Humanity Working
Humanity Working is a podcast focused on how new technology such as AI is changing the experience of work, and how humans can thrive in this new world.
Each episode we explore what is changing, how it is affecting the way work gets done, and the impact it has on the people doing work - with a particular focus on those who have a creative aspect to their work.
The podcast is hosted by Paul Slater - Principal AI Technologist at Adobe Systems, often alongside Matt Neal - Innovation Leader at BeOne Medicines. We frequently feature authors, business leaders and top tier academics.
Join us as we navigate the ever-changing landscape of work.
Humanity Working
Lead A Productive Life with Phil Libin
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Phil Libin is the founder and CEO of mmhmm (available at mmhmm.app) - a company that is reimagining video for the future of work. He is also the former CEO of Evernote. In this wide ranging discussion, Phil and Paul discuss the nature of productivity, and why Phil believes that we should never go back to a predominantly in office environment.
Humanity Working is a podcast focused on helping individuals, teams and organizations be ready for the future of work by maximizing their human potential.
For more information, and access to our weekly newsletter, visit us at humanityworking.net.
So there is no going back. There's only thinking about what is where you are right now and where you want to be. And you move to where you want to be, and it's going to be different from where you are right now, and it's and it's going to be different from where you used to be. And you just decide what where do you want to be and how do you make the best of that? And any kind of instinct to go back to the way things were has never worked, will never work.
SPEAKER_04Hey everyone. Phil Libman is the former CEO of Evan Otanese, now the founder and CEO of a really interesting company called Mm-hmm. His company is reimagining how video can be used in hybrid and remote-first organizations. We'll talk about that here, but we'll also get into a much deeper discussion about things like what productivity even is, why Phil believes that it's inhumane to force people back into the office, and we even get a little bit into French philosophers. Phil's really fascinating, so I hope you'll enjoy the episode. I'm here with Phil Limon, who's the co-founder and CEO of Mm-hmm. So welcome, Phil. Thanks. Nice to be here. I mentioned you're the CEO of Mm-hmm, and actually you've been the CEO of a few things, uh, which we'll get into during the course of today, but um nobody starts with being the C starts with being the CEO of anything other than, I guess, a lemonade stand. So where did things start for you?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh, I think I started my first company uh in high school. Uh and we made um we were selling uh PCs. So we basically we'd be like we would buy PC parts. So this would be in the late 80s, probably. We were buying PC parts from like Taiwan and assembling them and you know reselling them to local businesses and out of kind of the back of our car. Uh and I I sold that company for uh for 500 bucks. That was my first my first big exit. I got $500 out of it, which was uh far more money than I'd ever had at any point in my life before that.
SPEAKER_04So yeah. So literally build literally computer parts and assembling assembling them and selling some businesses.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, back then it was there was uh PCs were just getting really like rolling as a mainstream thing for for people and for companies, and so there was a whole market for PC clones. You know, IBM kind of made the you know the brand name PCs, and there was all these other companies that uh made uh uh clones that were in some much cheaper, but in some ways better. And so yeah, we would uh I think there were there were already these like big distributors, like Ingram Micro and Tiger, Direct, and a few others. I'm trying to write kind of blanking on the names. And yeah, we would we would get these like giant paper catalogs that were you know several inches thick of different hard drives and controllers. I remember those. Yeah, just screw them together in our in our in our apartments and drive them around and sell them to places.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_04So um, and that was uh here in the United States, but you didn't start in the United States, am I right?
SPEAKER_01No, I was born so my I was born in uh in what it was then the Soviet Union uh in uh Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg. My my family uh my family was Ukrainian, um, but I was born when my mother was in was in what's now Russia, but back then it was all Soviet Union. And we came over in 1979 as refugees. So we were one of the people, one of the families that uh was lucky enough to be able to flee the Soviet Union in the late 70s, and so we got to the to New York, to the US in 79.
SPEAKER_04So there was obviously a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in there if you were starting a company that young. What do you attribute that entreprene entrepreneurial spirit to?
SPEAKER_01Uh well, my first job was um I was working at Carval Ice Cream, which was this you know chain of ice cream stores that's that's kind of on the East Coast. And uh uh I just wasn't very good at it. I couldn't, I kind of got fired from that job because uh I didn't have the manual dexterity to make soft serve ice cream cones. People think it's easy, but there's a there's a whole technique. Uh because you know you've got the you've got the ice cream dispenser and you've got to like rotate the cone around it at a certain angle. And if you don't, then too much ice cream goes inside the cone, and you know, it's all it's all very complicated, and I couldn't do it. Uh, and so I got fired from from that from that ice cream job. Um and you know, I'd had a couple of other jobs uh uh afterwards, uh doing programming and kind of other things like that, but it always seemed, I don't know, it always just seemed better to like not listen to what other people wanted me to do and just kind of figure out figure out what I wanted to do with myself or with some friends and just do it. And back then computers were so new as a mainstream thing that I think if you you know if you were good around computers, like it didn't matter if you were you know 15 years old, you can still get a job and make money.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, actually that's my my exact experience as well. So I completely resonate with that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I kind of wonder what the equivalent of that is now. Like when you and I were growing up, uh yeah, it felt like you could get, you know, you can get good with quote unquote computers, and that was like that was a really in-demand skill, and you could you can make money doing it. I'm not sure what like 15-year-olds today can what is there an equivalent thing that they can make money on? I guess yeah.
