I’m definitely a believer in praise in public, criticize in private. So I try to do a lot of public praise on Slack, where everyone can see it. But yeah, if I’m giving someone critical feedback, it really always needs to be a video call. If I can’t do a one-on-one meeting with them.
Today we have Laura Roeder, CEO and founder of MeetEdgar and Paperbell Coaching Software!
In this episode we covered how Laura built a company that can run without her, why MeetEdgar has a “CEO” and a “President,” and the importance of transparency in company culture.
We also talked about why MeetEdgar doesn’t believe in deadlines, why they use the title “advocates” instead of “managers,” and how you can give better criticism and feedback in a remote team.
Laura also has a special gift for Outside The Valley listeners! Get one free month of MeetEdgar with the coupon code PODCAST.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider leaving a review on iTunes!
The podcast is also available on your favourite players: iTunes, Google Podcast, Castro, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Player.fm, and Tune In.
Follow us on Twitter to get updates.
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- Laura’s current role and why MeetEdgar has a “President”
- Why Laura decided to create a company that can run without her
- Mistakes and challenges Laura made while growing MeetEdgar
- The importance of transparency
- Why you should not put criticism on Slack
- Why meetings are essential for remote teams
- Is MeetEdgar small by design?
- How MeetEdgar thinks about documentation
- Why MeetEdgar doesn’t have “managers” but “advocates”
- Why Laura doesn’t believe in deadlines
Mentioned resources:
- Laura’s Twitter
- Laura’s blog
- MeetEdgar
- One free month of MeetEdgar (Coupon code:
PODCAST) - Liam Martin of Time Doctor: How to be a “Remote Executive”
- MeetEdgar President Sarah Park
- Justin Mitchell of YAC Chat: Remote Team “High-Res” Communications
- “Away” controversy
- Krister Haav of Toggl: Creating a Playful Culture in Remote Teams
- David Heinemeier Hansson
- Dave Teare
- REWORK Podcast: Venture Capital and Control with Dave Teare
- Basecamp
- Tettra
- Holacracy
- Trello
- Asana
- The MeetEdgar Company Handbook
Full transcript:
Jovian: Welcome to another episode of “Outside The Valley,” the podcast where we interview remote startup leaders, remote work advocates, and founders of distributed teams who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. They share insight on what works and what doesn’t, so you can learn to do it right.
This podcast is brought to you by Arc remote hiring platform that helps you hire remote software engineers and teams easily.
I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. Today we have Laura Roeder CEO and founder of Meet Edgar. In this episode, we covered how Laura build a company that can run without her. Why MeetEdgar has both a CEO and a president and the importance of transparency in company culture.
We also talked about why MeetEdgar doesn’t believe in deadlines, which is kind of special. Why the subtitle advocates instead of managers, and how you can give better criticism and feedback in a remote remote team. Laura also has a special gift for “Outside The Valley,” listeners. You can get one free month of MeetEdgar with the coupon code, podcast, all caps.
So you just go to MeetEdgar and input the coupon code podcast P-O-D-C-A-S-T, I guess you probably already know how to spell that because you’re listening to podcast now. Okay, so and if you’re enjoying the podcast, please do consider leaving a review on iTunes because that’ll help other people like you to discover the podcast. So without further ado, here we go. Laura Roeder. Hey, Laura, welcome to the show.
Laura: Thank you Jovian. I’m excited to be here.
Jovian: Yeah, Laura. It’s really a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I’ve been following your writings and your interviews for a while now. Like I mentioned before the call I was slightly nervous to talk to you today. But yeah, I’m more than excited to learn more from you and about MeetEdgar. Just to kick things off. Just to introduce to people who are not that familiar yet with MeetEdgar and with you. Can you share a bit more about your background and the company itself?
Laura: Yeah, so MeetEdgar is a social media marketing automation tool. So we’re a tool for publishing your content to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the different social networks. I’m sure we have a lot of developers listening. Developers often really like us, because we really automated a lot of the tasks for social media marketing and developers are not scared of automation. They love it.
Jovian: Totally, yes.
Laura: Yeah, so basically, we save you a lot of time compared to other social tools. And my background, I’ve been an entrepreneur for I guess about like 12 years. So my whole career I’ve been working for myself and various businesses. I’ve really always been in the social media marketing and online marketing space, either doing consulting and then E courses and then software as I do today.
Jovian: Right. When I reached out to you, so I realized that you’re currently not active with the day-to-day of the company and you have a president that do this. Can you share a bit more about the decision itself why you do that?
Laura: Yeah. So it’s a path that I’ve been on, really since we launched. So, something really unusual about the launch. When we launched Edgar in 2014, I was pregnant with my first child. So I knew that I’d be taking parental leave within the first year of our startup, right? I took three months off, and that was six months after launch. So it was unusual, but it was a really actually a great constraint because I had to build a company that would be fine with me being away for three months, right, in the first year. You know which a lot you know, I would say most founders probably have never been away from their business for three months, much less.
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: In the very first year. So you know, I knew that I wanted to be able to take that time off. I’ve never been a you know, super hardcore hustle work all the time type of entrepreneur anyway, you know, I’m a big believer that you should build a business that you love and that supports your life. So I knew that I wanted to build something that I could, you know, take periods of time away from, where I could travel, or spend time with my family, and eventually work myself out of entirely. So at about the four to five year mark, I promoted the person who had been our head of operations to a president role. So I still obviously, do promotional stuff like this. I’m still, you know, hanging out on our Slack and I still have calls with that the president but I don’t have any other like direct reports or like, you know, execution work that I do in the company.
