welcome to another episode of The Hilary podcast, where we turn the metaphorical am over to the darker side of Founders Journey to get to where they are and discuss previous projects and companies to shed light on illuminating insights that you can apply to your business. Today, I brain in hand Erica. And on this episode, I am very excited to be joined by Brian Ray, the current founder of Project Headlamp, a feedback tool for remote teams to foster internal connection and support. Prior to this, though, Brian is already amassed an extremely entrepreneurial journey that all started off with a kickass portfolio website and a cold email to the legendary Brad film. This led him to his time at Mako, a company that eventually exits with him at chief product officer and then to be knocks a personal search engine for all over user's files that they have in the cloud. Along with these awesome anecdotes from his journey and the Denver start of ecosystem, Brian and I discussed his experience going from a large acquisition to the founding team of the new company, his take on the future of mode work and the idea of the necessary tools required to enable it. That often is alluded to in online discussions and why you might miss that one person in your office who always brings two nights work.

Sit tight, get a notebook ready and thank you for listening. This podcast wouldn't be possible without the help of our friends over at Referral Hero, the all in one platform to design and run flexible referral programs that grow your bottom line. If you're tired of wasting money on Facebook ads or writing tons of content that never rank on Google but already have loyal customers, you should definitely try a referral program. The Dollar Flight Club grew its business by 13% and holiday pirates added 300,000 emails in less than a month after setting up their referral programs. The best thing about all of this is that you can get started in minutes with their no code widgets, and if you sign up today, you can get 20% off with the code fail ary to zero. Try it now for 14 days without any cost at referral hero dot com Once again, that's a referral hero dot com Hello and welcome to another episode of The Hilary Podcast. Your one stop shop for failed ventures failed founders. But more importantly, the lessons you can learn from them when his brain and Yoko. And today I'm super excited to have Brian Ray on the podcast. Hello, Brian.

How's it going?

It's going good. Are

you? I'm doing pretty good. That's Ah, pretty funny. Insure their

I wrote it myself. They can't. Ryan is the current founder at Project Headlamp, and he previously head of product and user experience at Beit Knox. Is that correct? Like way

we called it but knocks internally. But 50% of the people we introduced the two called it by knocks. I think just defense. And it just depends on how you refer to binoculars.

Yeah. Yeah. And you were also previously the CPO and macabre. Oh, that got acquired in July 2014.

Yep.

Yeah. I love to just, you know, scale back because you have, like, lots of these, like, great, great experiences that I want to dive into, But I'd love to just scale back and go back to hire brian ray dot com. Yeah, about that.

Yeah, that was the most wild experience. So this is like summer of 2012 and my wife and I were living in the Dallas area in Texas and I was working for myself. Freelance developer doing a okay, you know, enjoying life and business was good trucking along. But the thing is, is that we would always vacation in Colorado and our idea of, ah trip of a vacation was to go to a national park. And, you know, several years before 2012 we'd let it enter our minds. You know what

if we were to move

like, what if we and we kind of tested the waters and there was actually a job offer, too, but they just didn't feel right. So we said, OK, let's put that was, Put that on pause. Let's hunker down for a little bit. And then our son, our third child, our son was born in May of 2012 and no sooner had we gotten home from the hospital, then we kind of looked at each other and kind of grand and said So Colorado. And so you know, I was working on cover letters and doing job applications, like doing the whole you know, the whole room where all the whole thing and one day it just kind of hit me is like,

you know, forget this. I'm gonna build a website is gonna be higher, brian ray dot com. And what I'll do is I'll make it this funny story about how hot it is in Texas and how much we love Colorado. And oh, also, I'm good at websites,

So hey, can you just like, by the way, right?

Yeah, but yeah, exactly like And by the way, I can build websites and the site. The site itself, you know, was the portfolio. Like at the time, parallax Scrolling was the hot thing and like it had, you know, some jokes. And it was like, you know, without sounding Draghi like it was entertaining, you know, just a scroll through and look at and it had, like,

some I might work on it. And so just totally on a like whim or is one of multiple things I sent an email to Brad Feld be felt on Twitter. It was like the godfather of startups and shoulder and was like, Hey, Brad, like total shot in the dark here. But, you know, I would love to move the boulder. I think if you were to tweet, someone in Boulder should hire brian ray dot com. It'll happen. Thanks so much. Love your work, whatever you know and forgot about it. I completely forgot about it until,

like, a week ish or so later, For the first time, I got up in the middle of the night to feed our son and I don't know, man, it's like one AM or 3

a.m. like something

in the middle of the night and some I'm getting ready to sit down at the kitchen table and give him his bottle. And I opened up my iPad and like, the notification pill is red, and it's like 100 and something. And I'm like, Oh, shoot what happened and I scroll all the way to the bottom. And it's an email back to me from Brad saying Tweet it. Good luck. And so all those e mails were just like people e mailing me. Hey, we're not in Boulder, but we're in New York. Hey, have you considered Toronto? Hey, we're in Boulder.