SPEAKER_04It's a good question, isn't it? Because because the thing that the thing that being good with computers meant was also that you were good at something that the people hiring you weren't necessarily that good at. So there was almost like a mystery around it to them. Right. Um and almost being young was an advantage, wasn't it? It was like uh it was like, oh yeah, it's all these kids have got it figured out and we don't.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and and and it was a mystery to them, but they also needed it. Like that was that's the thing. It's like they most people understood like why they needed computers and they just didn't know how to set them up or do anything. And so yeah, it was a valuable, it was like a really interesting window where you could get good at something as a kid that was very commercially valuable to you know the adults. Uh and yeah, I don't know. I haven't thought about whether or not there's like a something equivalent in in the modern times.
SPEAKER_04And kind of looking back on that period then, you you obviously had it you had a clear idea of what you were not that good at. Did you have a good understanding of what you were at that time good at?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. Probably not, probably just you know, quote unquote computers. Like I was the guy that, you know, you could like I would fix your VCR from blinking 12 all the time and you know just do basic things like that. And and then yeah, when I got into PCs, I knew how to take them apart and put them together. And I remember there was in my high school, uh, we got some PCs for the high school library, and they were networked together. Uh not not there's no not to the internet, they were just connected, you know, to each other. Um uh using token ring, which was this like you know, old networking thing before Ethernet. And and the thing around token, the thing about token ring cables was there were there were two different connections depending on which end. So like the end that plugged into your computer was physically different than the end that plugged into that the wiring closet into the you know the router or the hub or whatever. And uh whoever wired these computers up in a library got the cables backwards, and so they physically couldn't be plugged in. And it was it was gonna be like another like six months of like getting the wiring contractors to come back and do it. And I remember I just offered to like sneak in there one night and cut the ends of the cables and you know rewire them. And I did that very much unofficially, very much like under the table. But uh from then on, like the librarian and various school administrators uh owed me many favors. And so I like I learned from a pretty early age that if you were like handy around you know, a computer and a soldering gun and uh you know wire strippers, like you could you can make your way through the world. Uh important lesson.
SPEAKER_04So fast forward a bit from that, and we get to the I guess the first proper company engine five. So tell me a little bit about that and and what did you how did you come up with the idea?
SPEAKER_01Um what did it do? Uh so basically it was me and and and a couple of friends of mine from college, um, from Boston University. And we were all working together at this company called ATG. Uh it was our technology group in Boston. It was one of the early kind of internet companies. And um uh we just had this experience, which I think is pretty common, uh, where you know you're you're working at kind of a big-ish company, wasn't big by that, but it was the biggest company I'd ever worked for as of as of that point. Uh, that, you know, you just like you kind of look at yourself and you say, Yeah, I know what I do, and I'm like, I'm pretty good at my job. I understand what I do. And then you look at like a guy sitting next to you, and you're like, well, yeah, I kind of know what he does, and I kind of know what she does, and like I get it, but then there's always like somebody that where you're like, what does that guy do? Like, he's kind of an asshole. Like, why is he here? Don't they know that he doesn't do anything? And you know, we just had this experience where we kind of thought, well, what if we started our own company and when someone showed up to interview and it was clear that they were no talent and an asshole, we wouldn't hire them. We're like, could that's possible? Because clearly it'd never been done in like the history of companies, because companies were full of incompetent assets at the time. Uh, and so we said, all right, let's just start a company and um do that. And so that was the idea. We really had no idea what we were gonna do. We just we was like, it was the it was like the worst way to possibly make a startup. It was like we didn't even know what we were gonna do. We were doing it as a social experiment to like make our own company.
SPEAKER_04So it was more like how you wanted to run that company than what that company was.
SPEAKER_01We just wanted to make a place that was like fun to work at. It wasn't frustrating. And so we would do that. And that was in '97. 97 was the height of the dot-com bubble. So we were in Boston. And so you could like, you know, you can go to any tree and say dot com, dot com and like shake it, and a VC would fall out and give you money. And so it was like if you knew programming, you could just work. So we just started, you know, started working. We didn't know about investors, we didn't know that there were people that gave you money. Uh, so we thought, you know, we thought you had to be like profitable. Uh, so we just started building, you know, websites for companies and uh immediately just it just took off from there. So we built some of the first uh uh e-commerce sites, like some of the fresh shopping carts and you know, places online where you could you could buy things. Like we did work for eToys and Nokia. Uh Nokia was a company that used to make cell phones. Uh and uh what what became GameStop, we actually worked on the on the current the current GameStop branding, like logo and stuff was done by by our team uh during the project we did with them. Because back then GameStop was owned by Barnes and Nobles or something. I don't know. There was like some weird spin-out. So yeah, so we we we were basically doing the work of the some of the initial like e-commerce web things uh back in the you know 97, 98, 2000, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_04And Phil, I know that um hearing you talk about this, this was this ended up becoming very hard work, even by normal, uh, normal startup standards. You're working extremely long hours. Yeah. Um was it something about the business model that was causing that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think um uh we yeah, we were working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Like I hadn't had a weekend, you know, off in in a couple of years. We got to about, I think, 15 or maybe 17 people total. Um and uh uh I think it was because we were mostly doing consulting work. Uh like it was you know consulting work, like we were working for other companies solving their problems. And um, you know, we had some reusable code, but for the most part, we were just billing, you know, by the hour. And so the more you work, the more money