Jovian: Right. So this is what I found really fascinating, just like you mentioned, because since you built MeetEdgar since day one, you are on the mindset that you wanna build a company that won’t be dependent on you on the long run. Because a while ago I talked to Liam Martin the founder of a startup called Time Doctor and he’s also the organizer of Running Remote which he was a podcast interviewee.
All right, so we’re talking about the evolution from the so called entrepreneur to executive like basically there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that just cannot let go of doing day-to- day. So if they’re under your position like that you know, “Can I help you with something I’m not doing anything right now?” And they just can’t let go but I just totally find it fascinating because like you mentioned you strive for build a company like, “Okay, how can this company run without me.” And then like you mentioned you want to have like a great work life balance or something like. So I totally found this fascinating. So just curious about the current…actually let me take a step back. How big is MeetEdgar now?
Laura: We’re about 15 people now.
Jovian: 15 people and all hundred percent distribute.
Laura: Yes, but all in the U.S. Yes, except for me. I’m actually in the UK. But the rest of the team is in the U.S. so, we’ve always had a U.S. based team so that we can all work in the same time zones.
Jovian: Got it. Got it. Yeah, I love to jump to that, like the whole team a bit later. So on the transition from you you know, kind of like, facing out a bit from the company and delegate to the current president. Can you share a bit about how was it? Like, was there any kind of like worry or any kind of how do I say? Uncertainty out there?
Laura: So I did it a year before I planned on doing it. So you know, she and I had been talking about it, how this was a role that she’d like to move to at some point, and I had sort of told myself…I remember I told myself, okay, in September 2019, that’s when she’ll start. And I was thinking that kind of a year before and like, September 2018, I’m like, then, you know,” I’ll have a year to kind of train her and we’ll get her ready for that role.”
And I kind of realized, I wish I could remember what I read, but it’s so cheesy, but I swear I read some like inspirational quote on Instagram. I was like on Instagram and someone’s like, “Why do it tomorrow when you can do it today?” Right? It was just some like, really generic cheesy quote. But you know, sometimes something just like strikes you the right way. And I was like, “Yeah, if this is something I know that I want,” right? I want to put her in this role and take myself out of this role. Why am I waiting a year?” Because it’s not like, I’m gonna disappear as soon as she starts. So whatever kind of like training I imagined I need to do, which of course was very vague. If you’d ask me like, “What’s that training?” I’m like, “I don’t know. We just meet and talk.”
And like she’s been with the company since day one. Like I’ve worked with her really closely since we launched so it’s not like she doesn’t, you know, know what’s going on. She had always been in charge while I was on leave, right? Like she was plenty prepared.
So I just realized, like, “Well, whatever this vague idea of training that I have, I mean wouldn’t it even be more effective once she’s in the role? “Because then it’s not theoretical anyway, then she’s coming to me being like, “What do I do about this?” So I was like, “Here’s what I would do.” Instead of like, maybe someday you’ll find yourself in this situation, you know? So, yeah, so I just talked to her that day, and I’m just like, it’s time, it’s time.. Now let’s, let’s just do it. So, you know, I think it just shows that you never feel totally prepared and totally ready. You just have to make that call and go for it and see what happens.
Jovian: Right. So when you decided that one day you’ll be transitioning to be less hands on as the process goes did you share this gradually to the whole team?
Laura: Well, it was always kind of the role that I had with the team. Like I said, I was never that founder that was like first in last out like, I worked after the first leave. I was just working part-time, so people were always used to me. And I’m not a micromanager. They weren’t like, “Oh, Laura’s just like double checking everybody’s work with everything.” People were used to me having kind of that distance. So it was a very natural progression.
Jovian: Got it amazing. Just curious, like, this is a very trivial question, but how did you guys decide on the name of the title of president?
Laura: Yeah, it’s kind of funny, isn’t it?
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: So really, it’s just I mean, you know, it’s sort of arbitrary, but we don’t have any “C suite,” titles at our company. And like we also don’t use VP titles. So it’s like okay, I don’t think like CEO is quite right. And she’s also not some people use like general manager, but it just sounds like I don’t know, it sounds very retail to me, a general manager. So yeah, so we just decided on president because it sounds like, I wanted it to be clear that she’s the leader of the company. It’s not like I’m the leader and she operator like she’s the leader. So, yeah, we just chose president, but it’s definitely kind of arbitrary.
Jovian: Yeah. So I noticed a while a go, did you realize that in a lot of bigger startup, there’s a lot of vice president, but there are no presidents?
Laura: Yeah, like, who’s the president? [crosstalk 00:11:16].
Jovian: Who’s the president? Like, there’s only Joe Biden there, but there’s no Obama like, that’s kind of weird. All right, so now currently, you are more like, hands off with the company. You also like this year, you opened a strategic coaching consultation. And why did you decide to do that?
Laura: Well, so there were two reasons. One is that I had time. Like, seriously, I was just like, what do I do with myself? I mean, you kind of mentioned that a lot of people have this time, so they started like digging in and micromanaging the business. So I think it’s true that you have to give yourself something else to do.