You should talk to us like all these just outright offers. It wa ce bonkers. Dude, it's over the next two weeks. I just spent a bunch of time interviewing with companies. And the funny thing was, the interview process became me. Interviewing them like this is not a brag like this is like in the total, you know, lesson of positioning to try to, like, flip things around and just change. The balance of power was so bizarre and nothing I had experienced, you know, before or sense to that degree. But to be able to see so clearly okay,

when you can create a sense of, like, foam Oh, on the other side, like you suddenly have the advantage. And it was bizarre. Business are lots of lessons. Medal lessons learned from that entire experience, but yeah, I was through that that I joined Acabo, a tech stars and foundry back company in Boulder, and just had the time of my life

there. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much for saying I was saying, like, I fired up the wayback machine friend and like it definitely, You know, I had, like, results from, like, 12 4000. Yeah, and I think like I was saying, it definitely looks much much more fun than you know, Everyone's resumes, like to an extent in white and like no one has fun in these things. You know? It's very right for sound. A very professional. That's

what's so funny. Toe. Pull it up in the Wayback machine. Yeah, it was on trend for 2012 like the typography and the style like it looks like 2012 If you

David, I have since

taken its archive

now, but what? Absolutely, Yeah, this is like a good segue way into macabre, right? Yeah. This was a company to like. Their mission was to consolidate all of the world's genealogical content into, like, just like online. So you chose there because specifically, it was

like, out of Boulder. Well, I mean, there are a number of options that we're in Boulder. What attracted me to that company was not only that, you know, all of the other, you know, requirements were checked off, but this company in particular head of product vision that I could get behind, and the idea is like, I mean, in the United States, ancestry dot com is the £800 gorilla in the market. They own the market and their business model is to put a walled garden around all of their content. And if you want to see the good stuff,

then you gotta pay a subscription fee. Well, Makov owes, you know, thesis was overtime. Information wants to be free. And so ancestries business model is susceptible to disruption and for a number of different reasons. And so what we ought to two is instead of charging for content, let's let content be free. And let's put our subscription service on top of advanced tools and features things and features and things of that nature. And so there was, you know, in my interview with them with the CTO Richard Miller, who remains a very close friend of mine. I was just so struck and inspired by the vision that he cast and that the CEO was leading like there were other companies who offered more money, who,

you know, hasn't better things in terms of like materials. But the vision that they put forward with something that I felt like I could really invest in and get behind, and that's why I ended up there. I mean, I was hired. Just is like, you know, Java script. You know, person like front end Dev and over a couple of you know, over the years with them was super fortunate to get promoted up to head of product. And it was, Yeah, it was a heck of

a ride, man. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't assume. I mean, what I'm trying to get out of here is like, you know, you go from front Endeav too, and, like, you know, this whole story of, like, Brad just like tweeting your you know, just, like shot in the dark out,

I guess. Like, if I'm not prying here like, I'm just curious like, how did you get into, You know, like Front and Dev And like, how do you like, you know, despite Brad's tweet, like, why do you think people wanted to hire you? Besides, like you know, the portfolio?

Well, the thing that I think worked so well in that situation and how I was able to get promoted into that leadership position is that something that I think I can fairly say about myself is that I am one of those people whose resume does not reflect and again not trying to brag, just like that that my resume does not reflect what I bring to an organization. I didn't go to the right school like going to a commuter school in nowhere, Texas. My degree is a bachelor art education. Like I didn't go to Stanford. I don't have a C s degree. I didn't start off at the right start up and then, you know, grow with it too many hundreds. And like some like, you know, millions of dollar things, whatever on the resume. So if that's not true, if you can't win on your resume,

then don't play that game. Do not play the resume game, elevate your skills. And one of the skills that people tell me I have is that I'm a good communicator and tell a good story. And so that's what I tried to roll into that site is Yeah, I am not gonna mention my college. I am not going to mention the previous cos I've worked for because they're not super relevant. I am going to simply demonstrate to you that I can think creatively and that I can put together a pitch. Here it is, and it worked. And so then when I get my foot in the door and was just like one front and developer among a number of them over time. You know, those opportunities to be the person to pitch, to tell a story, to engage with customers, to cast a vision, those opportunities present themselves in a more natural context than a paragraph on a sheet of paper.

