September 23, 2024 • 47 mins
In this episode of The Only Thing That Matters, I sit down with Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of Remote—a company that has raised over $500 million, operates in 67 countries, and is valued at $3 billion. 🌍
Job shares the incredible journey of building Remote from a simple job board to a global platform solving one of the most complex challenges for companies—hiring and managing international teams.
We dive into:
💡 The moment Remote pivoted from a remote job board to tackling international payroll and compliance—and why it was the right decision.
💡 Going all in on venture capital: How Job and his co-founder Marcelo made the high-stakes choice to raise money and grow at all costs.
💡 The importance of timing: Why Job believed it was a "now-or-never" moment to build Remote and capitalize on the opportunity.
💡 Talking to customers from day one: Job’s approach to building a business by having constant conversations with customers and how it shaped Remote’s evolution.
From embracing the risk of failure to scaling with a global vision, Job’s insights are a must-listen for any founder or entrepreneur looking to solve big problems and achieve product-market fit.
Tune in to hear how Job built Remote into a billion-dollar company and the lessons he learned along the way.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Job van der Voort (00:00):
To me, success is am I doing the
activity that I want to be doing?
For me, this is not aboutmaking a shitload of money.
It's about doing something thatI find fun, right and find
challenging, and I like to beambitious and have a change in
the world, and so, in that sense, we've already been successful.
So, raising venture money, I dothink that the bar for success
is insanely high.
(00:20):
Right, you end up comparingyourself to well-known named
companies, but those are one ina million, and so if you define
success as, like, monetarysuccess, I do think it's much
easier to make less money.
Ariel Camus (00:45):
Welcome everyone.
This is Ariel Camus, and thisis the Only Thing that Matters
the podcast where I interviewsuccessful founders to
deconstruct their path toproduct market fit and extract
the principles and frameworksbehind their success.
My guest today is Job Van der V.
He's the CEO and co-founder ofRemote, a company that helps
(01:06):
businesses of all sizes pay andmanage full-time and contract
workers around the world.
Remote handles internationalpayroll benefits, taxes, stock
options and compliance in dozensof countries, making it easier
for companies to hire globally.
Making it easier for companiesto hire globally.
Since its founding in 2019,remote has raised over $500
(01:28):
million, reached an evaluationof $3 billion and has over a
thousand employees servingcustomers in 67 countries.
Before Remote, ob was the VP ofProduct at GitLab, where he
helped grow the team from 5 to450 people, gaining invaluable
experience in building aremote-first company.
(01:48):
Join us as we explore theintricacies of launching and
scaling a very complex businessin a highly competitive market
With all of you.
Job van der V hey, job, thankyou so much for being here.
Really appreciate you beinghere.
You, I know you're quite busy.
Thanks, thanks for having me.
(02:08):
Well, I was checking on myinbox earlier today.
When did we meet and it was on2019, I think, august.
Uh, we were introduced by nico,who he participated in your
seed round too.
Job van der Voort (02:26):
He participated in our seed round
with General Catalyst and everyround after.
So yeah, good investor.
Ariel Camus (02:34):
I remember having that doubt of like you know, is
it a good idea to get aninstitutional investor in your
seed rounds and you know, ifthey don't follow on that's the
downside, but that they canfollow on in every single round
after that?
it's uh, it's, it's an amazinguh thing, and and he's awesome,
I'm so glad that that you knowwe were introduced to each other
by him and, yeah, the the thingis when, when we're introduced,
(02:57):
I remember him mentioning, yeah, like job is like working on a
way to like help people likefind remote jobs, and I'm like
that looks very different towhat you're doing today.
Maybe that can be a good way tostart the conversation.
Where did the initial idea comefrom and what was that idea?
And then how did that evolve towhat remote is today?
Job van der Voort (03:19):
Yeah, the funny thing is that we're back
at it.
So today we again helpcompanies find people.
Yeah, the funny thing is thatwe're back at it.
So today we again helpcompanies find people.
But indeed, so I joined GitLabbefore I started remote, very
early on, just getting startedas a company, and there we built
a fully remote company and wefound that that works incredibly
well.