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: Right, yeah. I mean, I love talking to entrepreneurs. I was also interested in researching the coaching and consulting industry, I’m actually probably gonna release software in that space at some point in the future. We’ll keep it very vague for now. So, you know, the best way to get to know an industry is to really dive into it. So that’s what I’ve done.
Jovian: Great. That’s interesting. So, yeah, this has become like teaser trailer for now.
Laura: Yeah.
Jovian: Cool, so you know, MeetEdgar…sorry, can you remind me again, when did MeetEdgar start 2015?
Laura: 2014.
Jovian: 2014 right. So it’s been like, you know, four or around five years now. So what were some of the challenges, mistakes you’ve made or lessons you’ve learned as a leader, you know, while running MeetEdgar especially when it comes to your team management or anything.
Laura: I mean, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs at Edgar I mean, we’ve had to do layoffs, which is the worst. We had to do layoffs, because we had a huge drop in our revenue and lost a lot of customers after there were some changes to Twitter in particular and also losing access to Facebook groups for a while. So I mean, we’ve been through ups and downs for sure. You know, it’s been like a lot, a lot has happened over the five years, and I mean, one of the biggest lessons has been the value of transparency, of really sharing everything with your team. We’ve always been a very transparent company, we share all of our financials, aside from individual salaries, you can see like, honestly, you can kind of ballpark it because if you really wanna dig, you can kind of find like this is a development team salary and you know how many people are there right?
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: And we actually we do like, we like people to have some sort of ballpark of how much different roles are paid. Because my point of view is like, you never wanna be shocked. I don’t want someone who is in a customer service role to be shocked that a developer makes more than them. A developer does make more than them, that shouldn’t be a secret, you know.
So we’re very transparent with our financials. And that was a really fascinating thing. When it came to the layoff. So people had seen that, you know, our expenses had become too high for our revenue. So when we did lay people off, a lot of the people that were affected, it was definitely negative for them, but they were like, “You know, I’ve been looking for another job because I saw that the finances weren’t going well.”
You know, which is funny, but it’s like, that’s actually great as the founder, right? That’s kind of what you want is for it to be the least crushing blow possible for them. Because it’s like, yeah, people are smart, you know, people see if things aren’t going well.
And that was such a huge lesson to me of like, just sort of the unexpected way is that it pays off. And we’re just it’s really important to us to share all information.
You know, anyone can sit in on any meeting, anyone can see any document like stuff is not siloed to different people or to different departments, because people can just make much better decisions when they understand everything that’s going on across the company.
Jovian: Right. During the layoff, like, you mentioned that because of transparency, was there like a feeling that actually the people who was unfortunate at that time was kind of like still rooting for MeetEdgar, right? Because of the transparency that you gained along the way? Like, “I know, this is something you have to do, but I’m still rooting for you. I’ll just go find another job as you contact.” Was it that kind of feeling?
Laura: It really, yeah, I mean, I got positive emails from I think every single person that was affected because we also gave sufferance. We gave two months severance which, you know, in America, you’re not required to give anything, two months is kind of considered a pretty good amount. So people really appreciated that we did that, that we made the decision early enough to be able to do that.
So, yeah, I mean, I’m pretty happy to say that I’ve really maintained…there’s also been people that I’ve let go over the years that I’ve also maintained a really positive relationships with because that too, that should never be a surprise, right?
If you’re fired from your job, it should not be a shocker that day, there should be lots of conversations leading up to it where you know, that it’s not a match. So that’s been the case.
Jovian: Yeah, totally. So right. Just before the call I mentioned to you that I kind of scroll up on to your Twitter feed. So that’s how I do research by the way. So there is this, you mentioned about, you know, not delivering criticism on Slack, which I totally understand. Because I think there are times where my manager or my boss kind of like, say this on Slack, but in text it sounds like severe. Sounds really bad.
Laura: Yeah.
Jovian: But when you talk it out, it’s actually not that bad. So, I’m just curious, it’s kind of like this curiousity about your one-on-ones with your team members, like delivering,you know, delivering criticism or praise, and while that’s so. Can you share a bit more how do you do one-on-one with your direct reports?
Laura: So, yeah,
I’m definitely a believer in praise in public, criticize in private. So I try to do a lot of public praise on Slack, where everyone can see it. But yeah, if I’m giving someone critical feedback, it really always needs to be a video call. If I can’t do a one-on-one meeting with them.
I will literally just record a little video of myself talking and email it to them because like you said, the context is so important if you write in text like, “Hey, I found these mistakes, on your report.” That sentence alone and text people can spin all sorts of stories about what it means and, “Are they saying I shouldn’t do these reports anymore? And they’re taking this away from my place? Are they gonna fire me now?” Or like, just saying it in a video being like, “Oh, hey, I found these three mistakes. So go ahead and, you know, fix them. Let me know when you’ve done that.”
It’s just such like a different experience. So yeah, I really try not to hold back on criticism, which is something that I’ve had to work on. You know, it can be uncomfortable giving people critical feedback, but it’s really important. I just try to think, okay, if I find myself thinking something in my head, I need to share it with them. I mean, unless I’m just venting, right which we all have like bad day where we’re like, “Jovian, what? That guy’s the worst.” You know you shouldn’t share that but if you’re like, “Oh, like Jovian made this video and I wish he had like made it faster, he takes too long to get to the point.”
