Alessio Fanelli: evaluation

Transcript context

…and they really wanted to implement Linear. And I had to bite my fist so hard. I was like, fine, do it. Implement Linear. Because I was like, at the end of the day, the team needs to be able to self-organize and pick their own tools. Yeah. But it did make the company slightly less legible for me. Another big change you had was going away from remote work, every other month. The discussion comes up again. What was that discussion like? How did your feelings change? Was there kind of like a threshold of employees and team size where you felt like, okay, maybe that worked. Now it doesn't work anymore. And how are you thinking about the future as you scale the team? Yeah. So, for context, I used to have a business called TeamFlow. The business was about building a virtual office for remote teams. And so, being remote was not merely something we did. It was, I was banging the remote drum super hard and helping companies to go remote. And so, frankly, in a way, it's a bit embarrassing for me to do a 180 like that. But I guess, when the facts changed, I changed my mind. What happened? Well, I think at first, like everyone else, we went remote by necessity. It was like COVID and you've got to go remote. And on paper, the gains of remote are enormous. In particular, from a founder's standpoint, being able to hire from anywhere is huge. Saving on rent is huge. Saving on commute is huge for everyone and so forth. But then, look, we're all here. It's like, it is really making it much harder to work together. And I spent three years of my youth trying to build a solution for this. And my conclusion is, at least we couldn't figure it out and no one else could. Zoom didn't figure it out. We had like a bunch of competitors. Like, Gathertown was one of the bigger ones. We had dozens and dozens of competitors. No one figured it out. I don't know that software can actually solve this problem. The reality of it is, everyone just wants to get off the darn Zoom call. And it's not a good feeling to be in your home office if you're even going to have a home office all day. It's harder to build culture. It's harder to get in sync. I think software is peculiar because it's like an iceberg. It's like the vast majority of it is submerged underwater. And so, the quality of the software that you ship is a function of the alignment of your mental models about what is below that waterline. Can you actually get in sync about what it is exactly fundamentally that we're building? What is the soul of our product? And it is so much harder to get in sync about that when you're remote. And then you waste time in a thousand ways because people are offline and you can't get a hold of them or you can't share your screen. It's just like you feel like you're walking in molasses all day. And eventually, I was like, okay, this is it. We're not going to do this anymore.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.