It works so incredibly well,and I think the two things that
it did really well was one itsolved all these problems that
(03:44):
companies typically strugglewith, which is scaling and
expanding quickly.
That suddenly became reallyreally easy, and finding great
people became really easy as aremote company.
And, inversely, we found thatthe people that we hired were
incredibly happy, and so to me,it showed that the way we were
building GitLab as a company,that's how companies will work
in the future, and, given that,I should do something to help
(04:09):
that, because we encountered allthese problems at GitLab
building that company, and so Ialways wanted to start my own
company.
Always, when I joined GitLab, Itold Sid, the CEO and founder.
I told him I'm going to stayfor a year and then I'm going to
found my own company.
I ended up staying five,because the company grew really
fast and I was having a goodtime, but still I always want to
start my own company, and sowhen I finally had the
(04:30):
opportunity to do somethingmyself, I think I had a bit of a
financial cushion build up.
If it wouldn't work out, Iwouldn't have to give up on life
.
So when that was the time, Imanaged to acquire remotecom,
the domain, and I got Marcelo,my co founder, to join me and we
started building, and at thevery beginning we had the idea
(04:52):
of what remote is today.
So we wanted to become anemployer of record and we knew
that we could do this as one ofthe options.
We also knew that it wouldrequire an immense amount of
money, and on remotecom itselfthere was already a website, a
freelancer connecting kind ofplatform running, and so we
figured well, maybe we can makethat work for a while, make some
money while we work on otherthings, so we don't have to
(05:12):
raise a lot of cash up front.
We did it for a while and itdidn't really work out.
And then we figured well, youknow, the change in the world we
want to see is more remoteorganizations, and so helping
more people find remote jobs iscertainly going to help in some
way in that, and so that's howwe started early on.
(05:33):
So we built the job board andeverything else, but then very
quickly after that, we realized,well, the real problem we have
to solve is this employer recordbit, and that's what we started
to build then for a long time,and I think around the time that
we were connected, we hadalready started building that,
but we still had a job boardonline and we tried to connect
companies and made some moneyand nothing significant.
Ariel Camus (05:53):
So the mission, the why, was pretty clear.
It was more about, like thewhere to start building towards
that right.
Job van der Voort (06:01):
One thing that was really incredibly clear
to us was that we either builtthe employer record thing that
we ended up doing, but we wouldneed to raise money.
And if we need to raise money,like you and I were saying
before you started recording,you have to go incredibly hard.
Right, you have to grow at allcosts, essentially, and so
that's a.
This is a really die-hardchoice.
You cannot calmly build aventure business.
(06:23):
You have to be all in, reallyfocused, really focused on
growth for a decade.
It's quite a commitment, andthe alternative route for us was
well, we're going to dowhatever else, just not this
thing to help remote companiesand whatever else and then we
can build more of a lifestylebusiness, right, so we can
calmly scale it.
And so we ended up obviouslychoosing to raise capital and uh
(06:46):
, and then we then things growgrew really really fast, but and
and for us it was sort of like,well, it feels like the stars
are aligning to do this rightnow.
We want to do this, so let'stake this opportunity and see
where it goes right.
We and I think we wereextremely willing to fail as
well.
We were just we're going towork really hard on this if it
works out out, it works out.
If it doesn't, we can always goback to do something else.
Ariel Camus (07:07):
Will you say, going on the venture path increased
the chances of failing theventure path.
You mean yeah, like?
Do you think that by going witha more?
Job van der Voort (07:17):
It just depends on how you define the.
I think if you can sustainyourself, arguably, you're a
successful entrepreneur,absolutely.
And so, in a venture business,what is a successful venture
business?
Is it one that exits?
Because many companies exit ina way that's not really
profitable for the founders,right, and so very, very few of
(07:39):
them actually have large exits.
Is that success?
Is it success reading aparticular milestone?
I don't know.
I think to me, success is am Idoing the activity that I want
to be doing, like, am I tryingto?
You know, for me, this is notabout making a shitload of money
.
It's about doing something thatI find fun, right and find
challenging, and like I like tobe ambitious and have a change
(07:59):
in the world, and so, in thatsense, we've already been
successful.
So, raising venture money, I dothink that the bar for success
is insanely high.