So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And, like, you know, those qualities, like, definitely showing for sure, because like you eventually became had a product like CPO. And then Yep, this also, like, rolled into McCobb. Oh, eventually getting acquired by yes, sign my past for your and get some of money. Yeah, a

good chunk of money, which was, you know, the validation of the work that we had done. And again, like more fantastic opportunities for me to have the experience of demoing to our board members, pitching demoing to our eventual acquirers, being in those situations, I mean, they purchased, you know, the company is a direct foothold into the American market toe. Try to take on ancestry and pulled in, You know, a number of our technologies and are content. And so yeah, that's where that

story went. Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations on that. I know it's been a while, but and then that was June of 2015. And then that rolled over us into been ox, where you were head of product in u X. So, yeah, I liketo play this game with lots of the founders I interview. But if you explain to your kids, right, what your company is like, if you had to explain to a 10 year old would be Knox did. What would

you say? The Knox was a single search engine for all of your cloud documents. And so you would be able to connect your G Dr Dropbox Slack ever note at the time, everything. And we would give you a single search interface to find anything you were looking for. Yes. So the acquisition of MK Avo was meaningful, like it was a you know, a nice little blip on our family's financial, you know, financial forecast. But I went to work the next day. It was it was not like and so continued on there. But Knox was the CEO of McCabe. Oh, and I like working on this company together, which came out of you know our seance at Macabre, where we put so much of our effort into its search capabilities. You know, we're searching hundreds of millions of geologically relevant documents, and we're always

like, Man, I wish I had

a combo for Ma for me, for my stuff. And so that's that's kind of where the germ of that idea came from. Well, I mean, I guess I just kind of go and start getting into it is that it was extremely difficult on the technical implementation side where and like on the back inside, which is which is my co founder, Cliff his specialty. And my focus is on the front end and on and on you x. And so, you know, as I'm working on trying, tow design and put together, you know, a beautiful user experience to present everything. A huge struggle that we, you know,

just continue to run into was how challenging it waas to process, wasn't it wasn't difficult to store because storage is cheap and like you just throw something somewhere and then retrieve it. But to be able to process this fire hydrant of content, it was very difficult to keep. The service is from falling all over themselves and extremely expensive as well. And so those were the the challenges that we just continue to run into.

You absolutely Thank you for being vulnerable. I'd love to just, you know, take a step back here. But, like, you know, I love this or like this phrase that you said about, like, you just even though, you know, you've got you guys got acquired. Um, Acabo you went to work the next day, right? I guess I'm just curious. Like,

what is it like going from, you know, uh, team Or like, a company that, just, like experience a large acquisition toe, like building a new company with, like, someone who was previously on macabre? Like, I guess you know, what was the day today like Was like, you know, the office banter like,

Well, so the first thing is that I need to mention is that, you know, after the acquisition I had, sir, I just I nearly said serve out. But I did have to stay with the acquiring company for a year. That dynamic changed dramatically. And so I was hopeful that tow hop, you know, to go back to the scrappy, you know, start up like two person kind of I've It would be a huge breath of fresh air. What ended up being a huge challenge is that because we were so early and because we were having a difficult time finding product traction is difficult for us to feel like we're firing on all cylinders and doing our best work and bringing out the best in each other. And so, you know, the other thing is that we worked as a remote team.

We did not have an office and we were fully remote, even though, for the most part, you know, for most of that time we were living in the same city. We worked remotely, and we did not practice being a good, remote team. And that is as much a skill as any other management skill that you need to You need to learn and in flex. And so the typical challenges that remote teams face, we face to them in spades and so, like miscommunication is dialing in a synchronous communication and, you know, being able to not block one another despite not being next to each other to be able to talk it through in a handful of others. And so, you know,

ultimately, we eventually hired another previous co worker to help out with some business development and research development. And despite all the technical issues and the technical challenges that the company faced, ultimately we had to shut it down because of interpersonal impasses and conflicts, which we've, you know, thankfully, have since repaired. But it has to be acknowledged that those impasses that we developed were in large part responsible for the dismantling other company.

Sure, sure. Yeah. I hope this is not, like too big of a tangent, but just like, you know, on the topic of I guess, you know, internal impasses, right? I just wanted to, you know, ask if I guess like what I'm curious about is, like, I want to know, Like what the ecosystem was like or like when you were saying before that macabre like,

add macabre. You guys, you're like, Oh, I wish there was, like, a macabre for me, All right? I'm just curious. Like, was this more so? Like, I assume this, like, solved your guy's problem. Like Knox with something you guys wanted to build for yourselves. But was this something you, you know, validated

the other people would like Yes, I mean, we certainly had plenty of problem validation. And for what it's worth, I mean, there's a company called F Y I right now founded by Heat and Shaw. You know, Anne Marie Proco pets, and they're working on this. And so whether or not it's them, you know the chances are decent. With resource is they'll they'll be able to pull it off. But if not, then somebody like this is This is most definitely a problem, and it will be a persistent problem because you know, each of those cloud service is have an incentive to remain siloed. Slack wants you to put everything in slack.

