physically, too. So I wouldn’t say that being remote is what makes you happy. Sure, commuting makes you very unhappy. We know that, right?
Jovian: True. Yeah.
Peldi: Working in a very loud office makes you very unhappy. But there’s also social aspects of spending time in the same location that are positive, for sure. Now, the other thing, the other lesson that was a kind of eye-opening is that it’s not my job to make my employees happy. Happiness is an internal thing. It comes from inside. You kind of decide to be happy or not. So I can’t make you happy just like, “Be happy, now.” You know, you just can’t.
So what my job is, is to create an environment where people who want to be happy can be happy, where people feel supported and free to be whatever they want to be.
Now, do happier employees make happier customers? I want to read the study that came out yesterday, too. I’m curious about it.
It makes sense, in theory, right? Of course. Especially with support, right? When you call some phone company, and you talk to them, and you can just see how miserable they are, of course, I’m gonna be unhappy, because I feel bad for them. You know, the trick there is to have good policies that allow people to have enough freedom to do well by the customer, right? And then they’re just applying the policy, which is, “I’m gonna try to help the customer up to a point that we define so that, you know, it doesn’t drive us out of business.” But, in general, you’re free to do that, so that makes you feel better because you’re helping other people. And then, you know, a designer who needs to design something while they’re depressed, that might not come out as joyful of a design. But I don’t know. I don’t know. These things are hard to measure, so I’m interested to reading how they studied that.
Jovian: Cool. Yeah, awesome. It has been an amazing episode. We start with entrepreneurship, remote, and we end up talking about happiness.
Peldi: Oh, that’s what the Italian uncle will do.
Jovian: All right. Awesome, Peldi. So, yeah, thank you so much for your time today, and I learned a lot from this conversation. I really hope the audience, they learn a thing or two, especially about happiness.
Peldi: Well, sure. And if anybody has any questions, you can find me at peldi@balsamiq.com.
Jovian: Right. Oh, yeah, about that. Other than email, is there any other place where people can find you online?
Peldi: Sure. We have a Slack community where people can ask anything. I offer an office hours. Once a week, I meet with someone, usually entrepreneurs, to give them advice on their business. So all these things you can find on our website, balsamiq.com with a Q.
Jovian: Right. Cool. And for listeners, if you go to Peldi’s LinkedIn, you see under his description… And I don’t know if it’s still there. But I remember looking at your LinkedIn a long time ago, and it said that, “If you try to poach Balsamiq’s employee, I will find you.” That’s so funny. I was like, “Okay. These guys are hardcore.” I mean, okay. Right. Awesome, Peldi. Again, thank you so much for your time, and I wish you a great day.
Peldi: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
Jovian: Awesome.
Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of Outside The Valley, brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with a hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s J-O-V-I-A-N at A-R-C dot D-E-V, or you can find us on Twitter, @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of Outside The Valley, and ciao.
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