Venture Everywhere Podcast: Pau Sabria with Scott Hartley
Venture Everywhere Podcast: Pau Sabria with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Pau Sabria, co-founder of Remotely, on Episode 31: Remotely Engineered.
Listen on Apple & Spotify!
Episode 31 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Scott Hartley, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures, a founder collective and early stage venture fund investing in the future of money, health and work. Scott is joined by Pau Sabria, Co-Founder of Remotely, a platform that helps startups in constructing and retaining top-tier, remote engineering teams to achieve rapid and competitive scaling. Pau shares his entrepreneurial journey from Barcelona to New York, detailing the transition from a stable corporate job to founding Olapic and Remotely Works and the strategies that led to his entrepreneurial triumphs in tech.
In this episode, you will hear:
Pau Sabria's startup hurdles, emphasizing timing, family influence, and entrepreneurial drive
Advantages of remote work and the value of long-term investments in software engineering.
The importance of coachability, communication and cadence in achieving startup success.
Capitalizing on macro trends for innovating products and services to meet evolving market needs.
Focusing on profitable, sustainable businesses over constant venture capital reliance.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:20 Scott: I'm Scott Hartley, one of the co-founders of Everywhere Ventures. I'm here today with Pau Sabria, longtime friend, multi-time founder, founder of Olapic, founder of Remotely Works, currently CEO and co-founder of Remotely Works, also an LP in Everywhere Ventures. Welcome to the podcast, Pau.
00:00:39 Pau: Thank you for having me, Scott. Good to see you.
00:00:42 Scott: Good to see you too. So maybe one of the exciting things as we move from being The Fund New York to being Everywhere Ventures and one of the realities that we sort of observed was that a city like New York is full of people from everywhere on the planet. It's a truly international city. And even though we started as The Fund New York, we very quickly blossomed out into being absolutely everywhere.
00:01:03 Scott: So I know as a long-time New Yorker, as somebody who lived, studied at Columbia, lived in Brooklyn, used to take the Brooklyn Ferry to work, but you're from Barcelona, you're from Spain originally.
00:01:13 Pau: Correct.
00:01:14 Scott: Talk a little bit about your background and kind of what led you to New York and to your entrepreneurial journey.
00:01:19 Pau: Yeah, I'm originally from Barcelona. My mom is Argentinian. My dad is from Spain, from Barcelona. I was born and raised here. I live now in Barcelona, but I lived for 15 years in New York up until last September and grew up mostly in Barcelona. Went to school, college, everywhere. I had a short stint in Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1998, in high school. But then, started working.
00:01:48 Pau: I went to engineering school, started working at BCG in Barcelona/Madrid, and then ended up going to business school at Columbia in New York. And I moved there in 2008. As you probably remember, the world, the financial world crumbled in our faces as we were walking into Uri's Hall. And I was going to Columbia just for a couple of years and decided to start a company and stayed there for the long run. And 15 years later, married and with two kids, I moved back to Barcelona.
00:02:26 Scott: It's amazing the ways in which when we do things might influence how we do things. And in the sense that when we arrived on campus at Columbia, you know, I had the privilege of going to school with you back then. You're right, within a month of walking into the campus, the financial world was crumbling.
00:02:44 Scott: Folks were leaving Wall Street in droves as banks shut down. To what extent did that macro backdrop? Did that influence at all your decision to go, to leave the confines of the BCG consulting world and dive into entrepreneurship?
00:02:59 Pau: I think that back then, I mean, I was 26 years old. I didn't fully get a grasp of what was happening, to be honest. I looked at everyone and everyone looked pretty worried, but at the same time, I wasn't maybe as savvy as I am now. I wasn't following the S&P 500. I was there with a plan, which was to go to business school to meet interesting people and then to go back to BCG.
00:03:27 Pau: I was a sponsored student. I wasn't looking for a job. I wasn't looking for a career change. I wasn't looking for any of those things. So when all of these things happened, I thought to myself, well, we still have two years ahead. By the time that this is over, we'll be on the other side of the tunnel. It's a good thing that it's actually happening right now. So I think that that was the general kind of overview of when that happened.
00:03:53 Scott: And for you, looking back, as Steve Jobs said in the 2005 Stanford graduation speech about the dots, makes sense looking backwards, but not looking forwards. Looking back, thinking about leaving Columbia, leaving BCG to found Olapic and the tailwinds behind that business, the rise of Instagram, the explosion of individual posted photos and how that would link to businesses and link to internet marketing.