Dropbox wants you to put everything. And so sitting across the top of that entire ecosystem is going to play. It says somebody's advantage, and so is what you're asking. Like, what was the culture of product discovery and customer discovery, or what was the ecosystem of communication and sharing of ideas and trying out new things? What more can I look more can I talk

to you about? No, no, absolutely. I think like what I was trying to get out. It was like, I guess, figuring out whether or not you guys were, you know, too early for your time.

Yeah, Okay. In retrospect, what we should have done. And I haven't, like, seen behind the scenes to tell if this is what f y I is doing or not. But it sure seems like it with the way that they describe their security layer. Well, we should have done is not tried to process, analyze and ocr all of the content and store it. We should have just provided as seamless an experience of hitting each of those individual search AP eyes would have been easier to execute. It would have been cheaper to execute. What would not have done is delivered. Relevant search results, search relevancy and waiting was really, really important to us because we knew we knew that it was important from McCobb.

Oh, that what you put up at number 12 and three is extremely important base, you know, in terms of how much your customers willing to trust you. And our hypothesis was, if they don't feel like they can trust that we're delivering the best results, then they're not going to return to us, and so we have to process of them. We have to process every document and be able to like inter. Leave the search relevance if you're just hitting multiple AP eyes and then inter leaving them randomly or only sorting them by by service like you can't deliver is relevant results. Now that may still be true. It doesn't matter. What was more true is that we would not be able to deliver on the product we're trying to build. And so that, coupled with you know, our internal conflicts is what we ultimately returned. What money we had in the bank to our investors as a sign of goodwill. And this probably isn't our last radio. And, uh and we went on our way.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think just like, you know, like when I heard you are like when we were talking previously about knocks like it, really just, like struck me as like something that's been rather start up that's been like very, very hot. And conversations, at least like for me personally, is called Command E, which is like a cloud searching productivity shortcut that people you know, your precious Command e. And you can search through, like Dropbox. Whether that be Google, Dr Etcetera,

etcetera. So I guess, like from that, you know, on a tangent of, like, being too early or like and I know, like at one point, like I was just like searching you guys up in like you, I guess the pressure of, like, launching and like, just like, really getting, you know, search and waiting down.

Like you guys were, like, featured on product hunt. And, like, I think Ryan to wait it out. Yeah, so I guess on that topic, you know, like, I'm just curious. Like, would you build been ox? They're like, Do you think? You know?

Is there a space for blocks to exist? Do you think? Like the problem of, like, you know, silent information has been solved? I don't know if you're too familiar with, like, command d. Like what? They're trying to get out, you

know, like, I haven't heard of that one. I haven't heard of that one specifically, but the closest thing that I've seen to be Knox is for sure. F y i for you and I strongly believe that somebody will do this I don't think that we were too early. I don't think that. That's why I don't think that that's why we failed. We didn't need, like a technical consultant. We needed a marriage counselor. And that would have given us a bit more time to work through our technical issues. And so, yeah, I mean, I'll check out is it command E or be command e. Got it.

All right. Come on. Let's check it out. I'm a chicken. Absolutely. And take a look at f Y I It's used every dot com,

and I guess, Yeah, you've talked about it, you know, like lots of interpersonal. And you eventually returned money to like, your investors after, like, two years of operations and then, you know, moving forward from this. I guess we're We're, you know, like I know this is like a super late question to ask, but, like, did you ever know?

You know, you're going to be a founder or like, did you ever know you're going to, I guess, beyond the founding team of a startup. And you know what was your experience? I guess like your first experience, I'd be knocks like did you know you're going to be a repeat founder is what I'm trying to ask,

like I don't know my mom and dad on their own business when I was a little kid. And so the idea like that you would start a mail order computer repair business from a desk in your bedroom and eventually a large table in the kitchen, eventually take over the garage and then eventually move into an office and build a new building in our little town like that's what my mom and dad did with their business. And so just the idea that you could be an entrepreneur and work for yourself just was supernatural or was very natural to me as a kid and like looking back like it was definitely the, you know, 16 year old who, like had a garage band, was you know, I was building our website. We're getting our own shirts printed, you know, selling them at school, that sort of thing. That was just like, Yeah, that's of course you would do that. That's what you do.

And when I did, like, quit a salaried position for the first time and go to work for myself, it waas like On the one hand, it was a little bit scary, but oh, I just also believed that it would work. I believe that I could do it and was, you know, super huge fan of 37 signals and red getting really It was like, these guys are totally doing it like you have the idea of a sass company. And that sounds awesome. Work for yourself doing software cool and like, you know, solving problems for the fortune five million, not the fortune 100 like that sounds great.

