Optimising for the intellectual act of working - Greg Janota & Satchel Spencer

00:00

What appealed to me was being able to spend my extra skills and my extra value not in making more money, but in spending less time on it. And so there was definitely a phase in my life where I was optimizing for working as little as possible. There is a second phase and they definitely still overlap somewhat where I'm optimizing my work for being as interesting as possible. So as intellectually fulfilling.

00:23

And is this something that you thought kind of a lot about? Sometimes I speak to people and they've thought about work and how work impacts their life and how they choose to spend their time a lot. And other people it's happened more naturally. And I wonder what that's like for the both of you and if there's any topics you'd like me to cover?

00:39

Realizing, oh, I can actually do something that's valuable to people. What appealed to me was being able to spend my extra skills and my extra value, not in making more money, but in spending less time on it. And so that there was definitely a phase in my life where I was optimizing for working as little as possible. There is a second phase and they definitely still overlap up somewhat where I'm optimizing my work for being as interesting as possible. So as intellectually fulfilling. Those often do conflict with traditional career goals, I would say,

01:15

How does that relate to you, Greg?

01:16

For me, I mean, I think I was very much going towards the path of investment banking. When I was in university I studied economics. Then I went into business school, did a bunch of internships, and then I went into investment banking. It was a really good learning experience. I really developed my network, I think, in this kind of very intense and professional context. But I really wanted to kind of create something out of my own initiative and not just advise companies on what to do, but actually build a company. And that's where I was thinking taking quite a big risk, because when I quit banking, I was obviously making quite decent money. But then jumping off that cliff and going initially when I joined our company, basically we had no customers. We had no funding. That was in 2019. And just entirely taking the risk of doing something innovative, doing something new, and really potentially trying to find my passion, which I think I have found by taking that jump.

02:35

I don't think I would've ever been as happy in my work had I stayed in banking or professional services as I am right now helping run a startup.

02:48

Sometimes those moments where you find your passion come naturally, and sometimes you have to force them a bit. Sometimes you have an experience that you click with and you continue it and you love it and you fall all into it. And then at other times there's moments where you almost have to push yourself to go and do it. When was that moment where you knew what you were passionate about, Greg?

03:16

I think it really kicked in for me back in 2020 when we were releasing our first product. It's actually a tool that helped during the COVID-19 crisis, screen students and staff in schools and businesses.

03:36

It was a no code product, wasn't it?

03:38

It was, exactly. It was quite a flexible tool that really inspired us to build Skippet, which is what we are now really focused on. But basically at some point during the summer, we got inundated kind of with demo requests for our product. And then we ended up growing really quickly and signing contracts and at that point, I realized, oh wow, all this work I and the team are doing is directly contributing to, providing value to tens of thousands of people. Really from the beginning of developing the thing, which Satchel was responsible for to then launching it. Selling the product and just this kind of feeling of excitement of growing a company that really stuck with me, plus the creativity of trying to make what we're doing better both on the business side as well as on the product side. I think then you've just realized how much possibility you have to shape the future of your company, but also in a way the lives of the customers who are using it. And then also in some way, the lives of the employees as well.

04:46

So that sort of feeling of empowerment and empowering others and growth is kind of limitless possibilities, plus in some way a very flat hierarchy makes a kind of environment I really realized I take pride in.

05:07

When you were both deciding how to choose what to do next and choosing to start Skippet there must have been a whole load of different factors in your own mind that you would've weighed up to make that decision. Greg, what were those factors for you?

05:24

Yeah, I mean the story of our company is pretty interesting. I think we're definitely not your typical kind of startup where there is a graduate from say Stanford or Cambridge maybe in the UK who decides that they want to start a company. They raise some funding for their idea. In two years they raise a seed round, and that's just how it kind of goes and it either fails or it succeeds. For us it's been much more of a kind of complicated journey. It started really with our third co-founder, who is not on this call, Jacob, who started our company before called MyMedBot to solve a completely different problem and maybe similar problem on a kind of abstract level. But the product had to do with medical emergencies and helping people in that context. And so that was actually the product that I was sold on when I quit my job in investment banking.

06:25

At that point, I didn't know that much about start-ups but it seemed like a good idea. Big problem, people's health issues, and helping people. I thought that's quite a noble cause. But then the pandemic struck and we had to sort of throw out that whole business idea. And that's where we made the decision really inspired by just going to one business meeting where we were given a paper form asking us about our symptoms. And we were inspired to build a product to automate that paper form. So we completely switched course at that point, which was the right call, definitely because that got us to a kind of critical mass of customers and also really to build our team.