00:04:19 Scott: And then the exit that you guys had, nine figure exit, successful exit that then led to an investment career and then subsequently falling into another company and founding Remotely Works. Those sort of looking back at those waypoints and those dots, you couldn't stitch it kind of going forward, but how do you reflect on that looking back?
00:04:38 Pau: It's very interesting because there's a few things. One is I had always had the itch of entrepreneurship, my family background, my family tree is filled with entrepreneurs that took way bigger risks than I did. Not necessarily in business, but in personal lives and immigration stories and wars and all sorts of stories that I grew up with. And so I grew up with this kind of false sense of security that things would turn out okay, no matter how crazy a step you took.
00:05:11 Pau: And in that sense, when I went into thinking about essentially leaving BCG and not going back to BCG, repaying the debt of the MBA program and going into Olapic with a dubious business model and no salary whatsoever, no fundraising, at the bottom of the GDP of the US, especially the bottom of the recession, didn't seem the best of the moments to do this.
00:05:41 Pau: In fact, my dad said, I would be telling you that this is a crazy step, but it would be a bit of a hypocrite if I said that because I've been grooming you all your life, telling you all these crazy stories and now it's your turn. If I told you not to do it, it would be a little bit weird. So I went into it, I would be lying if I did not regret it at some point during those first two years of Olapic, of how hard it was, and knowing that everyone else that I knew were having good steady state careers up and to the right.
00:06:14 Pau: And I was broke and in debt and no health insurance. But we were very lucky. I mean, that's the truth. We started a business at the bottom of the longest economic upward cycle in the history of the US combined with the fact that mobile phones were flourishing, mobile ads were flourishing. Instagram was founded around the time that we were launching the company.
00:06:39 Pau: We caught that, we invested in that, and we benefited tremendously from it. And we were lucky also to have an exit. So that sequence of events was truly, a huge component of it was alignment, interplanetary alignment of stars and coincidences that, again, very lucky and maybe there's something in the myth that we took that allows us to mindlessly go into it.
00:07:09 Pau: It's funny because with former friends of mine at BCG, and I wonder if you had the same experience, sometimes I've known other entrepreneurs and other BCG consultants that have gone into becoming entrepreneurs, but many, many, many that have not. And it's interesting when you ask about the have-nots, it's oftentimes, they are too smart to see all of the things that could go wrong and all of the risks that they decide.
00:07:32 Pau: No one in their sane mind would go into it, right? And so maybe I'm not as smart to get to the point where I can foresee everything that could go wrong, so I might as well go into it. And then when you face all of the struggles, it's too late, you cannot back out of it. So you just have to deal with it and you keep going, right? So there is a part of that, but I think it's also very, very true.
00:07:52 Scott: And the thing that made me laugh, as you said, not being smart. I say, certainly I remember sitting in the back row of one of the business school classrooms, watching a presentation of you and your co-founders presenting Olapic to our class and judging on whether or not we would, a hypothetical venture situation, if we would write a check or not write a check. And I said, no, I don't think so. I don't think I would back this company. I don't really get it.
00:08:17 Scott: And so making the mistake of not sitting at a firm at that time to be able to write the check, but sort of missing Olapic and missing what you were building and then sort of not making that same mistake twice and making sure that we were participatory and Remotely Works as you started your second company. But I think that there's something in there as well that I wonder if you, reflecting back on leaving BCG and going through this entrepreneurial journey.
00:08:42 Scott: One thing that I've experienced is you have to stay the course and have confidence in where you're going because in the interim, there certainly are shinier objects or reasons to deviate from the path. But the idea that life is not totally linear and that you'll end up being in a place that maybe colleagues have been before, maybe they'll want to get to in the future.
00:09:04 Scott: And you just have to be on your own journey and be confident that your journey is the right one and not compare apples to oranges of, oh, you know, I could be at this other place or I could have been making that salary. But those are the challenges, I think, in entrepreneurship that we all face.
00:09:18 Pau: For me, it was very much a, you have to have an appreciation for what the journey is, right? You have to enjoy, or at least have an intellectual appetite for what you're trying to build either that, or you have to really have a vocation for whatever it is that you're building, right? If you are a craftsman that does leather bags, then maybe you should go and work at Hermès.