If I’m watching the video thinking that like I should share that with you because I have something useful for you and useful for the whole company to make our work better. So I am, you know, direct with people I do share critical feedback in a kind way not in an aggressive way but with the idea that we’re all like, you know we’re all working together doing our best so we all want to improve what that is.
Jovian: Yeah, I do find that interesting, like, you mentioned like the contact or the media where you transfer the feedback is super important, especially when you are the CEO. Because in any way your voice will be the loudest.
Laura: Yes.
Jovian: For me, I tend to think about the negative part. And probably if you Slack me like, “Okay, that’s it. I’m going to fire you.” Like, probably reply with like, “Okay, when’s my last day? When’s my last I’m turning back my company laptop?” So yeah, it’s certainly important. I think this all something so I talked to a startup founder named Justin Mitchell. He worked for not he worked for…not he worked, he founded a startup called YAC Chat. It’s basically you can send voice message via on Slack and on the app itself.
What I find interesting is basically like when you talk it out, when you talk something out, it’s either you getting stuff like you’re more aware of what you wanna convey, and you kind of soften your tone and whatnot. And, or when you even though when you’re trying to convey an idea, you want to talk something but when you talk it out, you’re probably in the middle, and it’s actually not that important. And then you save time instead of like, back and forth via Slack.
Laura: Yeah.
Jovian: So yeah, I just found that interesting. So I’ve been doing this research for this podcast, I’ve something that you repeat it when it comes to remote team management is that you’re missing this, “Over hurt moments.” Like you cannot see if you are in marketing team you cannot actually hear the sales calls that the sales teams are making, and your product team you cannot hear what the marketing is planning about. And I totally can relate to that because I only transition to working remotely in this past six months. And then I do like miss it like sometimes, I kind of like out of the loop of what happens. So you mentioned that the way to avoid this is being as public as possible on Slack. I would love for you to expand on this.
Laura: Yeah.
Jovian: And will love to it any other else that you can replicate this thing that can spark creativity?
Laura: Yeah, so I mean, one thing that we do is have a lot of meetings. I think it’s very popular right now to be like, “Oh, like meetings. Yuck.”.
Jovian: Meeting are so bad yeah.
Laura: Meetings are bad. Meetings are so uncool, but especially being remote, you know, having a company wide meeting every week where everyone’s there on video, discussing what’s going on with the entire company, I think is really important for keeping people on the same page. Because, like, you really have to put it in front of people. Like if you’re like, “Oh, well, you know what, our marketing agendas are public, and anyone could go look at them.” It’s like, “Well, yeah,” but like what developer has plenty to do, they’re not gonna spend their time like going to look at the agenda for a marketing meeting.
I mean, I do think it’s important that all that stuff is available and easily accessible, which it is, but it’s just like, you know, how many people are actually gonna do that? Whereas if it’s like, “Okay, we have a company wide meeting, everyone’s sitting there.” You can be thinking about someone else, something else, but hopefully at least part of your brain is a little engaged, and hearing the update from ops and marketing and development, you know.
So I think a lot of meetings are important. We also really try to limit private messages.
So this one is interesting, because there’s just been, as we’re recording this, this big controversy from the company Away, where they had the same rule about no private messages and things did not go well for them, you know?
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: And this role was sort of blamed for it.
Jovian: I’m just grabbing my popcorn, like just saying on Twitter, “Oh, this is what happens,” right?
Laura: Yeah, that’s right.
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: So, you know, we try to limit private messages as much as possible, because of course, if something isn’t a direct message, nobody else can see it. And we’ve found that this actually is a little challenging for people because people often feel like, “Oh, I don’t wanna like clog up Slack with my little side conversation,” you know, if they’re having a specific conversation, asking someone like, “Oh, where can I find this file? It’s not in Google Docs is it somewhere else?” But little things like that. If you put them in a slack channel, you can search for them later or other people can see like, “Oh, I thought we didn’t have that file anymore. But now she’s talking about it. Do we still use that?” Like, there’s just a lot of little connections that happen when people can see everything. So I think that no private messages role is a really good rule.
Jovian: Yeah, I think people kind of like, underestimate this subconscious creativity that comes. So that’s why if you’re in the office, like you say over here, like the vibe, and I think you kind of get replicated by being public, as public as possible on Slack message. Cool. And just curious, like, what are some special or fun things that you guys do at MeetEdgar to keep the culture great.
Laura: So you know, it’s always challenging being remote. You’re always trying to find little ways that you can connect.
One that we’ve done that’s fun is watching a movie together. So like all watching the same movie at the same time, and then doing like a little group chat about about the movie.
A lot of this stuff honestly feels really cheesy. But you know, it’s just kind of what you have to do in a remote company.
Jovian: Yeah. So a movie, anything else? Or just like small stuff?
Laura: Yeah, I mean, we do arrange group chats for people to have just like video chats with like two to four people. Which again, it feels really awkward at first, like for the first like a minute or two you’re like, “Okay, what are we supposed to chat about?” But we find that it gets not awkward right away. And I think that’s really important because one of the weird things about being remote you know, our company is really small, right? We’re about 15 people. If we were together in an office, everyone would have had lunch and coffee and everything with everyone else because it’s only 15 people. Like that’s a very small group, [crosstalk 00:26:11.25]
Jovian: Yes.