07:15

And then from there our journey and decision moving towards Skippet has been driven by our learnings really from our customers and a lot of their feedback, but also seeing what kind of solutions they use day-to-day to solve their problems, whether they're at school or whether they're at business. And we kind of realized that there is fundamental trade offs in the way that software works. In terms of complexity, something being super complicated for it to be flexible, and simplicity on the other hand where you compromise on flexibility. And that's what really inspired us to start thinking about building a no code platform that anyone can use, and make it even more accessible for the use of natural language and artificial intelligence. So it's all really very much like a learning process that started.

08:17

And people have lots of different choices. They can choose to join really early stage startups. They can choose to join larger companies. If you were going back to the beginning again and making that call, how would you make it? It's everyone's own decision to make, but Satchel, how would you go about making that decision and advising someone on how to weigh up the risks and the benefits to joining an early stage start-up?

08:42

Well, I've seen both sides of it. I've seen the ones where it doesn't work out and it lasts even shorter than a year or two. I think there's a large potential benefit in terms of being able to make a large impact and have control over what you're doing. I've always found that that's been the quickest way for me to learn. And I think a lot of what's brought my skills up to this point has been putting myself in uncomfortable situations. Over time, over the past 10 years, those uncomfortable situations have grown more and more extreme, but it's always facilitated growth and it's sort of growth that I don't necessarily think is possible at larger organizations.

09:35

How do you think, Satchel, because as you said, when you were 12 you were building websites in WordPress, and now you're developing a new programming language that can be manipulated with human language, which is essentially one of the more advanced things you can be doing on a technical side as a software developer. What were the key steps in building up that experience, do you think?

09:59

I think that I went through something that a lot of developers experience, especially my time working in development agencies, where you start to notice quite a lot of overlap in between the different products you're making. You start seeing more and more abstractions that you kind of took for granted and wanting to create something that kind of finds the commonality between all of these products that you're making, getting at something more fundamental and something more flexible is what's led me in this direction.

10:29

So I've always been the kind to want to tinker with things. I've always been the kind to want to make new libraries, make new abstractions, make things for other developers. And that personally is just what I've found to be the most interesting. It's not necessarily an absolute, but that's how I sort of got from WordPress plugins to custom form builders, to no code tools.

10:51

Yeah. In some ways it sounds like the constraints that you are naturally given early on in some ways create the opportunities. And I can certainly recognize the feeling when you talk, Greg, about not having much money in the early days. And I look back on our own journey and think I'm so grateful that we didn't have loads of money because we were able to really focus on the user and not over worry about spending all our time raising funds and thinking about other things.

11:21

How do you take that kind of philosophy that you have as an early stage company, where there are these constraints that really focus everyone's mind? And no one wants to live in that world forever, but it gives you so much and when your company changes you no longer have it. How do you make you sure that the people who join still have that constraint mindset and get the benefits from it whilst not experiencing quite as much pain as perhaps you have?

11:48

That's a really, really good question. Well, I think in terms of values that you want to have in a company, I think taking ownership and being creative and really trying to contribute to the growth of the business should sort of transcend the size of the company. And there is ways to incentivize that with option schemes on the financial side, but also the profile of people. Who we're looking really to hire are the people who are just driven to create and to build. And these might not always be the most experienced people, but people who have a lot of potential and who have of course the technical skill, especially on the dev side. You should have discipline in terms of what you pursue, especially before you have product market fit. That's important.

12:50

But I think this bootstrap kind of concept of being sort of underpaid is not sustainable and that doesn't help you get the kind of people to build your company that you want. I mean, ultimately the best software engineers have good jobs. They're well paid. So for them, you need to provide a next best alternative to what they're doing that's significantly more interesting as Satchel said, more demanding, which I think we're pretty good at, but then also at least meets them on the financial side. You want people to feel like they're not making a sacrifice. And that doesn't mean over-hiring, I think it's better to have fewer people who are well compensated and who are really committed than to kind of over-hire, and optimize for, and then underpay people. I think that's a very short term strategy. I mean, it'll also potentially lead to other kind of problems. I mean, we're a small team. So this is kind of like a future question in a few years time. But I think the general, would you agree with me, Satchel?