you made. So it was a very incentive was to, you know, cram as much work as you could. Uh even when we had like you know, fixed fixed rate contracts, you still wanted to get them done relatively quickly. Um and then the what we realized is the problem with consulting, it was uh it's a good way to like get paid, but it's not a it's not a good way to build in value because you're not you know you're not actually creating anything that's gonna accumulate a value. When you you know when you stop poking at the keyboard, they stop paying you. So even if you can get make a lot of money while you were typing away, you can still only type away for so many hours a year. Um so yeah, I think I think it was probably that. I think the lesson we learned from that was like our our experiment to only to only hire people that we wanted to work with was pretty successful. Um but uh we also realized that I think being being consultants basically, you know, being paid for our for our our labor uh was not you know not a good way to actually build any value, even though you know we got lucky, really lucky, and we got paid pretty well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's interesting. I had much of that experience myself. My first um company was a consulting company as well. And it's funny, it some of these things seem really, really obvious in retrospect, but not necessarily immediately obvious when you're when you're inside them. And um what I realized fairly soon was that the the to your point, the incentives are there so that you're effectively the harder you work, the more money you make. The longer hours you work, the more money you make. And it actually becomes very, very difficult. Um possibly, I guess, because of fear that at some point you might not be you might not be working. Um you almost tend to push yourself into a potentially unsustainable situation because at some point down the line it that the money might not be there. And the only way in which you can generate more money is by working harder. And it's funny, I saw that in my company, but I've seen it with consulting just in general. It tends to be an existence that requires a huge amount of self-discipline to not work extraordinarily long hours. Um and you see that inside a inside of a lot of organizations and culturally it can be very, very difficult to work around that. We even see that with some of the organizations that we've worked in, whereby that's the basis of everything is the more hours you the more hours you clock, the more money you make. So therefore you clock a lot of hours.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's definitely, you know, the world tends to revert to what its incentives are. So regardless of like what you think your values are, what you're really gonna wind up doing is following whatever incentives or structures are are are you know you've put into place. And so it's kind of unsustainable to have a set of values that are at odds with the incentive structure that you're living under or working under. And so we try to line those up as much as possible.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So uh skipping forward then, we go from we go from that. You've kind of figured out that that in order to be able to provide something of lasting value, you need you need product. And I know you've done uh you you started another company after that, which which really helped you understand that. But let's skip forward a little bit to Evanote, um, which is probably, I guess, the thing that you're that you're most known for. For those that don't know, that have never uh have never used it, um, how would you describe, let's say, what Evannote was initially and what Evannote has become?
SPEAKER_01Well, what we set out to do is to build a, we called it from the earliest days, we called it a cognitive prestizes. So it was a it was a second brain. Uh we wanted something to you know make you smarter. Uh what we built was a note-taking app, but it was, you know, it was the world's best note-taking app. Uh and it turns out that that like that goes a long way. Like a really, a really nice way to capture any kind of information that you're seeing on any device. I mean, know that it's still going to be available to you at any time. Um that's what it was. And you know, in modern days, I think like a a lot of those concepts are fairly they're fairly straightforward. But back when we were starting this, you know, we we uh we kind of reformed the company in 2007. There was there was a um I I had a I had just exited uh with my team from my second company from Core Street, uh, and then uh met this other guy, Stepan Pachikov, who was this brilliant um entrepreneur. And he he had a team and we were in Boston, he had a team in California, and we both had like a very similar idea about extending your brain, giving you a second brain. And so we decided to merge those two companies. And we did that in 07 and it recreated the entity that's called Evernote. And uh the idea was to, yeah, just make make everyone smarter. Um and uh it was basically what you would, I think, now just say a flexible note-taking system. But back then, the new things were you know background synchronization, like so you can you can capture a node on your phone and it would be available on your Mac and vice versa. And you didn't have to sync think about it, you didn't have to set up any FTP servers and you don't have to push any buttons. You can like take a picture uh of a business card and then search for it by text you know later. So we did OCR of any of everything, uh, worked on you know multiple devices. We had a uh a browser extension that you can push a button and capture any any web page or section of a web page. So it was the kind of stuff that I think we I think we we we popularized a lot of technologies that then went on to become thankfully pretty common in the productivity landscape now. Uh and it was it was great. Our vision was to just kind of make productivity something that was relevant again. I think when we were getting started, productivity still meant Microsoft Office. It still meant a database, a word processor, and a spreadsheet. And we were like, I don't even know what a database is anymore. Uh but that that idea of productivity hadn't changed in 20 years. And so I think we we we changed it. Uh and uh it's really been good to see how the company's developed and uh all of the new kind of productivity category that I think uh we helped uh spur on.
SPEAKER_00The Way Too Busy podcast is brought to you by Billion Minds. Working out of the office brings employees all kinds of freedoms, but it can be really difficult to do well and stay engaged every day. If you want to help your employees become remote work masters while generating better business results for your organization, visit billionminds.com today or contact us at infobillionminds.com. Billionminds, helping everyone do great work from anywhere.
SPEAKER_04This definition of what a productivity application even is. Right? So you described Evanode as a productivity application. I would certainly think of it, you know, as in you know, when you see it, you know one right, and and that is a productivity application. Um But what do you think constitutes a productivity application? And then more specifically, what do you think makes a good productivity application?