And so that always appealed to me. And then, you know, it just happens that, you know, my wife and I really wanted to move to Colorado. I happen to be good with computers, and Boulder is a startup mecca. And so it just fit. And yeah, so that's where that's where it's gone. Yeah, what an interesting. I don't know the answer specifically to that question. When did I realize? Oh,

you're going to continue Thio, join or start companies for yourself? Yeah, semi recently, Although it has felt natural the whole time.

No. Yeah, absolutely. And then So you know this was September of 2017 you know, you guys been ox parted ways, And then I guess, how did you go from, you know, been ox too? Project had left were like where

you're at right now. Well, so project had lamp is extremely new. But so when we disbanded, I knew that I did not want to go Just get a salary job, you know, at some established company, I also knew that I just didn't have it in me to join to try and get a product roll at an existing startup. I just didn't have it in me energy wise. And so I talked it over with my wife was like, You know, let me see if I can take this experience, that kind of background like design chops, development and some product leadership expertise. I think that I can kind of take that, you know, Swiss Army knife around and build a consulting business out of this,

you know, and she's like, Okay, let's see what it does the entire time. Like the primary objective was do consulting to pay the bills so that on the side I can work on a side project and grow it up. That has been virtually impossible. That has been so, so difficult and just, you know, stage of life and just personal willingness to work. You know, 65 or 70 hour weeks in exchange for missing my kids like important events. No, I'm not gonna do it. And if that means that I can't do it, okay,

then I won't. And so that has been, you know, the story for these, you know, 2.5 years has been really challenging to find time to build up a side project. The attraction that I've started to find recently has been around my own experiences of working remotely. The root cause of Knox's miscommunication and dysfunction and ultimate like dismantling comes from not being good at working remotely. My personal experiences solo consultant, solo founder, the challenges of working remotely as I've just started to talk about that publicly and talk to an interview founders of highly effective remote teams and doing the research there and sharing that it's starting to get some traction. And so I was like, Okay, I need to put it. I just need to put a name on this thing so that it has somewhere to live and So that is what had lamp is. Project headlamp dot com is a place where right now all that exists is a waiting list. A big old batch of like the best remote work resource is that I have found, like curated, not just like all of the ones that you confine because there's so much out there and it's just so much noise to signal that I needed a place where I could go Where,

where was that article that I read?

Okay, now it's on my side. And then the other thing I've published recently is the Joel test for remote teams. And so, which is like a take on, you know, the Joel test that Joel Sapolsky Road. And like the year 2012 questions, you can ask yourself whether or not you're a highly high quality engineering team. This is 11 questions you can ask yourself to determine if Yura highly effective from O. T. And so it's all living there. I'm sorting through and trying to figure out you know, what's the service and what's the product look like? And so it's a work in progress. It's still a journey.

Yeah, absolutely. It's like super, super young. But, you know, I was like visiting the website. And, you know, I love the description of you don't want to, like, you know, you're, like, focus or like yours and distracted by, you know, the shoulder topper,

like the microwave tuna fish wrecking the office. You know, I'm just being, like, very, very, like, this is my experience here, but I really didn't, you know, experience the, like, really friction that, like, remote didn't really experienced until, like,

last summer, when I Internet a company where it was like, you know, they were like, fully for this, like, remote, equal. And like there was days were like they would close the office and, like, no one should or like, no one was allowed to come into the office because, like, you would have a date. We're like everyone was fully remote, I guess You know,

like, this has been a conversation, you know, in like my twitter circles. Or like, there's been a conversation for a while now, But I guess what is project headlamp trying? Thio, I guess. Achieve You know what I mean. I assume, you know, like solving the friction that remote teams like experience. But I guess also like, I want to tie that into, you know,

the question of, like, what do you think from someone who's, like, experience, a lot of the friction that comes with, like, remote teams? What is the future of, like remote

work? I guess, Yeah, there's a couple different questions in there. What I think the future of remote work is. I mean, I think that the volume, like the wrong number of individual humans who are working remotely, is only going to go up. And not only the number of people but the number of roles and job types like they're a whole batch of positions that are currently just inherently remote, compatible, like engineering. We have been using repose for code for a while. Now that's super mature project management, like it doesn't matter if you're sitting next to one another to be able to log in and use base Camp Utrillo. So those things were just inherently remote compatible. Some rolls are remote friendly but takes a little bit more work and little more time.

And so as time has moved on and more companies do, you know, start to see the benefits, then I think more and more companies and more, more even traditional companies, not not software companies will try to go remote. For all of its great benefits, you can recruit from anywhere your employees were happier because they don't have to commute and you save a huge expense on real estate, like lots of benefits. Really cool thumbs up. The flip side to this is that I think that many of those people will experience even higher levels of loneliness and isolation than then we currently do. It's already at epidemic levels in modern societies, for a whole number of reasons and the idea of now delivered not well. Yeah, the idea of now that deliberately, people will not even have the built in social network of Anaugh FIS that is going to have serious ramifications.