00:09:42 Pau: But in my case, I didn't have a particular interest in marketing B2B. But I did have an interest in how you think about building a company. Still to this day, I think that the hardest thing that I've done is how do you create something from scratch with no economic means, without the reputation? How do you get the ultimate bootstrapping essence of a company, right? If you're going to build something and if you're not good enough as a developer to build it yourself, how are you going to hire, convince someone to build it for you?
00:10:16 Pau: How are you going to pay that person? How are you going to make all the pieces and all of the ingredients of the recipe kind of glued together? And that for me was fascinating. And in fact, part of the ambition that I had at the time was I really was attracted to the idea of Y Combinator and the incubator programs, like the early days of those programs.
00:10:39 Pau: And I felt that it would be a great idea to have one of these incubator programs in Barcelona. It's a city that is very appealing to foreigners. I thought that it would be a good way to bring a hub of technology into Barcelona and so on and so forth. But I had absolutely no experience building one of these companies.
00:10:58 Pau: And so I felt that maybe if I started one, I would fail very quickly and at least I would have that experience and then I'd be able to teach something or help somehow. And a lot of the decisions, not a lot of the decisions of building Olapic, but certainly a lot of the things that we experienced and the path that we took were influenced a bit by the idea that we would learn something out of that experience, right? Given two options, which is the one that rewards you with learning the most.
00:11:30 Pau: And it was fascinating through and through, even through the acquisition, post the acquisition as part of an existing large publicly traded company, then taken private, all of those steps from, in the span of nine years, we saw everything from inception to quarterly investor calls, everything in between.
00:11:52 Scott: I was curious in that journey. You mentioned the cadence of problem solving and being able to put together these ingredients around the table. In many ways, those early blockers of, Oh, I would have started that company, but I couldn't find a developer. I would have started that thing, but I couldn't raise the money. These are the actual steps that are required of any entrepreneurial venture.
00:12:12 Scott: And one of the things that we index around or one of the heuristics that we look for in founders and what we obviously saw in you guys in backing Remotely Works is what I call the three C's of high coachability, high communication and high cadence. And that third one being high cadence. If you think about the entrepreneurial journey, there are so many quagmires, there's so much quicksand all around you. There are so many ways to get stuck.
00:12:37 Scott: Every day, there's 10 ways to get stuck. Whether it's a conflict or an email back to a client or a tough conversation you have to have, or letting somebody go or any number of things can be a drag and be quicksand. And that ability of a founder, and I'm sure you've experienced this, to have the cadence of getting through those things and problem solving rapidly, rapidly, every single day solving those things.
00:13:00 Scott: The baby steps you take are toward that end goal, which is building the big company, having the big exit, doing the things that you want to do to change the world. But you don't see that long-term vision. You just see the day-to-day quagmires that you're just blocking and tackling and getting through. But does that resonate?
00:13:16 Pau: I think it does. I think that in my experience, both as an investor, as an entrepreneur, I think that the other part that also resonates, similar to this is kind of how do you discern what is a big problem from what it is not? And you can ignore the not so big problems to an extent and then get away with not dealing with them and then eventually they go away. And I think that the reason for this is there is an aspect that is more closer to intuition, following your gut. I'm from Spain. I tend to have a bias towards laziness in a sense. And so there is a–
00:13:53 Scott: I think it's a bias towards Bellota, biased towards Jamon Serrano and Jamon Bellota.
00:13:57 Pau: Probably. But I'm not going to be the person that is very exhaustive in exploring every possible avenue and analyzing to the nth degree every single permutation of a problem. That will default to laziness and I will default towards action and go into one specific path that feels right. And I will do a lot of that, even though I'm very, very analytical. So once I pick one thing, I will think, through, that significantly, right?
00:14:28 Pau: And so there is a part that I think that a lot of people get caught in problem because everything looks like a problem, an equally insurmountable problem when in reality there's a few things that really need to be unlocked for it to kind of move a step stone. I think that especially at the beginning, otherwise it feels like you're blocking and tackling and working a lot, but really not moving much.
00:14:53 Pau: And there's this sense of working many hours without a lot of progress happening. And I think that it is until you start seeing this kind of intuition and focus on specific areas that feel right, that then you start to see a little bit more progress.
00:15:10 Scott: There's an interesting metaphor that speaks to that one of our co-founders of one of our portfolio companies, Sam from Flaus, she mentioned to me a while back, which is this idea of a rocking horse, which is a rocking horse is something that's constantly in motion, constantly moving, constantly going back and forth, but it's not really making any progress. It's not moving forward. Rocking horse is a children's toy. It's a stationary horse that never goes anywhere.