Laura: But the problem is being remote, there are some people whose jobs just don’t interact. Like if you’re a back end developer, you don’t really need to talk to the person that writes our blog, like you guys just don’t have usually any work that overlaps or like, you maybe don’t need to talk to our finance person, you know. So, it’s really important that you’re creating these opportunities.
And of course, we do have in person meetups, but you can’t you can’t just rely on that. So these casual chats, and movies, and stuff like that is just a way to make sure that the finance person and the designer are getting a chance to get to know each other because they might not get that chance.
Jovian: Hmm, that is interesting. So what we do at Arc is basically we’re like around 30 people now. So what we do we…so we are like a hybrid team, like a lot of us are co-located in Taipei, Taiwan, but some are distributed in North America. So what we usually do is we celebrate birthdays.
So let’s say if you are a June baby and after your birthday we celebrate by the May baby. People who were born in May are responsible to help you just do like some real small thing. So when we are celebrating the birthday of people who are remote we are basically just using you know Zoom or using just discreet like some bad like Jeopardy quiz like online where people can participate on Slack. Like, okay, like for example, “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Okay, ask the audience and then ask the audience, and people just put their emojis on Slack and these are the answer. So yeah, just small things like that. But you mentioned you have an in-person meetups though. Is it like a whole team retreat?
Laura: Yeah, whole team retreat. We’ve done sometimes once a year, sometimes twice a year.
Jovian: Hmm. Oh, were you like pretty hands on and like, not managing, like, arranging the trip? Or?
Laura: No, that is not my skillset, I don’t help at all.
Jovian: Yeah, I’m just mentioning because this is something that remote companies are trying to dive into more, you know, because they feel like in- person meetups are super important. Some of the most creative initiative from the companies. So for example I talked to the CEO of Toggl, Krister Haav, they have this really cool unicorn startup simulator. And it’s super fun game, and games that win during the in-person meetup brainstorm. I think people will try and emulate that more. And, you know, also there are some great projects specially, like, just came up for that.
Laura: Yeah, you know, something that we found is important for in-person is not to be over scheduled. Because I think when you first do them, you’re like, here’s the breakfast and then here’s the work day and then here’s the activity, and then here’s the meeting, and then here’s drinks and here’s dinner, you know. And like, these are all people that choose to work alone from home. You know, like, not everybody wants to spend all day together, you know?
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: So now like, we have time, every day, we have at least like two or three hours, kind of in between, like, the workday and dinner. We just don’t have anything scheduled because the people who are really social and wanna hang out, like they’ll make it happen anyway. You know, someone will be like, “I’m going here, if anybody you know, wants to come with,” and then people can. But like, you know, we’re a software company, right? We’re talking about a bunch of developers who work remotely, like often not people who wanna be social all day.
Jovian: Yeah, I like where you mentioned that these are the people who choose to not meet people in real life. Like that’s why they are working remotely, like they hate people. No, just kidding. But yes, but I just find it hilarious, but I did receive some degree of truth in it. I forgot which company they’re basically again, like on their meetups, they have like this free time. They even get their budget allocated.They even get their budget, like they give you like a couple hundred bucks do what you want to do in this beach, just don’t drown or something like that.
Laura: Just don’t drown yeah. And we’re also really clear that the social stuff like, you know, because we have generous and social stuff in the evening, we’re very clear that there’s no pressure to go to that. I mean, people obviously, do go most days. But like, if you just feel like being by yourself one evening, you don’t have to make up some elaborate excuse, you can just not go and no one’s gonna give you a hard time and it’s totally okay.
Jovian: Yeah, so, I’ve interviewed a couple of remote startup leaders from a startup company. So one of the topic that always came when it comes to you know, employee management or, team management is the onboarding for new employees. Can you share a bit more what the onboarding looks like for new hires in MeetEdgar?
Laura: Yeah, so I think something funny about being remote is the first question we always have to address is, “How do I show up on the first day?” If you’re in an in-person office, you know how to show up, you walk into the office at 9:00. But when your remote people are like, “Do I send an email to someone and say, I’m working now? Like what do I do?” So, at our company, you know that you’re working, if you’re on Slack, if you’re signed on to Slack, that means you’re working. If you’re not signed on to Slack, that means that you’re not working. So you know, we tell people that we give people a first friend, and your first friend is someone who, you can ask any questions. So that if you’re not sure who to ask, you know, who your first friend is, and you can say, where do these documents live? Or how do we do this? How do we do that?
We try to give people a really thorough tour of all the departments and not just their department. So they’re understanding you know, kind of what is like our basic marketing strategy. What does our development process look like? Like how do we handle finances at our company because we are a small company. So, you can kind of get to know everyone and get to understand everything.
And we give people a lot of time, like the first week, we assume that you’re just gonna be like chatting to people, poking around, you know, reading through documents, reading through meeting notes, we don’t start off with like, here’s your project on the first day.
Jovian: You mentioned about like giving, “tours,” like for the new hires.. So what does this to entail? Is basically just like let’s say this elite developer that you just go like one-on-one call with you and present you with like 30 minutes, something like that?
Laura: Yeah, so yeah, a lot of it is one-on-one calls with people from all over the company and they might kind of show you things that you can explore more on your own. So yeah, you might have a call with someone from our customer service department, and they’re like, “Here’s where our help docs live. Here’s how we kind of think about constructing them. Here’s like the resources that we use when we make them, you know, you can read through them or later. Here’s like, the top questions that our customers have. Here’s the pages that get the most views.”