Right, you end up comparingyourself to well-known named
companies, but those are one ina million, and so, yeah, I guess
(08:23):
I would agree with that.
If you define success as, like,monetary success, I do think
it's much easier to make lessmoney, and if you don't have any
external investors, then it cango to your own bank account, so
to say and the moment you raiseany kind of capital, that's no
longer on the table.
Now you have to find other waysto make yourself rich, if that
is your goal.
Ariel Camus (08:40):
And it's amazing how both things can be true.
Right, the fact that it'sharder to be successful
monetarily speaking is true, butso is the importance of
defining your own success,precisely because the odds are
against you on the other side.
So if you are conditioning yourdefinition of success to that
monetary success, you're mostlikely going to be unsuccessful.
And who wants that?
(09:01):
So I'm also of the belief thatyou have to choose something
that you're going to be enjoyingand proud of doing every day.
So it's the the journey, notthe destination.
Job van der Voort (09:10):
Otherwise you're like setting yourself up
for for failure yeah, you'regoing to be incredibly depressed
, right, because you're going tostruggle to do something and,
at the end of the day, even ifyou make a whole lot of money,
then you'll feel empty.
I spent 10 years doingsomething I didn't like now, now
I have some money, but what doI do with all the time?
Ariel Camus (09:26):
It happens with anything that we say my goal to
be successful or to be happy isto achieve X.
Everything I say, if X has tohappen, then it's a recipe for
finding or continuing to be sad.
But in this case, you ended upmaking a decision of like okay,
we'll go with this venture path.
Why?
Why did you end up deciding notto go with the lifestyle
(09:50):
bootstrapped model?
Job van der Voort (09:52):
Because we had worked Marcelo and I, my
co-founder we had worked atventure-backed companies for
years but never ran oneourselves.
So we had a good understandingof what those businesses looked
like and we know a lot about theups and downs.
We were very ambitious and weknew that this potentially big
idea would not be feasible if wewere to do it in a bootstrap
(10:13):
manner.
And it turned out.
You know, then the pandemichappened.
Really, the stars aligned evenmore than they ever did before.
But it was like, well, we areyoung, I mean, we both had small
kids, but nonetheless we sortof were in a right place still
to do it, and we felt like wehad the skills, we had somewhat
of the network necessary toactually do something big.
But above all, yeah, it feltlike, well, it's now or never
(10:37):
kind of deal, right, like if you, I don't know.
Ariel Camus (10:40):
I guess it's like inherent ambition that we had to
do something big, and so that'swhy the now or never was more
because of the timing of thepandemic or because of where you
were in life?
Job van der Voort (10:51):
No, this was way before the pandemic.
No, it was more about the timewhere we were in life Like we
had a, really we were able toget the domain right.
So we had a really strongdomain, we had a really good
idea and we had investorinterest or we were able to, you
know, drum up some investorinterest.
And so, you know, there's thismoment where, if you feel like
(11:12):
all the things come togetherreally nicely, that you can
choose not to capitalize on it.
But for us it was like no, thisis clearly something and you
know you, I guess, many peoplethat are in a world of startups
often you look up to thesestartups being really successful
.
I kind of feel like, well, ifthat is something you want, why
not try it?
And so we did.
Ariel Camus (11:34):
Absolutely.
It makes total sense.
And then the stars probablykept getting aligned in some
ways and I want to hear aboutthat.
I want to double-click intosomething that probably is not
the you know fancy, flashy stuffthat is happening remote today,
but I think it's a probablyoften neglected side that is
really important.
(11:55):
You said that the first thingyou were doing with the job
board website that you hadacquired as part of the domain,
you tried to give it a.
You know, you give it a chance,but it wasn't really working.
What did it mean back then thatit wasn't working?
How did you make the decision?
This is not good enough.
Job van der Voort (12:13):
It was not so much that we didn't think it
was good enough, it was morethat we decided we had a better
idea and we wanted to startworking on that.
Because as a small business, itwas working fine.
It was making quite a bit ofmoney.
And because as a as a smallbusiness it was working fine, it
was making quite a bit of money, and how?
Just through blood, sweat andtears.