In my opinion, it will not offset the benefits of remote work remote work, I think. Is it Annette good as a net gain? However, I think that a lot of people are I don't want to say unprepared, but I think that there's so much cheerleading and excitement around the benefits of it that a lot of companies and management teams are going to be caught off guard because the first challenges that you face leading a remote team are not the first challenges that you face leading a co located team. So that's like that's the problem thing on the solution side, you know, Project headland dot com is deliberately vague about about its feature set because I don't I do not want to build a feature set yet. It could be a non boarding tool that keeps people from feeling isolated from the get go and that communicates and the company handbook been easy to consume way out of the gate. That's what it could be. It could be an employee engagement tool that does pull surveys like there's a batch of thing it could do all of them. So that's what I'm trying to

Yeah, yeah. I don't want the, you know, the Hillary podcast to be the place where you drop. Okay, Project had live dot com. It's like it. Yeah, absolutely. I think something that I just want to, you know, like just like touch on here is like I know I don't know. There's like, a debate. I don't remember, Like maybe like 45 months ago on like my twitter feed,

but like people were talking about, you know, remote work is not like propelled by necessary tools, you know? So, like, people are saying like, slacks, human gusto are not gonna cut it. I guess I want you, like, you know, your thoughts here. Like, do you think you know, software is the way to go or,

like, software is the way to, like, propel like this is the future of my work. You know, this is, like, solved loneliness, like, if you have, I forget. But like, you know, my company was testing out this thing where there was like, it's basically zoom, but like on basically 24 72 time like you guys air like on your laptop.

And there's, like, custom, like interface built around like your office. So you could, like, you know, like, move your chair towards, like, where someone is sitting in here.

The virtual office. Yeah. Handful of virtual office is being built right now.

Yeah, and like, I guess I'm just curious. Like, would you say, like these things where it's like humans, like or like, just being super? You know, like thinking you feel like you're in the office when you're not like, Do you think the future of work is going to be propelled by, like, remote tools or like the necessary tools you would need to like? Sir,

I think that those there are a handful that are being built by cool people, and I think that they will definitely be helpful, and they for sure serve a purpose. But in general, my belief is that the process is matter way more than the tools. And so a team that is struggling that goes remote and finds that they're struggling with the set up is not going to have that solved by any one magic bullet piece of software, not at all. It will have to be solved by a handful of well defined, agreed upon principles. Around here is how our company makes decisions. Here is how our company communicates. If you have this class of request, this is the tool you put it in, and it doesn't matter what you use for email. It doesn't matter. What you use for chat doesn't matter. It's that if you have this sort of request, put it in this channel and expect a response in this amount of time, the processes are what matter. And so that's my fundamental fundamental belief.

No, no. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I mean, you know, maybe one day when we get to software that can, like, emulate the smell of, like, my grave tuna fish wrecking for office there,

I think one flaw that I see in those tools and it's again, it's not a criticism that they shouldn't be being built. They certainly will be helpful. But I think one flaw in them is that it sort of assumes that the way to solve the challenges that people experience when there is no office is to emulate the office. And I think that that could be helpful. It gives you a model that we understand. But it's probably not the underlying you. No problem. It's a symptom. It's a symptom of

Yeah, and like, you know, this is a good segue way into, like, you know, you're Joel test for remote teams. And this is like a 12 point like score for remote teams like Judge, whether or not they're like, you know, good and like, you know, a nine point scores like adequate and like a 10 point scores. Good. That sounds Directorate

s 0 11 Love questions Certain 11 questions, obviously. I mean, Laura Rotor of Meet Edgar was like, Hey, I like this list. We do all of them, and that's that. I believe that you all have been at it for a while. You know, they're doing if you're doing 10 of whom you are in good shape, well above average, if you're doing nine, you're still well above average. But chances are very, very good that if you fast forward and add a member or two, you're going to start experiencing some serious trouble.

And so that may seem like a high bar. But it's really not when you when you look at what it takes to get it, Yes, on all of those, it's just a simple matter of processes with commitment and follow through is your said than done. But that's what it means to be professional.

Yes, you know, I don't know if, like, this is something that like Well, hopefully or like, I don't know if this, like will be like successful, but I love to try this. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with, You know, Brian Chesky, ese, You know, heading point are, like 10 point experience, like 10 point check in or time star experience for, like, Airbnb

haven't heard that.