SPEAKER_01I think I think those are really good questions. And I think I think right now it's actually worth taking an even more basic question, which is what is productivity? Like what do you what do you what is what does it mean to be productive? What what you know and what should it mean? Because I think like the whole concept of productivity for you know for knowledge workers, for creative people, I think was probably we're probably used to defining it in a very kind of industrial age sense. You know, we're still looking at sort of outputs per unit of time or outputs per you know person or something like that. It's a very like factory model of productivity. Um and it's weird. It's a weird, it's a weird notion. So I think like I think if I was starting a productivity app now, and I think I think of it as a productivity app of sorts, uh, I would go about it very differently than than than than an Evernote because I because I think the whole concept of what it means to lead a productive life is a little bit different than than than it used to be. And I think we're all we're all still trying to figure that out. But uh at its simplest form, I think being productive means uh accomplishing what you want to accomplish.
SPEAKER_04So there's something you mentioned just before that, which I think is really interesting, which is that some things changed in terms of what it means to be productive now than what it meant to be productive, let's say, two decades ago. Why do you think that is?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think I think I I think some stuff has just become table stakes. Right. So like back then we were saying, again, this if you take this definition of productivity as like we're gonna let you accomplish what you want to accomplish with you know as little uh uh as few errors as possible and as little cost as possible. Uh and so if you looked at, well, what were the things that were preventing you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish? It's always things like, well, you forget something, or you need some information to do it, but you don't have access to that information. Um I remember um you know going back to that high school library where I you know rewired the library computers, uh, those were, you know, those had CD-ROMs and it had like basically all the card catalogs. It had like lots of like um, you know, fully searchable card catalog of you know virtually every book uh that you could search on the computers. And that was very much a big productivity boost because you know you couldn't, there wasn't really a Google, you know, Google, Google wouldn't be invented for many years, you know, since then. So if you wanted to like find something, like find uh you know, some information, your best bet was to like read a book about it or a magazine article, but how would you even find the book or the magazine article? Well, you know, before this generation of computers that I, you know, that I that I that I held my school put in, it was like, you know, microfiche, which is like these like little photographic forms. You would go to a microfiche reader and you would say, Well, I think maybe this thing was in the a Scientific American journal, and you would just like look through like all of the back issues of Scientific American, like optically trying to find something, and then maybe you would be able to get it. And then from there we had an you know better searching, but even that was very specialized on you know these CD ROM databases. And then you could find the reference, but you still couldn't get the magazine. So you would find the reference, you'd be like, ah, okay, this was in the Scientific American from you know 1974. And then you would, you know, order that copy from the librarian. And they would go and get it for you from some other library, and it would take a few weeks to show up. And this is all like this is not ancient days, right? This was my lifetime, right? This was um and now, and so back then, like a an efficient, you know, being able to search a database of like magazines was like seen as like a really major advance. Where it's like right now, no one will do any of that stuff because you just, you know, you just Google it and it's there. So a lot of it is just like things become table stakes. And same thing with Evernote, right? With Evernote in 2007, there was a big problem that, like, yeah, I have the information, but I have it on this computer, but I'm not near my computer right now. I mean, you're a different computer or I'm near my phone. How do I use it? You couldn't do that before. I mean, you could, but you'd have to set up very complex structures. You'd have to like set up centralized servers and upload stuff somewhere and like do a lot of stuff. Whereas like, and so Evernote, you know, solving that seamlessly, where take a picture of something on my phone, not think about it again for years, and then search by a few keywords that were in the photo and find it years later on a totally different device, like that's not that big a deal anymore. But it but it was back then. So part of it is, you know, the technology advances and you get you get table stakes phenomena. Uh, but part of it is the world changes. Um, you know, we're we live through these uh uh there's a French philosopher named uh um Michel Foucault, uh who talks about this as a historical continuity and historical discontinuity. Uh the idea is that historical continuity means that there's like important things that the world thinks about, that society thinks about, that generally doesn't change over the course of decades or even hundreds of years. So like hundreds of years go by and we don't really change the way we think about an important thing, but then all of a sudden a discontinuity happens and how how the world, how society thinks about some important things changes. And you know, and we're living through uh more historical discontinuities right now than I think have ever happened in my lifetime because of because of COVID, because of all because of you know distributed work, because of all this other stuff. So a lot of it is just like the world changes its opinion and how we're supposed to do stuff. Um and you know, you take the combination of those, you take you know, changing attitudes about important issues, plus what technology uh enables to mix table stakes, and it means that what you would actually want to build as a product for productivity is radically different now than it would have been, you know, back in 2007 when I got started in it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Wow, that's that's really, really interesting. I mean, I think if I take some of what you said there, you're what you're kind of saying is that if you if you in the past, if you wanted to uh accomplish something meaningful and potentially complex, then the the process of doing it was itself extremely complicated. Right? You had to have a you either had to get a whole bunch of other people with a bunch of skills that you didn't have or develop a whole bunch of skills yourself in order to be able to do these things. And those things themselves were incredibly time consuming. And the vast majority of those things, the sort of process things, have been optimized over time to the point whereby it's a Google search engine away, or it's a or the communication piece of it is really, really simple. And so that's all to a certain extent done. And so now what it means to be productive in that new world where that's all done is a totally different potentially set of skills. It's interesting because for us, we think about that as being that same engine that is now available to us that allows us to be able to find anything at any time incredibly efficiently. It's so efficient that it can be used for any purpose. And so therefore, the challenge now is to sort of maintain attention in that, right? The challenge now is to be able to focus those um that immense power that you have for something that is itself productive. The challenge now for us is to make the human is to help the human being to be productive amongst amongst this enormous power that they have that can be used for anything, including stuff that isn't remotely productive.