00:15:35 Scott: Yet there's a lot of people that will spend time tinkering, spend time focusing on the wrong things, going back and forth, back and forth, but not actually making that progress. It's so interesting that, really being able to ruthlessly prioritize what's going to move the business forward, not just sort of back and forth, is an important founder characteristic.
00:15:54 Pau: And I think that this is something that I actually was reflecting today in how we operate our business today. There's this little insight around thinking about the business as leading indicators or lagging indicators. And oftentimes, I've seen or I've run into frustration with investors or with executives at a parent company as they set strategy by lagging indicators, meaning that they say, oh, you need to reduce churn, which sounds innocent and obvious that, yeah, of course I want to reduce churn.
00:16:34 Pau: What founder would not want to reduce churn? But the problem is how do you do that? And if you focus, as your topic or your theme of the initiative, reduce churn, it's oftentimes you will never find the solution to reducing churn, right? I like to think more about how, are you going to build first principles mechanics into your business that as a result, as a lagging indicator, you have lower churn. But it's not the metric that you choose first.
00:17:03 Pau: What you choose first is something else that either differentiates or gives you an unfair advantage or gives you a mechanic of the business, of the theoretical design level that changes or that influences eventually the outcome of the business, but the business itself or the metrics of the business are a result of those decisions that you took in the first place.
00:17:29 Scott: That's a really interesting observation. I want to kind of take a step back for what drove the decision to create Olapic and the decision to create Remotely Works because I think it ties into this theme where if you focus on churn, you focus on the reality or the Xpost, the results of something. And you start a business based on an observation of the world versus you look at the underlying first principles of where is the world going? Where do I see the tailwinds? What's happening from a macro perspective?
00:17:57 Scott: And if we put our heads down and build for a year or two, what's the world going to look like at that point in time? And I think at least from the outside, looking at the timing of when you guys built Olapic, the tailwinds to me made a lot of sense. And you alluded to some of them: mobile phone ubiquity, camera’s evolution on the iPhone and Android, the rise of Instagram and the ability to append images to locations and all of that.
00:18:23 Scott: That was driven by Burbn, which became Instagram and a number of others. Hipstamatic, our mutual friend Iñaki, was building something in a similar space around Pixble at that time. But what were some of those tailwinds that you guys saw or is it something that you can now reflect on and rationalize Xpost? Was it something that drove the decision to build Olapic or was it something that you can kind of point to?
00:18:44 Pau: There was an aspect that was very obvious to us, which was the iPhone, the camera, the ubiquity of the camera in your pocket. I remember going to business school with DSLR, a camera, a Canon, and I ended up selling it on Craig’s List because I was taking all my pictures with the phone. Now I have a Leica and we barely use it. We always use the phones. The pictures on the phones have become so good that it's almost like, Why would you take a big heavy camera with you?
00:19:13 Pau: I remember also buying, I don't know if you remember this, but there was the flip camera. That was like a little video recorder because the iPhone didn't have video recording capabilities at the beginning. And I also sold it the moment, literally the moment that the iPhone made the upgrade so that you could record video, I sold the camera.
00:19:34 Pau: So all of that made a lot of sense. We didn't know how it would materialize as a business. But we started by this broad idea that communication would be more visual and therefore brands would be able to make it with their audience through pictures. And we didn't know exactly how or how it would generate value, but we would figure that out later.
00:19:57 Scott: That point is actually, it was a pretty interesting leap intuitively because at that time, I remember having this debate at Mohr Davidow, my prior fund, where we were talking about the evolution of photos on the phone and how photos had gone from a mode of memory sort of consolidation. Like you used to take a picture because you want to remember it five years from now.
00:20:19 Scott: And photos on the phone had turned it into a much less memory driven experience and a much more conversational driven experience of, people can laugh at taking a picture of your brunch on the table. But that's a mode of communication, not memory, right? You're not taking a picture of your brunch table to say, I want to remember this forever for the next decade. Like you would a family photo, you're taking that picture because there's a quick transactional element of, I want to communicate what I'm eating right now to Pau.
00:20:46 Scott: And I don't care to see this photo next week or next month, but that was a fundamental shift in how people were communicating visually, right? What you guys capitalized on those underlying trends and then built that into, kind of a B2B aspect which I think is a pretty astute observation of the world at that time.