Jovian: Right, so yeah, MeetEdgar is a very small company. So again, when I was doing research, I was like, kind of I guess probably I’ll guess you’ll have like, 25, 30 people at least. And I realized we’re like, 15, and I was kind of surprised, but actually not that surprised, because I also been following your writings and whatnot. So this small team, is it like by design? Like, is this something that you want to cap on?
Laura: Yeah, I mean, like I said, we have been larger before. And I think a lot of companies go through this experience where maybe they at first are sort of excited about growing and then maybe something happens where they get smaller or and then they’re like, “Oh, wait, I thought I wanted to be bigger. But I wanna be smaller.” Small and small is really great. And I think the interesting thing about being small is like, it’s such a balance, right? Because of course, there’s only so many things that you can achieve as a 15 person team, right? It’s just it’s a limited resource that you cannot do all the things at once.
Jovian: Yeah.
Laura: But almost everyone prefers smaller teams, like it’s very unusual to meet someone that’s like, “I’d rather be on an 80 person team than a 10 person team. Most humans enjoy how smaller teams operate. So we’re definitely a company that wants to remain very small. We are happy growing a bit slower and having a smaller team or we’re happy never being you know, a $500 million company, that’s not really the path that we’re on.
Jovian: Yeah, so I think you nailed it on the head. Like I think lots of entrepreneurs like being in a small company, but most of them don’t want to admit it. Because they feel like, “Oh, everything is about scaling.”
So I listened to this ReWork podcast with on Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hanson, the CTO of Basecamp was talking to the CEO…oh, not CEO the founder of the 1Password David Teare. So they were talking about DHH, which is David Heinemeier Hanson, talked about stories like he heard a lot of stories about startup founders that just don’t feel like they don’t love their company’s number just because it’s grown too big and they prefer when it was smaller, they don’t find the joy in it.
So again, yes, I totally agree. I feel like most people especially okay, one of the things that comes to mind, especially when you’re building a remote company, when you grow bigger, it’s like you have a 100 people. It’s really harder to scale again with the process and documentation and whatnot. So the so-called like communication that will just or the process that will just stack up. Is there any particular thing that you think MeetEdgar does really well or emphasized more compared to other companies when it comes to culture or something that you personally really quite proud of.
Laura: Our working hours.
It’s sad that this is a point of differentiation, but we work 40 hour work weeks, every week. There’s no exceptions to that. There’s no crunch time.
And you know, our team has four weeks vacation, which again in America is considered a lot. And we don’t work on the evenings or the weekends. So that means that you will get no emails, there will be no Slack messages. It’s just not what we do. And I think it’s really important to be able to give people a job that they can really enjoy and work really hard during the workday, and then they can unplug and be off.
Jovian: Yeah, I think, again, I think a lot of remote companies are [inaudible 00:37:28]. Companies like Basecamp, they’re a huge proponent of 40 hours work week. I think the main difference between MeetEdgar and Basecamp like how they work, they know yeah, they’re are a big proponent of asynchronous work and MeetEdgar is more synchronized, which is totally fine. What works for you.
Laura: Right.
Jovian: Right. And another thing that I want to talk about today is basically the thing that I’m super interested about because I don’t think I’m really good at it is about processes. So how does the MeetEdgar team go about documenting stuff in general? And yeah, I just wanted to start with that first.
Laura: So we use Tetra for our company WIKI. I think they’re a really great product. And we have a company WIKI which I assumed that every company did, but now I’ve come to find out a lot of companies just don’t have like any documentation.
Jovian: I think it’s more like they have it, but they’re just too lazy to update it like nobody knows when to update it, right?
Laura: Right, right. So yeah, we use basically like the company wiki is used for things like processes or like directories or things that don’t get updated very much. And then Google Docs is used for more living documents, or more like, you know, if there’s a series of emails, like the actual copy of the emails will live within Google Docs. So it’s not like an you know, it’s kind of the actual work not like the overview of something.
And then we use a lot of just like pinning in Slack channels is also just a really good way to organize things. So every department and their Slack channel they have like, usually a little kind of shortlist of what their priorities are and then that might be linked to like a, you know document where it goes more in depth. Or it might just be a little Slack note like, here’s the top three things for us right now, there’s gonna be a link to their meeting agenda notes that everyone can find that easily. If there’s like a big project that they’re working on right now, there’s gonna be a little overview of that pen just so we found that’s a great way to organize information too.
Jovian: Got it. So is the team lead, or in your case is called Team Advocates, I think like marketing advocates, are they the one who are somewhat responsible to keep that intact?
Laura: Yeah, they’re responsible for it. We also have someone on our operations team who is kind of like a helper for the entire team. So she’ll help kind of remind…she’ll kind of look around and be like, “Okay, you don’t have your priorities updated, you know, go ahead and fill that in here.” So she kind of helps remind people to do that.
Jovian: I think this role is really underrated, especially in remote companies. I think there is someone that has to just go on like,”Okay. Is this updated or not?” Just someone who has this you know, this focus. And why don’t we I just want to look like a little bit. The team leads in MeetEdgar is not called “managers” is called “advocates”, right?
Laura: Mm-hmm.
Jovian: Can you share a bit more why advocates?
Laura: Yeah, so we came up with that word because we’re like, “Okay, what should we call it?” Because we talked about like we’re not doing VP. We don’t. Yes, VP title, like, manager feels a little old school, to call someone, a manager.