So, like, the gist of it is like he says, you know, like a five star experience would be like you checking into your house and then, you know, your host would be there, give you the keys and then leave. And then, like, he just, like, keeps going And, like, you know, a seven star experience would be like, you know,

your host is like, Oh, so you love surfing. So, like, you know, I rented you a surfboard. You know, you can use my car. Here are my keys at senator center. And then, like, 11 starters like you, like, you know, you land in the airport.

It's, like very very beetle circle, like, 1950. Like, there's a group of schoolgirls just like screaming your name. You know, you walk down, you get into, like, this limo, you move to the house and like, you check in, right. So and then like, I guess his juxtaposition here is like when you think of like,

the crazies experience you can get like the you know, the 11 start check in. You know, the six or seven star checkin doesn't seem so far away. Like I'd just like if you just like first is going to, like, you know, getting a band of people and like, getting a limousine together to get your people to check in verses, just like knowing that they love surfing or like knowing that they, you know, like backpacking. It doesn't seem so crazy. So I love to try, like, you know,

if that's a good explanation, I'd love to try this. You know? Brian Rae. What's a five point Joel score for remote teams? What's the, you know, 6.6 jobs, girl for mo teams. And what's you know, what's your 10 start? Remote

check. Interesting. Yeah, that's pretty good, I guess.

Yeah. I hate to put you

on the spot here. Now. It's okay. Now, this is really good. I'm really curious to see what my brain thinks when it's just on

its feet here. I was very, very excited for this question. Yeah,

well, so let's just say the five star experience has to have a communications guide like I'm coming to the conclusion, you know, because a few people now have asked me like which one is most important? And I was starting to come to the conclusion that is the communications guide. It just cuts, you know, expectations and assumptions off in the past. So there we go. For one, I'm gonna say, always turn video on for calls, not necessarily saying it's never too. But it's probably be my top five. The amount of just you're losing like the intangible physical experience of a conversation when you work, you know, in different places.

So let's not also get rid of just facial expressions and, you know, like knowing what somebody's somebody's looks like. That's huge. I'm then going to Ggo Thio. Scheduling time for team socialization is the sort of thing that it happens passively and accidentally, and just like through serendipity in the office and I'm an introvert, and even as an introvert, I miss being around other people. And so it's the kind of thing where the other joke I make is like, you know, weak woman of

working remotely. Nobody's tapping me on the shoulder anymore. Month

five is, uh, nobody really taps me on the shoulder anymore. And so you have to literally plan like you have to schedule socialization time and like, because if you don't, then it's the one of the first things that just gets passed by and before long, Like nobody actually even knows each other or so and there are easier ways, easy ways to do this. OK, from there I am. Gosh, I'm gonna say company handbook. That's pretty tightly coupled with the communications guide. But the reason I put it there is like the handbook should have some degree of. Here is what to expect in your first day. Here's what to expect your 1st 5 days. Here's what to expect your 1st 30 and your 1st 90 like laying that sort of thing out so that new hires know what to expect,

who to ask if they're confused. You know, everybody has some degree of imposter syndrome just at a base level, let alone when your brand new you don't want, like you're you know you don't want people to regret, like making the decision on you and so much of that as you can in power and give them some of autonomy to you know, to master their their new situation. That goes a long way. Oh, man. And then I guess I'm probably gonna say, you know, sharing working hours and normalizing Ignoring notifications is probably the next next important one. The likelihood that people are gonna, you know, start to experience burnout. Overtime is approaches 100% and yeah, so

absolutely. Yep. No, actually, that was great. So, you know, I'm assuming there's no the Beatles reference in your 10 star mode. Work through our roadwork. Wait, So now what? What's the okay? Minutes actually would have the reference there. Not a no worries. Absolutely. I mean, I think like those are definitely,

you know, things that, like, resonate with me And like, I assume, you know, in the future of my work, I would hope people, you know, get right for, I guess, like whether it be software will be something. Yeah, And I guess you know, this is, like,

you know, super early and like, I don't want to, you know, like, have you, like, always looking always listening back to this podcast and being like, Oh, what did I say for that answer? But like, what do you think are like, you know, Where are you on? Like you know, it's a 10 ex future. Like, what's the vision that you have

for headlamp? Well, yeah, you've asked me that a good time because I feel like I'm at this crossroads with it where I have very deliberately stayed out of the solution space for a while. And however it is feeling like it's a TTE the point where okay, I do need to I need to put something down and have a vision product wise, have a product vision. Ah, first thing in place toe have something to kind of manipulate and so that it can react to customer feedback and it can react to the market. Right now, the whole thing just remains this like, you know, I've I've identified that cos we're going to have this problem. I've I also identified the common patterns and the ways to address them and solve them so that you're less likely than average to have that problem. Okay, how do you product ties that? And so my vision for headlamp is that it would be a right sized bootstrapped,

profitable business that lets me and a handful of people I respect and admire. You do work that they can be proud of. It doesn't have to, you know, put a dent in the universe or, you know, or or take over the or take over the world or, you know, anything like that. But, you know, the crossroads in the struggle that I'm at right now is like getting myself to come down on here. This is version one. This is it and got a little bit of analysis paralysis on wanting to get it to write too soon. Even though I know good and well, that is a terrible

position. It's a powerful position to take. I tell people

this all the time, but when it comes to this right here like I'm falling, I am susceptible. Thio really common pattern that's starting to really get on my own nerves. So gotta get a job

over it. No, no. Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's, like, a sense of, you know, like, personal attachment to like what you're building, but yeah, I mean, that's a great you've done a great job of, like, segueing into my next questions.