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh I think that's right. And I think like there's there are new problems that are created, uh, or that are at least made worse. Uh for example, if you know, if if in the 70s or the 80s I wanted to, you know, do some research about uh, I don't know, a historical event, and I wanted to like read about that historical event, like, well, my challenge was like finding the information, like finding the articles from the history books and then accessing them because I physically couldn't just Google it. Um I didn't have the challenge of like, but now it's very easy to find all that stuff, but now the problem is like I don't even know what, I don't know what's true because there's so many more lies out there. Uh and so but like we have we have issues now that that just didn't like that were dwarfed by by by structural changes, by structural problems before that now that we've sort of made the structural problems easier, as you're saying, we have we have other things that come to the surface. So like is it you know, is it easier or harder to be to be smart about to have an accurate understanding of history right now than it was 20 or 30 years ago? And well, overall I think probably easier uh if you're serious about it. Um but if you're not particularly serious about it, or if this is not like really your job, then you're actually probably more likely to be to be more confused and more wrong, because maybe 20 years ago you just wouldn't have known anything. Now you actually know something that's just false, or you think you know something that's false. Yeah. That's a big problem. Uh big problem for the world. Uh so yeah, all of this stuff changes. I I really think that like we have an we have this we have a crisis right now of what I think of as as our epistemic infrastructure. Um the infrastructure of how we think we know things.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_01Like, how do we like what makes us think that we know something? How do we can we we don't have to agree, you know, we don't have to agree on opinions uh if we can agree on the facts. Okay, we don't have to agree on the facts if we can agree on how we go about finding out the facts. But now we don't agree on opinions, we don't agree on the facts, and we don't even agree on how we how we would go about establishing the facts. And so, like, well, then how can we have any basis for any kind of communication when when we have this like this this infrastructure that we use to know things is no longer reliable? At least the the last the last version of it. And the last version of it was basically Google or like Wikipedia. You know, you like we sort of agree that like, you know, if we disagree on something, okay, let's Google it. And then you know, we can kind of come to a consensus because Google says so. But that that is, I think that's rapidly that that that era is rapidly ending. And now we need we need a way that's not just Google to to know things. Uh and and so these are like I think the deeper issues of productivity that are that are that are very interesting, that are much more interesting to me than uh you know how you synchronize information or how you read how you read text out of images, that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's super interesting, Phil, because uh if you think about it, we we've always had, I suppose, the same ways in which we knew things, which was we would look stuff up and we would uh learn from people that we trust. We still do that, except our disagreeing with our etc. So we're still doing that. Yeah. It just isn't. Yeah, we're still doing that, but it's almost all weaponized, isn't it, in a sense, right? So like the network of people that you could reach out to that you trust is 20 times or 30 times what it was, and maybe you shouldn't trust all of them. And the information that you're getting, you can get from anywhere, and the quality of it and accuracy of it is less is potentially less consistent than it used to be. So I suppose it's like the same techniques that we've always had and what we're wired to do as individuals, but now the things we're checking are themselves potentially less reliable than they used to be. It's interesting.
SPEAKER_01There's a lot more mundane stuff too that are changes. So, for example, just for me personally, I was for for many years, for a couple of decades probably, um the most important thing in my life was the calendar. So the calendar app was the app that was my single source of the truth. That's that's what I would live by. So I'd wake up in the morning, check my calendar, it tells me what I'm doing that day, and and I do it. And so my calendar was like, that was the most important thing for me, was the calendar. Um, because the calendar was basically a record of my of my external meetings, right? My meetings with by external, I just mean like outside of my own head. I don't even mean inside the company, like just like my interactions with other people. But my interactions with other people back when I had to commute was pretty much the most important. Like you could, if you looked at that, you kind of knew what I was working on and what I was doing. And if I needed to like refresh my memory about something, I would just check my calendar and I would see like, oh yeah, who did I meet with that day? And then that would that would be good enough. And and and and the most important thing was getting things into my calendar. So if I wanted to talk to someone about something, I wanted to work on something, I'd have to find the time to schedule it in because I was doing you know 13, 13 or so average meetings a day. Uh now, like in the past year and a half, my calendar has become much less important because I don't do very many synchronous, I don't do a whole lot of synchronous interaction anymore. You know, I probably have four and a half average meetings a day. Like this this is one of them. This is like of the things. Well, today's actually a busy day for me. But in general, I do you know four or five like synchronous conversations or meetings with people. And the vast majority of the time, they're they're asynchronous. I'm doing work, but you can no longer tell what I'm working on just based on who I'm meeting with or who I'm talking to at any given time. So the calendar is sort of fallen from its like primacy. Uh and now there's something else that's like the most important thing uh in my life for for for for uh figuring out what I'm actually working on. Um and and and that's a big change. So I think if I was again, if I was doing productivity right now, I'd really want to rethink what calendars are. What because like calendars don't mean what they used to mean, and meetings don't mean what they used to mean, or they shouldn't. This is like a major change, is people just shouldn't be doing as many meetings. When I was doing 13 meetings a day on average, it sounds like I was more productive than now when I'm doing four and a half meetings a day on average. That drop from from 13 meetings a day to four and a half meetings a day has made me far more productive. Like I'm accomplishing more than I ever have. It's not like I'm, you know, in my quasi-retirement. Uh it just turns out that meetings are a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible way to like conduct yourself. Um, so these are all, again, these are all like big changes that that are part of this historical discontinuity that we're living through that I think very much affect the whole concept of what do you what does a productive life look like.