So we’re like, “Okay, well, you know, what are they doing?” They’re really advocating for both their team members and they’re advocating for their like department and the company. So if you are the customer experience advocate, it’s just sort of, I think it’s a way to emphasize the idea of, you know, what some people call servant leadership, that the director or the manager is serving their team instead of the team serving the director. So your advocate is advocating for you the members of the customer experience team and is also advocating when we’re talking with the leadership team of the company. And they’re like, “Hey, this is why customer experience is important and needs priority and needs, resources and all that.”
Jovian: Right, yeah, that is interesting. Because as you were talking, like, I just realized the name advocate like if someone told me like, you know, like marketing advocate, it’s more like an evangelist or something like this. Like, I’m not managing. I mean, technically, I’m managing someone, but it’s more like, it’s not like I look down at managing, but like, I advocate, I look up to the C suite, for example, that I want to advocate this stuff for my team. And this is the project that I propose, for example.
Laura: Yeah. And we wanted to have a word for it because we’re also very clear that we’re not a flat organization. Like it’s not, you know, a few years it’s not so popular anymore. But a few years ago, it was like holocracy is big, right? And being flat is big. And we’ve always been a company that’s like, No.
We’re very organized in exactly what your role is, everyone needs to know who their boss is. Because that’s another thing that especially in remote companies, I guess it’s easy to just sort of leave everything very loose. And we’re really a big fan of clarity and just making things really clear for people.
So if you’re like, “Oh, well, you don’t you know, everyone just takes ownership and you don’t really have a boss.” It’s like, “Well then who determines my salary? Like can someone else fire me?” And it’s like, “No, actually, you do have a boss we’re just gonna pretend to like no one knows who it is.” You know.
Right, so we’re not gonna pretend we’re just gonna tell you like, “This person is your boss. So know that.” But yeah, they’re also advocating for you.
Jovian: Yeah, exactly. I think this is a good segway to the next thing I want to talk about is MeetEdgar like you guys have no deadlines.
Laura: Yeah. So we do still largely operate without deadlines. And the reason why, so something to know about our company is we’re totally self serve, we don’t do any custom work. So that also means like, we don’t have a sales team, we don’t have any enterprise clients. We’ve never written a line of code for a specific client, right? So that means that we can be really flexible, like, obviously, we work for our customers, and that we create a product for them. But we never promise any public deadlines for features or anything like that.
I mean, we have an audience of developers here, I don’t need to explain why, you know, it can be a bad idea to publicly promise a deadline for a software feature. So that means that we found that it’s often more useful to be really specific about the scope of a project rather than the deadline. So if we’re, you know, developing a feature, for example, getting really, really clear before we start on exactly what this means, exactly what it includes, exactly what it doesn’t include.
And then of course, we all wanna make sure we’re on the same page as far as like, is this a one hour project? Is this a six month project? Right? I mean, you need to have some idea of how long it’s gonna take.
But the reason that we don’t have deadlines is because we’ve found that you can’t have strict deadlines, and have a no crunch time culture, which is what we have, right? If you have a deadline, you’re gonna have to work overtime sometimes to make the deadline. That’s just how it is.
If you’re like it has to get done by Friday, no matter what. Well, you’re gonna have to work late Friday night sometimes to make that happen. And what we find is like we’re like, “Okay, this is what needs to happen.”
Like we just released our Android app. And you know, we’re a small team, there was only one developer who was working on the Android app. It was just his project. Well, he ended up having a longer vacation scheduled right when the project was supposed to be wrapping up. That’s just sort of how the timing worked out. So it didn’t finish until he got back from vacation. That’s just how it was.
And like, it doesn’t really matter. You know, like we hadn’t promised to our clients that it was gonna be live on a certain day. In the grand scheme of things. It really doesn’t matter if the Android app goes live today or two weeks from today. If we had said, No, this is absolutely the deadline, we would have had to say to him, “You know what, you had this vacation scheduled, but guess what, it ended up falling at the time or the project needs to be done. So you can’t take the vacation.” Like if you wanna have strict deadlines, that’s just what goes with it. So we’re like we’re gonna have a clear project scope and then it’s gonna get done when it gets done…
Jovian: Yeah, I do find it interesting because on one hand, I feel like MeetEdgar is actually pretty structured when it comes to remote companies. You know, the, I don’t want to say strict but like consistent working hours. And you know how people should be it’s like, but on the other hand, there’s this none anxiety inducing, like there’s no deadlines, and there’s this level of trust. I trust you guys to do your best work for the company. And when it’s done, it’s done. If it’s not done, I trust you will continue it. This app won’t look like 10 years if it’s not done, like there’s a certain level of trust on it.
Laura: And I mean, we would talk about it right? If we’re like, this is taken a month longer than we thought it was, like, “What’s happening here?” Like, obviously, those conversations are gonna happen.
Jovian: Yeah, definitely. I can see like there’s that like passive aggressive, not passive aggressive, of like you know, it’s been like three months and then. But when there’s a new hire, I’m not sure if you hired someone new recently, but there’s new hire, that they’re pretty used to deadlines, right? Have a soft deadline, do they feel anxious or something like that?