00:21:05 Pau: But at the same time, we graduated from Columbia in May, 2010. That summer we were, let's do this. Let's not do this. Should we do this? Should we do it? Should we not do it? Ended up deciding to do it. By September, we had found a co-working space on Broadway and Grand Street. And that was amazing, it was 80 bucks a month per table per desk, cheapest working space on earth.
00:21:34 Pau: And in October, Instagram launched. I'm user 3000, something on Instagram. And we could not, have not foreseen this, right? So there is a way that you have to believe that somehow it will align somehow. But I did listen to a podcast by the founders of Instagram. I thought it was very interesting. I think that the best entrepreneurs are those that, they don't, necessarily have a clue of what's going to happen.
00:22:05 Pau: But when they've been lucky enough and something has happened that benefits them tremendously, that they realize and then they really ride that wave. And I think that, well, for one, they were very able to ride that wave, we were, that's clever because arguably you could say that we saw the same thing happening. We had less than ideal execution, but certainly it's something that once you see, you want to see it through as much as you can.
00:22:34 Scott: Yeah. I love that metaphor of just, you can paddle out, you can be in the right spot in the water and you can sort of feel the tide moving below you, you can feel the swell, you know from a surf perspective, you can be in the right place, but then not paddle hard enough and not make the wave and the wave can go right underneath you. And looking back on that with Olapic and then looking forward with Remotely Works that you guys are now running, how do you think about that? You know, the groundswell, the wave coming underneath you, there clearly are tailwinds around the ability to build global teams, remote work, international payments. These are sort of the broad-based tailwinds that geography matters less than it might have in the past. You can build an asynchronous global team and a lot of those friction points have gone away.
00:23:19 Scott: But how do you make sure to your point you're paddling hard enough at the right moment, in the right direction to catch that wave and not just have the wave move underneath you and say, you know, I was in the right place at the right time and I think we've all been there.
00:23:32 Scott: I certainly look back on a number of experiences in my life where clearly, was in the water in the right place at the right time, didn't paddle exactly, the right direction and missed the wave, you know, and caught others. But clearly that's a metaphor, I think that resonates with lots of people.
00:23:45 Pau: Specific to Remotely, I think there's an aspect that is, the underlying wave that we saw was something that we had already identified at Olapic. So very early on, because we couldn't afford anything better, we started finding developers outside the US. And also because we knew developers in other geographies more than we knew in the US. And so it was easier for us to find people that we trusted.
00:24:12 Pau: I think part of it, we got a lot very early on, and I'm talking about 2012, 2013, a lot of negative feedback from VCs on our approach to how we were going to find talent. We weren't the antithesis of the ADL team structure for a startup. We had MBA programs. There was three of us. We didn't have, a diverse team structure. Two of us could kind of code, but not really. And we were building an engineering team outside our office, right? Completely anti what we were supposed to do.
00:24:51 Pau: And I think that there are times in which it does make sense to go a little bit against the grain and to be a little bit contrarian. If you believe that there is no good justification for that. I thought that there was a very strong bias towards the S-Grad from Stanford. This is how you build a startup. This kind of cookie recipe. This is how you do things. And didn't feel that, well, if I'm not part of that, does that mean that I cannot do it? Well, why?
00:25:24 Pau: And I think that maybe it's the drive to prove them wrong. Maybe it's just that they are wrong. It allowed us to exploit an angle that was there for us to exploit. A few years later, VCs would come to us and ask us if we could teach their portfolio companies to do what we had done, right? Because we were the only portfolio companies in which the R&D costs were going down instead of going up.
00:25:50 Pau: For us, fast forward to Remotely, I think that the underlying trend that we saw was at the point that we started Remotely, which was January 2020, it was pretty obvious that everyone had embraced to some degree remote work. The talent constraints in the US forced companies to look elsewhere. And the same has happened in Tel Aviv with Israel that they looked elsewhere. In Israel, they went into the Ukraine and they started hiring people there.
00:26:18 Pau: Most of probably a lot of the entrepreneurs that you've seen that are foreigners in the US have hired teams in their home country and it comes very natural. So that had stopped being frowned upon and became just the norm that people would do this, right? And this is pre-pandemic. And so our kind of underlying wave was not necessarily to ride that wave, even though we were…..obviously COVID kind of accentuated and pushed everyone to become remote by force.