SPEAKER_04So that's a great segue into mm-hmm, which is your your current company. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what does and uh and what you hope it will be doing over the next few years?
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm is an app that makes you great at at video. Um video communication is the key to uh being able to live and work the way that you the way that you want. Uh video communication, particularly around teams. Uh so you can replace as many meetings as possible with with recorded stuff. But when you are meeting live, either on video or in person, you make those count. So I think that like the what does is it basically gives you, it gives you and it gives the team communication superpowers. Uh lets you just waste less time uh thinking that you're communicating when really you're not. You're just getting in the way of communication. Uh and the specific way it does that is by making it easy to go from synchronous video to asynchronous video and and and kind of smoothly go back and forth between them. So do recorded stuff when that makes the most sense, do live stuff when that makes the most sense, have all of that be hopefully much better than than which we get currently with uh the first generation of video tools.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I can vouch for that. We've been using it increasingly ourselves now. And it it's it's really interesting, Phil. It's one of those those things that once you start using it, you start to realize how unique it is. But it almost takes like that first um first few interactions with it to be able to really understand um the ways in which we need to optimize and enable different forms of work. As you were just describing, right? This this um relationship between synchronous and asynchronous work is is fundamentally changing. Um and particularly as we move into distributed teams with um more workers outside of the office, the ability to be able to optimize our communication across all channels becomes becomes hugely important. Now, I know that um remote work is not a term that you that you particularly like. Um so give it up on that. Explain to me more.
SPEAKER_01I'm off my high horse on that. Sorry. I've given up on that. I was on a I was on a moral high horse. It's not remote, it's distributed, but I decided screw it. I'm just gonna say remote and hybrid just everyone that says why were you on your high horse, if you don't mind my asking? I get I go through unreasonable periods uh where you know I decide that you know it's better to call it something else, uh, because you know the problem with remote, right, is that it connotes that it's you're remote from something. And so somebody is more central, someone has an advantage, and if you're remote, you have a disadvantage. And so I was I prefer distributed because you know, like the internet is a distributed system, it's not a remote system, it's not a system of remote computers, it's distributed, it's not remote from anything. Everyone is distributed, and it's distributed by design, not like the internet is not remote by accident, it's like it's distributed by design. And so it was the same kind of thing. Like we're we're making a company that's distributed, which means that we don't have remote employees, we have distributed employees. We have people all over the place and they're distributed by design because it's better that way, because it's more productive that way. There are all sorts of like elegant philosophical reasons for choosing one word versus the other, but you know, at the end of the day, who cares? It's you know, people want to say remote and hybrid, and that those are terms that society understands. Why confuse things by by insisting on different terminology?
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SPEAKER_04You just you just said something which is really important and I think of a lot of interest to our listeners. You said we're designing our company to be distributed, and we're doing it because it's better that way. So not every CEO believes that. And in fact, a few very high-profile CEOs don't believe that. Not every commentator believes that. We had an episode a while back talking about Martin Gladwell's opinion on that. Um I'm curious as to what's the why behind designing our company as uh as distributed because it's better that way. What's the what's the why behind that?
SPEAKER_01Well, let me say it's not necessarily better for most for all companies. Um, it's just better for our company and most others. Uh, but it's hypothetically possible that some companies are better off being being centralized. Um look, I think I think people spend too much time, people are blinded. Whenever there's a big change, um, most people think about the problems that that change creates and uh focus on the problems. And then they either focus on solving the problems or they focus on whining about the problems, but they're focusing on the problems. It's very understandable, very human reaction. Not very interesting. Um, much more interesting to focus on the on the on the advantages and the superpowers and the opportunities and focus on maximizing those and doubling down on those and then putting the problems into perspective. Like once you know what the superpowers are, what the advances are, then you can decide whether the problems are worth living with or worth solving or worth or no, we should just give up. And so one way to put it is like, what are the advantages of being having a distributed company? Well, let's start with 0% of my employees waste any time sitting in traffic. Like, none. At Evernote, you know, as an average commute was about two, an hour and a half each way. Uh it was very common. So three hours a day. Um, I mean, is that is that not enough to say that 100% of my I'm not asking anyone to spend to waste three hours every single day stuck in traffic? And the thing that's like super stressful, super unhealthy, super bad for the world, takes time away from you your your family and your friends and music and other pursuits. Three hours a day stuck in traffic. Why? That is so inhumane. I'm never again in my life gonna ask someone to do that. You know, three hours a day, every day, five days a week for you know, the prime of your life, you're gonna waste, and that's okay? Like, of course not. So I actually mean there's there's 20 other you know, giant superpowers, it's not even the biggest, but but it's a big enough one. Uh let how about no, I'm not gonna sit in traffic for three hours every day, and you can't make me as a start. Uh-huh. You know, another one is uh look, if you talk to CEOs, there's kind of a secret. There's a secret thing that they teach us in CEO school, which is uh you get asked, what's the hardest thing about running your company? There's only one answer you're allowed to give as a CEO. The only one answer that any CEO has ever given about what's the hardest thing. You're you're you're you're you're required to say it's the people. It's getting, it's hiring and maintaining the best people. It's always the hardest thing. That's the only reason, the only reason you're ever allowed to give for what's the hardest thing. And it's you know, it's mostly true. Um and so here we here we've spent the past 50 years as CEOs whining about how difficult it is to get the best people. We've just been given the greatest gift in the world for that, which is I can hire from people everywhere in the world. 