14:03

Yeah, the answer to your question I think is we're not there yet. Once we start getting past a team of 10 there might start being trade offs in terms of the organizational overhead, where you actually have to make something this huge function versus the individual impact. We're still at the small scale where sure we've got revenue, funding, customers, but I think we have a really exciting trade off of high impact, but some degree of stability. How we keep that going forward, I think is frankly beyond my experience, though I'm keen to figure it out.

14:45

Yeah. As things develop, how do you, Satchel, want your relationship with work to develop alongside it?

Personally, I do want to continue really doing what I'm doing now, which is very much focused on the engineering side. I think I add the most value in an architectural sense. Management via the implementation and via the code as opposed to management as a project manager. I think especially as the company gets larger, that's probably not going to be my role necessarily. I see myself as being an engineer. In the short term, those roles kind of blend. I'm the reliability engineer. I'm the CTO. I'm the top to bottom, right?

15:30

I don't think you'd want joined an early stage company where the CTO didn't want to be an engineer. What about you, Greg?

15:37

For me I think that's the most exciting is that you in a startup, whether it's kind of on a senior role like mine or more on a junior role, as the company grows you need to grow with the company. And the things that you do change. And when you become comfortable and efficient at what you're doing, that means that things are going too slow. So I'm really excited about conquering the next stages of our growth. And to that extent, relationship with work, I think it really is very much learning and reflecting on what 

are going well and kind of building upon that. And I think also trying to have fun, I think that's really important at work. And it helps if you're doing something that you enjoy.

16:35

In an early state startup I think this applies, especially to myself and Satchel and Jacob, but also potentially for even more junior employees, you really need to think about every minute that you spend working in the company, how is it benefiting the end goal and the vision. And that changes over time. But I think that's really in interesting, and it's very different from a sort of corporate environment, or even a large scale startup where your contribution is part of a bigger puzzle. Here it's your contribution is a fraction of 20% of the puzzle that is the company's growth. And so that's really interesting to think about priorities and where you want to put in the work. If you view it very materialistically that your work is a resource, just like anything else, your time is that. And so you want to think about how am I going to allocate that to benefit the company the most and for it to be somewhat aligned also with my personal goals.

17:47

To kind of wrap up, I think that it's very, very difficult as early stage founders to recognize the growth that you go through. It changes so quickly. One minute you are writing code, the next minute you're hiring people, next minute you're managing those engineers. And the problems that you solve pre-product market fit is so very different to when you're actually scaling the company. That puts so much pressure on you as founders to scale with the company. And it requires a certain balance of self-awareness and not beating yourself up too much. And I wonder for you both, how you find the balance there and how you're able to have a growth mindset, where you are both self aware of your own growth in the areas that you can get better at, but at the same time kind of don't beat yourself up over it and burn out.

18:46

I think on my side because of the nature of the job, burnout is evident very quickly. It's not super doable to just grind through a problem. My efficiency will drop very, very quickly. And so I have to be very proactive about if I have to leave and take an hour long walk in the middle of the day to think about this, or to clear my mind. That will benefit me a lot more than the hour that I could spend banging my against the wall.

19:13

Yeah. It's not even a choice. It's just mandatory.

19:13

Yeah, yeah.

19:16

Yeah. I think the key is really self-understanding and self-regulation. I'm not sure everyone can do that, and certainly in my previous job I was really bad at it when I was working in banking. But I guess I also didn't have much latitude to regulate anything. But I think now being able to understand how the amount of time you work, and what other things you do during the day, and things like exercise and taking a break, and your creativity, how all these things interrelate and how you feel. At the end work is always going to be both physical in a way and in some way emotional. You cannot abstract the human body and the human emotion from the intellectual act of working. I think that's a very important truth.

20:15

And to the extent that you are aware of how these things relate and that you need everything to be aligned, you're able to make corrections when things are out of balance of when you think that you perform best. And especially this applies to knowledge kind of jobs, the ones that in software engineering or manager roles. It's not like in the days of the industrial revolution where you are essentially a robot. Now, I think in order to have this kind of intellectual performance, you need all of these elements to be aligned and to really understand yourself. I think that's really, really important and important for sustainability, especially in the managerial role you can't fully switch off very often because there is a company to run.

21:12

So that's why you need to create a state of equilibrium internally where you're never at the state of burnout where you need to take a break. You are always at the state of just being kind of in a personal equilibrium because of taking regular breaks or because of just the way that you work day to day being not taxing on you psychologically.

21:36

I think that anyone joining Skippet will be lucky to be able to be led by people who want to find that personal equilibrium. And yeah, I love it. Thank you both for taking the time out today to share your stories.