00:26:49 Pau: We decided, for us, our underlying trend, was something of a kind of a reaction to what Olapic is and was, Olapic was in the marketing space and I feel that marketing in general, as a very simplified model, is something that is always changing. Good marketing campaigns always have, by definition, to be contrarian and different from the norm because otherwise you don't catch the attention of the consumer. And if you don't catch the attention of consumer, then they don't work as well and so on and so forth.
00:27:19 Pau: It's rarely the case that something is steady state on the marketing front that always works. It's always the same and you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and it always works. And so our thought process was let's look for a market that is going to work forever, no matter what. And we started thinking about what is here to stay forever. And we thought, software is here to stay forever. Software is going to be forever and software engineers are going to be in need forever. And can you buy software engineers as an asset class?
00:27:56 Pau: Can you invest in software engineers? And you cannot, right? You cannot invest in software engineers as an asset class. And so we said, well, what's the closest to investing in software engineers as an asset class? Okay, let's build a company around software engineers and their needs. And their needs are careers, their needs are education, their needs are financial services, their needs are blah, blah, blah, blah. And you fill the blank, right? I say, okay, let's start with careers. Let's find a marketplace for software.
00:28:27 Pau: And what I liked about the marketplace for, and there's good and bad of making and doing labor marketplaces is, I don't think that the market where there's a winner takes all. There's a bazillion of these things everywhere. But it is a market that even if you don't get to like a tremendous scale, it can be very profitable very quickly.
00:28:47 Pau: And so we were in 2020, 2021, building this marketplace, trying to grab a piece of this action with a very, very long-term view, but also with a mentality of building the business in a way that was very anti-market. Again, the market was going crazy with all this funding and rounds and it was insane. We were like, no, no, no. We have to go back to principles.
00:29:16 Pau: We have to build a very profitable, very self-sustaining, almost primitive version of the business because we had already been down the path of VCs and not losing control, but kind of losing control in the sense of getting into the VC, kind of hamster wheel and not being able to get out of it. And despite that we had been lucky, we had seen others not be that lucky, completely, be obliterated by that dynamic. And so we decided to take it differently.
00:29:47 Pau: And again, this played out very nicely for us, right? Because when the market turned, no matter to us, we are in the right spot, with the right mentality, with the right mechanics of the business. And we didn't miss a blip, we just kept growing.
00:30:01 Scott: I think it's fascinating to listen to the first principles, the way that you guys deconstructed and chose a contrarian lane to build in. And it sounds like that was looking at 20 year, 30 year, 40 year, 50 year viewpoint of what's not going away. Okay. Software engineering is here to stay and there's a large enough market opportunity here. And we can build a slow and steady business that flies in the face of the venture model and the get rich fast mentality of Silicon Valley and TechCrunch splashy articles and this funding round and that funding round.
00:30:33 Scott: And quietly build a very sustainable, very robust business that takes the long view in a category that's not going away. In a sense, by defining in those ways, you were choosing a contrarian edge, right? That was quite different than what the market was chasing NFTs and everything in Miami that was Bored Ape Yacht Club in 2020. And you guys were not participating in that at all.
00:30:57 Scott: You were quietly building software for developers in Argentina and other places on the planet with the underlying belief that the tailwinds around global software development are here to stay. I think an interesting observation I had a number of years back was I had a call with a team. I think they were based in Belarus. And I said, oh, so you outsource your development to Belarus. And they said, no, no, no, we outsourced our business and marketing to New York City.
00:31:21 Scott: And so the flip that this is actually a Belarusian company based in Minsk and they happen to have two people that they staffed up in New York to connect the dots on fundraising and BD and sales, but really this was a company that was remote first. And so I think you guys are building into that trend of remote first with kind of outsourced sales and marketing to large capital cities like New York.
00:31:44 Scott: But if anything, there's a detriment when we now look at companies on the funding side, where the whole team is based in San Francisco or New York, we immediately scratch our heads and ask them, why pay these costs for development resources when you have a global opportunity here? And my first call is to you guys to say, rather than hiring all these folks in San Francisco, why not consider hiring half of them remotely?
00:32:08 Scott: Shifting gears a little bit, would love to do the lightning round with you here and run through what you're reading today, maybe what podcast you're listening to and what productivity hacks you have for other entrepreneurs out there.
00:32:20 Pau: So I'm reading a book recommended by my dad called The Treatise on Great Virtues. It's actually a philosophy book and it's an author that I had read many, many, many years ago. And I liked, a lot, kind of on the religious side almost. But this one feels particularly right because it treats the virtues of humans and feels like a proper thing to be looking into what makes us humans and good humans is something that I'm really, really interested in. I just started but I've heard great, great, great, great things.