100% of my job listing, say global. I hire people from anywhere in the world for 100% of the jobs, you know, with some exceptions, you know, for you know, in not currently, you know, in North Korea or Russia or something like that, but for the most part, everywhere in the world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Pay people the same. Um my top of the funnel for talent is just 10,000 times bigger than it was before. I'm never gonna write a job description again that says I'm looking for a database engineer in San Francisco. Never gonna happen. I'm gonna say I'm looking for a database engineer. So I can hire from the very best people anywhere in the world, and I'm gonna give that up. No, I'm never, you're gonna pry that out of my cold dead hands. I'm never giving that up. Any company that like that that gives up that benefit is putting themselves at such a massive, massive disadvantage. Um I like the fact that my employees can have a decent quality of life, that they don't have to like live in you know, places that are too small for them and their families and and and and you know, and in dangerous neighborhoods and commute. And you know, I like the fact that anyone who works at my company can live in the house that I'm currently living in, literally. Because like they live in Benthamville, Arkansas, it's just not that expensive. Make this we make we pay people the same, regardless of where they live. Why shouldn't we? We pay them based on their contribution, not based on what their location. So I like the fact that people can like have a decent quality of life. I think that makes it more productive. I think if you improve the quality of life of creative people, of knowledge workers, it improves their quality of work. And that becomes a virtuous cycle because then if you improve their quality of work, then you get more success, which translates to more money, which you could then put into improving the quality of life even more. So you get this like beautiful virtuous cycle, improving quality of life, improves quality of work, improving quality of life, improves quality of work, improving quality of life, and so on. Um, why would I ever give that up? So I think you like you focus on the superpowers for a creative team, for a team of people who work on laptops, we're not making rockets, we're not doing, you know, we're not doing brain surgery, we're not cooking meals. Um the advantages are astronomical, like they're blindingly obvious. It takes a real, a real effort to like close your eyes to these benefits. So when you kind of internalize that and you kind of say, well, these are the benefits, I'm never giving them up, then you say, okay, well, what are the problems? And there are problems. And then you figure out, okay, well, how do we mitigate these problems? How do we solve them? Because they're worth solving, because the benefits are so shockingly massive. And then so then, you know, we incrementally solve the problems as they come up, and we get better and better at it. We've gotten reasonably good already. And we spend time making sure we get as much of the benefits as possible because the benefits are staggering. Um and yeah, I mean, it's it's just such an intuitively obvious thing. And of course, it's not for everyone, uh, only for people who want to have a decent life.
SPEAKER_04You know, Phil, what I love about that is it just speaks to the extraordinary power of of where you start a thought from. So it's a really good way to do that. What I mean by that is that yeah, it's like imagine for a while for a while, we we have done this actually with some of the companies that we work with and say, okay, let's take, let's imagine that, for example, it's not possible to do anything other than remote work. You live in a world where whereby maybe it's another pandemic or whatever it happens to be, but you live in a world where Nobody is going to come into an office because it does an office doesn't exist. What do you do then? Right. And how do you turn that into a super successful business? And if you start from that perspective and then you start to figure out all the things you need to do in order to turn that into a super uh super successful business, very soon that business starts looking better than the business that you're trying to run right now. And it all comes from where that thought starts from. And and we see so many people right now who are thinking about it in terms of a normal that was versus the normal that is, and now struggling to get as much of that normal that was back. Um, and versus thinking about the company of the future that is built around the idea of a distributed workforce. So I I love I love how you put it.
SPEAKER_01That's that's where all the problems start, right? It's always it's always people wanting to go back to the way something was. And you never do that in any area of life or or or or history or culture or business. You never go back. There is no going back. Time only goes one way, it only goes forward. So there is no going back. There's only thinking about what it where you are right now and where you want to be. And you move to where you want to be, and it's gonna be different from where you are right now, and it's and it's gonna be different from where you used to be. And you just decide what where do you want to be and how do you make the best of that? And any kind of instinct to go back to the way things were has never worked, will never work. Uh and and and honestly, like you don't really fully remember the way things were. You like think you do, but you don't. Like you're you're you're you're you know, you're looking at it through a pretty inaccurate filter. You know, companies that say, Well, how do I keep my corporate culture? You don't, because your corporate culture sucks. And it always kind of did. And it's not like we all of your employees were like amazingly happy and fulfilled and had perfect life work balances, you know, when they were back at the office. There were all sorts of problems. And some of those problems got a lot better and some of those problems got worse, but the question is not how do you go back. The question was how do you go forward from where you are right now. And again, for some companies, yeah, like if you're if you're making hardware, you're assembling things, like sure, yeah, you got to be in a centralized place. I'm not saying that like no company will ever be in a centralized place. I'm just saying, like treat your workers as with respect as adults, and let them figure out where they need to be to get their job done. And if the job requires, you know, screwing rocket ship parts together, then yeah, you go where the rockets are. And, you know, if it requires doing brain surgery, go where the brains are. Um, and if it requires cooking, you know, great meals, go where the go where the restaurant kitchen is. Uh and and all of those people, all of those jobs, right, that are dependent on being in a physical location, all of those people will also benefit tremendously from this world because they're not constantly fighting for traffic and high rent and everything else with all the people who don't need to be there physically, who are just there because they're forced to. So it's a better life for for the geographically constrained jobs and for the geographically unconstrained jobs. Uh, because at the end of the day, all those are just people. And and it also turns out that there's no such thing as life work balance. There's only there's only life. There's only like there's only there's only life. And work is work is part of it. So this idea that we like separate life and work so completely, and you've got like office hours, and there's like a physical location that you go to work, and it's different from where you live, and that's okay. And the commute and the all the inefficiencies for that, like that's what causes the problems. Like we we should have never we should have never coined life work balance as an expression. It should have always been just about life and the part of it that work plays in.