I don't know. I don't know. Let's go and sit down a little bit like, Yeah, you've done a great job with that, I guess. You know, on the tangent of like, you giving advice to, like, other people of, like, you know, just like shipping version one, you know, being very,

very lean with it. I guess what I want to ask here is, like, you know, Brian today, right? You know, February 13th or something for every 13 2020. And I guess if you could talk to, you know, Brian circa 2016 you know, still in the trenches, you know, interpersonal impasses, etcetera, etcetera,

I guess you know, and like, this is like, you know, like, if you were talking to, like, any, like, early stage funder who's, like, you know, it's not going well is like going super great, I guess. What advice? You know, would you have for Brian in this

position? Okay, I'm trying to give advice to Brian

and 20 60. Yeah, like Bryant's.

Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Here's what I like about this question is, I actually wish that Brian of 2016 could till grand 2020 like, Hey, man, enjoy the journey. Like enjoy the struggle like And so what I am going to say back to 2016 is there is no such thing as a rival like you don't like, suddenly get there and one day wake up. And like everything is just as it ought to be. Because, you know, Brian of 2011 would look a 2016 and be like we did it. We Are you kidding me? We've done it. Which would suggest that I right now until I be experiencing no struggles, no inner turmoil,

that is the farthest thing from the truth. I am still, like in this, you know, wrestling match with wanting to do something great and put my name on it. And so it actually would tell 2016 going into the Knox to don't try to grip on so tight. Like, don't try to hold with such ferocity. Be a bit more flexible. Go with the flow the way that you can. You're getting ready to not go with the flow as well as you as well as you typically do. So go with the flow a little bit more, see where things go, and so I think that that advice is not necessarily universal. But I do think that it's it's not overly prescriptive That could be useful to founders in many different contexts. Is hey,

just analyze whether or not you're holding on a little too firmly And in that posture, whether or not you're introducing more drama than is likely to lead to creative solutions, you know, just have some self awareness. And so yeah, really telling that to myself at this moment?

Yeah. Wow, that was awesome. You know, I felt like 1/3 person, like just watching you, like, very, very, you know, meta and like, you know, you reference, you know, Brian 2011 Brian 2016. I don't even know where I was, you know,

for a little bit. Yeah, I love to, you know, like, just move on from this, Like, just, like super met over. Like, but we're gonna find Brian 2020 like, you know, is there any like, you know, Twitter? You'd like the plug.

Is there any sure Anything you're working on? Besides, you know, private kind of dot com. Quick plug, bright and early podcast. Yeah.

Yes. So you can find me on Twitter. It be Ray B R h e a reach out, you know, hit me. If you have any questions at all, you can listen to my podcast right in early. Bright nearly podcast dot com. So I talked to early stage founders like Ryan Singer Natalie Nagel. Laura Roeder mentioned Josh Pickford and Joel Gascoyne. So you can, you know, listen there and hopefully learn some things. My consulting work. You can learn a little bit about that at Bryant rei dot com Design background development shops, product experience, you know,

kind of available. Tell about startups there and of course, project headlamp dot com. Go check it out. Get on the wait list, Stay up to date, and we'll see where this, uh, we'll see where this ride goes.

No. Yeah. Good luck with everything. And, you know, if you have any of our listeners, you know, wanna send Brian, you know, higher. First name, last name dot com, you know? So I got 2012 police cement over and I will definitely get into you. I was sure you Brian has to retweet better else. You know, this is no good.

Yes, I would have to as lily Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Brian. My place. I've had a great, great time. You know, I learned you know a lot about remote Burke. A lot about everything. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. That was another episode of the Hilary podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We have a bunch of these coming out soon. Stick around.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Hilary podcast. I've been Brendan Handle Co. And once more, I'd like to thank our friends over at referral Hero for making this podcast episode possible. If you're looking to grow your business organically through word of mouth, make sure to check out their tool that allow you to create and grow a referral program within minutes. More than 7000 companies are using it already generating over 30 million leads. And now you can get it to for 20% off with decode Phil ary 20 Tried now for 14 days without any cost at referral.