00:32:56 Pau: I also read, other… I have a pile of books. I'm a little bit of a junkie on books so I'm bringing a few other things on the Kindle on my phone, when my wife tells, to turn the lights off, I switch to my Kindle. So I listen to podcasts when I go for a run or I do my workout. And I listen, just, I think nothing groundbreaking. I like the Pivot podcast by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Scott used to be in, our board and so I follow what he says.
00:33:24 Pau: But then I also listen to the All-In Podcast for good measure and balance between the political opinions on both sides. And I find that listening to both gives you a good perspective on different touch points. I love the Acquired Podcast. I love Invest Like the Best. In those, I am a little bit more selective on the types of topics, sometimes the topic or the interviewer is not that interesting, but Invest Like the Best is probably the best podcast host out there.
00:33:55 Scott: And for your pile of books, I guess, Kara Swisher's new book just came out called Burn Book.
00:33:59 Pau: Burn Book.
00:34:00 Scott: In your pile yet with Chris Dixon's Read Write Own or any of the other ones?
00:34:05 Pau: Definitely Chris Dixon's and I have a few that are weird. I, sometimes I go and buy books. And I go to a bookstore and I end up buying a lot of things. From a productivity hack, I'd say that probably the biggest productivity hack that I've experienced in the last year has been actually moving to Spain. So shifting time zone has been a huge productivity hack for me.
00:34:32 Pau: My life in New York used to be, I would wake up at 6 AM. I would prepare lunch, I would wake up the kids, prepare to get them to school, get them dressed, get them fed, prepare the lunch boxes, pick up my first work call, my first standup call as I am walking out the door, putting gloves and hats to kind of go through the winter in New York to get them to school. And then drop them to school, take a call back from the school home, and then continue to work, work, work.
00:35:07 Pau: By the time I hit 5 PM, I'm dead. I was completely depleted of energy. It would be rare. I would really have to gather a lot of inner strength to be able to do workouts then, and it's hard to do them at night, and I would just be exhausted. Now, my day, I wake up at seven, I get the kids out of the door. I go with my wife for a walk to grab a coffee. I do my workout. I tackle email on my own. There's silence, there's no calls, there's no team bothering, everyone is sleeping. And I get good two, three hours of efficient work before the craziness of the stand-ups and the meetings start.
00:35:55 Pau: And then I do all the stand-up meetings, but I go to those meetings super well-prepared with all the T's crossed, everything done, everything ready. And I end up working way more hours. My day is super long, but I end up so full of energy and so much more accomplished and with a healthier lifestyle. So for me, it has completely changed my life from a productivity perspective.
00:36:25 Scott: I'm with you on the time zone shifting and hacking. I've found a similar but opposite effect of moving from New York to the West Coast, California, a couple of years ago. And obviously the reversal is not having free mornings, but it's having sort of the fire hose that hits you starting at six or seven AM, but it's kind of subsided by 12 or 1 PM. And so for me, having what, much more of a reactive problem solving morning and then a much more reflective long form afternoon.
00:36:57 Scott: Which can consist of workouts or long form thinking, podcasts, being able to write. And so in some sense, the time zone shifting off of the baseline, which maybe is, East Coast, the US, or London as kind of your central time zone. And I guess deciding, are you more of a morning person or more of an evening person?
00:37:17 Pau: Correct.
00:37:17 Scott: Where can folks find you online?
00:37:20 Pau: So you can follow us on remotely.works. We have a Substack and we publish things from time to time. On Twitter, I'm @kuap. On Instagram, Pau, @Pau, P-A-U. And I'm also on Threads now, I guess. I've been using less and less Twitter, more Threads. So you can find us there. And you can find me also on LinkedIn. And I like to maximize our identity. So don't hesitate to reach out. We can chat.
00:37:49 Scott: Absolutely. And then I guess, lastly, if you're an entrepreneur building any form of product where you have a need for modular developer teams that can do anything from front end to backend to Android to iOS to you name it, remotely.works is a great platform for you to be able to find those developer needs and assemble fully fledged teams that can work remotely for your company. So with that, thank you so much for being here.
00:38:15 Pau: You're hired for being a salesperson.
00:38:17 Scott: Great. I need it. Thanks, Pau.
00:38:22 Pau: Thank you.
00:38:24 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.