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's interesting because Ability Minds, we talk about that quite a bit. And explicitly the that work-life balance image of you know, like work on one side and life on the other side. And we actually, I mean, we researched it a bit. It's interesting. I mean, it what it comes from is uh is a very much in the office culture. And the theory was that if those two things were out of balance, then you fixed it by spending an hour less in the office or an hour and a half less in the office. You come home from the office earlier, and that would redress the balance in some way, shape, or form. But in reality, of course, what we're really looking at is a set of skills that people need in order to be able to integrate, work effectively with the rest of their lives. And that set of skills used to be pretty simple, which it was leave the office earlier, because everything you did was in the office. And if you were away from it, you you really couldn't work in many cases, right? Especially if you go back to, you know, sort of before cell phones and you know, and things like that. Once you were gone, you were gone. And so the, but now the set of skills that you need in order to be able to integrate work effectively in the in the rest of your life, in a world that itself is ever-changing, in a world where work can interrupt you at any moment and pull you back in at any moment, that set of skills has become much more difficult to build. And so it really is intriguing that you talk about that. Because it always, to your point, it always has been life and the role that work plays in it. It's just that integrating those two effectively is now much harder than it ever was. I think that's right.
SPEAKER_01That's right. And I think that that comes back to the question you asked at the beginning, which was like, what is the what is the role of productivity right now? So what is it, what does it mean to have a productive life? And I think these are these are the new elements of it. It's it's making the life that you want, accomplishing what you want to accomplish, having a job that that gets you further for accomplishing what you want to accomplish, getting rid of as much of the bullshit as possible, wasting as little time as you can, and wasting as wasting as few conversations as you can. You know, when you're talking to someone, like that's an important and precious thing. Let's let's not let's not throw that away by having endless meetings where nothing is actually uh actually being discussed or or or nothing, not much is happening and everyone's kind of bored and waiting for it to be over. Like why why live a life where you're waiting for any part of it to be over? Um that's I think what we used to do in kind of previous in-office productivity culture. And uh it's it's worth it's worth rethinking all those things.
SPEAKER_04Interesting. So that brings me, I guess, to my to my final question, because you're somebody who used to live in the valley, um, and you moved from there, and now, as you mentioned, you're in you're in Benteville, Arkansas. So what led to what led to that shift? And and has anything about that moved to Arkansas or changed your outlook on life or your your view on how distributed code.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think um it was an easy like we were basically just looking to to you know flee San Francisco during COVID for for a while. And uh it was very low stakes. Uh, you know, I was living right in in the mission district in in San Francisco, and it was got pretty unbearable, especially during lockdown, like with nothing to do anyway. So, and kind of thought, let's just go someplace where we can at least have a backyard and a tree to look at. And we weren't planning on staying for more than you know, a couple of months. Uh, so it was very low stakes. We literally spent you know, 40 minutes thinking about where to go. Like I spent more time, you know, deciding what pocket notebook I'm gonna buy than uh than than where than where we were gonna live. Uh and so drove down to Arkansas to Bentonville. Uh and for the first couple of months, yeah, we were just like in lock up, in you know, lockdown, I guess. Uh so it was it was it was fine. But then as things, I mean we kept thinking that we'd move out, but like as things opened up, it just became really nice. And so I just kept extending it and extending it, extending it, and then like buying some land and building a house. And so it just kind of became this thing where uh turns out very staying here because it's great. It's just a great place to be. Uh Northwest Arkansas is just it's just cool. Uh and you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of business here, there's a lot of work, the economy is great, there's like all sorts of things, but really like it's I'm not here for any of that. I'm here because it's a great place to live. Um and I'm lucky enough that that that I have a job that uh I could do from anywhere. And so if I can do the job from anywhere, why not do it from a place that's great to live? And then what I've learned, what I've realized is the is is is how that loop gets closed, which is it's not I it's not only that I have a job that I can do from anywhere, so I might as well do it from a place that's great. I do my job better if I do it from a place that's great. It's that's that's how the loop gets closed. It's that it's that making a good quality of life improves my productivity, improves my quality of work because I'm I'm in a better mood, because I could do more stuff, because I have fewer distractions, because I'm not wasting time. So I didn't realize that until until coming here. I just thought, well, look, I can do the job from anywhere, so let's go someplace nice. What I didn't realize is the other half of that, which is yeah, I can do the job from anywhere, but I could do it even better from a place that's nice. So that's that's the big that's the bigger reveal for me.
SPEAKER_04Phil, that's a great way to close it out. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thank you. Um, and our audience love it, really appreciate it. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00The Way Too Busy Podcast was presented and produced by me, Matt Neal, and was brought to you by Billion Minds. If you want to get in touch with us, tweet us at Rising Billion or email us at WayTooBusy at BillionMinds.com. Billion Minds, creating practical tools for our way too busy lives. If you're enjoying the Way Too Busy Podcast, please consider leaving us a rating and review on iTunes so that others can find us as well. Thanks.