Laura: I don’t think so. Because people are always welcome to do it for themselves. And I think that’s something that we’ve discovered is to really let people have their own style of work. And that also means like, I remember for a long time, I was like we all everyone at the company has to use the same project management system. And we can never find something that worked for the marketing team and the development team and it was this stupid like thorn in our side, like, “Are we gonna use Trello or Asana or Pivotal Tracker?” And then we’re like, “You know what, different departments can use different things, it’s okay.” So if the way that someone works is they’re like, “I love deadlines. I love to have my work mapped out every day that I’m gonna do it.” It’s like cool, go for it.
Jovian: Yeah, the thing I got the thing that you say it’s basically the bane of my existence. Because like, just a while ago, a lot of the marketing team members like to use , and I was like,”I don’t like Asana.” And here’s me, literally look at me like I’m a pagan or something like that. “Why don’t you believe in our god Asana?”
Laura: Right.
Jovian: Like it’s crazy, but yes, I think it all depends, again, back to like, documentation and…By the way, just like mentioned about documentation. How do you avoid over documentation? Or was there even any problem like this before you made that thing?
Laura: We haven’t had too much problem with over documentation. I mean, our philosophy is just do it messy and do it. You know, you just need to have things written somewhere like, and this is also something we’ve gone back and forth on over the years. Like, we’ve tried to create these really lovely, you know, project templates. And it’s like, “Okay, here’s the template.” And you fill out all these parts where we found that sometimes I guess that can be over documentation and kind of slow you down.
Whereas if you just have a Google Doc, and you’re like, “Okay, here’s the six things you need to know about this project.” And they’re written in the Google Doc, and the document has a clear name that you can search for, I’m always adding just random words to my Google Doc titles of like things, you know, words that I might look up. It’s like finance, money, operations, financial. Because I’m like which ones of those words will I like type in when I’m looking for this later?
Honestly, as long as you have that we just kind of try to encourage people, it’s better to just put it down somewhere. Don’t wait till you have this, like, beautiful, perfectly organized document.
Jovian: Right, yeah. So, Laura, so we’ve been talking about a lot of stuff like transparency, documentation. I just want to end this with a you know that you guys have this handbook like the MeetEdgar handbook that you’ve published for, so other companies can learn from or even copy that. So I thought as you guys made it public in 2017. Can you share a bit more about why?
Laura: Yeah, so we found that we were a lot more organized than most other small companies.
Jovian: Okay.
Laura: Like I said, I was surprised that some companies have no documentation or like you said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that’s five years on a date and no one’s ever looked at it. We also have always been really good at clear policies. And I think, you know, what you kind of spoke to earlier is finding this balance of having a lot of like boundaries and a lot of certainty, combined with giving people a lot of responsibility and a lot of freedom. And we’ve found that having clear parameters actually gives people the freedom to not worry about that.
Like one example is I am not a believer in unlimited vacation time, because I think unlimited vacation time means to figure out where the backchannels how much vacation time you’re actually allowed to use, right? There is a norm that the company is okay, with. So just tell people what the norm is right? Or like we found, even for things that seem really silly, like we found it was really stressful for people, they would go to a conference and we’re like, “Okay, you know, book a hotel room on your company credit card,” and people would feel really stressed about how much money that should cost. They’re like, “Do I need to scour the city and find the cheapest possible hotel room or is it okay, to stay in the conference hotel room that costs, you know, twice as much as the one down the street like which one is okay?”
So giving people these specifics of like, we literally write, here’s how much hotel rooms obviously depends on the city, but like, here’s the range of how much hotel rooms cost per night. Giving people that kind of information is very freeing, and really allows them to focus on their work instead of hotel room stress. So we released the handbook because we found that a lot of companies felt really lost as far as like, what should HR policies be? How do I especially for you know, new entrepreneurs that are hiring their first few people? How do I do time off? How do I do sick time, like, what should the policy be?
So we’re like, we’ve found some things that work pretty well for us, and we have them documented. We’ll just put it out there and share it with you. And we’ve had a bunch of emails from founders that are like, “Thank you. I just copied exactly what you wrote. I just took your handbook and I made that my handbook.” And obviously it’ll evolve for them over time with their company, but we love when people do that.
Jovian: Yeah, I like the handbook because it’s quite simple compared to other companies. Like, some other company has their handbook which is also great, but MeetEdgar’s version it’s just simple. It’s a one pager right? It’s a one pager almost one pager.
Laura: Yeah, I think there’s a little bit more.
Jovian: A bit more oh, my God sorry. Yeah.
Laura: Yeah, we try to keep it simple and not like legalise, right? Just giving just giving people the information that they need.
Jovian: Yeah. All right. Awesome. Yeah, so Laura it has been an absolutely, fantastic chat. It’s really fun chat. So where can people find you online?
Laura: Yeah, so you can find MeetEdgar, M-E-E-T-E-D-G-A-R, meetedgar.com Meet Edgar on the social media. We do have a coupon code for podcast listeners it’s PODCAST all caps gets you your first month free in MeetEdgar PODCAST all caps. And I blog at Lauraroeder.com or you can find me on Twitter @LKR.
Jovian: Yeah. So for the listeners, you can find all of these in the show notes. And don’t forget to follow Laura and Medium and Twitter and she has this three letter handles so you know that she’s legit. So yeah, Laura, thank you so much again for your time.
Laura: Yeah, thank you.
Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of “Outside The Valley,” brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the 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 @ A-R-C. 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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