But the product itself didn'thave any particular moat, Right,
Other than you know.
(12:33):
There were a few small things,but like a strong domain, and it
looked nice and it worked.
It worked reasonably well.
We had some specific decisionsthat we took, but ultimately we
were selling a slightlydifferent thing of a
commoditized product right, Inthis case, job ads and so you
can make perfect money with thatand you can make some people
(12:55):
very happy with that.
It just it was not a thing wewanted to build right, Like it
was not necessarily like thenthere was no particular reason
that it would be very successfuland so.
But the most important factorin all of this is that we didn't
decide this doesn't work.
No, we decided no, there'ssomething else we want to do,
and I think that is more how wetook that decision at the time
(13:17):
than anything else.
Ariel Camus (13:19):
It sounds like, if I understand correctly, there
were at least three elements ofplaying different weights.
There was your passion for theproblem you were trying to solve
.
There was the absence of a mode, of a sustainable competitive
advantage that could actuallymake this a viable business for
a long period of time, and thenthere was the opportunity cost
(13:41):
of working on that instead ofworking on something that seemed
to be a much better idea.
Job van der Voort (13:47):
Yeah, I think so, I think so.
I mean, if you were, you knowagain, I really believe that the
last one is the most importantone, like nothing else you know
it's we decided it is also not avery intellectually interesting
challenge, right to just createa job board, no matter how you
cut or slice it like, it's justnot a super interesting
intellectual challenge.
And building an employer recordsure was, because we were
(14:11):
facing unknown unknowns andthat's very scary but also fun.
Ariel Camus (14:18):
That's a part like as an operational efficiency
nerd myself too.
Really, really I can't wait toget to that part.
Uh, but let me let me ask onething before um, in which way
did the pandemic play a role onthe success of remote in the
(14:39):
early days?
Of course, maybe I know howthings have changed very
recently, but in the early days,what would remote look like if
the pandemic hadn't happened?
I think maybe that's one way toput it.
Job van der Voort (14:50):
Well, smaller I think that's the main way.
Smaller, we would have raisedless money and grew a lot
smaller.
We didn't have a product beforethe pandemic, so we only
launched right after thepandemic and, yeah, the whole
world started working remotely,and only as a second order
effect did people start hiringinternationally, which is
ultimately what our productallowed and allows you to do.
(15:13):
Right Is to hire people inother countries, and so that
trend of hiring moreinternationally, that was going
to happen.
It's just that we took a suddenleap 10 years into the future.
Actually, I think we went like20 years in the future and then
we went 10 years back, you know,in the years that followed the
pandemic, something like that.
That's the main thing.
I think we would have grownobviously much slower if that it
(15:35):
hasn't happened.
That wouldn't have happened, um, we would have been able to not
raise as much money, right, wewouldn't have as much organic
interest.
You know we had a strong domainand everything that comes with
that.
But eventually, like, theproblem we are solving is a real
problem, and we see this now.
Now we're in, like thepost-pandemic years.
It's like, well, it's a realproblem that really needs to be
(15:57):
solved.
And now we're also solving awhole bunch of other problems,
so there is luckily more to behave done.
It just has accelerated theirtimelines quite significantly.
Ariel Camus (16:06):
So probably it increased both the amount of
capital available to solve theproblem, which I think you're
able to capture it's like 500million.
Job van der Voort (16:15):
That's a lot in two years.
Ariel Camus (16:16):
That's a lot, and also a much larger number of
companies having experiencingthe problem or seeing the
opportunity and finding theproblem on the way of that
opportunity.
So I can clearly see that, butalso by the way, I don't know if
you know this um, sid, uh, thefounder of gitlab, also played a
huge role on me as aprofessional and uh on the
(16:40):
company and also as a person.
I think you know the value oftransparency.
For example, I remember my Imet sid in 2012, right after
selling my previous company whengitlab.
You were already there,probably as one of the very
early team members, um, and butI remember gitlab solving I
don't know 100 people, somethinglike that 2013 I think, and but
(17:02):
2013, gitlab had five employees, so okay, five or four wow,
okay, so, so it was that thattiny.
Today it's thousands too.
And but I remember, um, alittle bit after meeting sid, uh
, finding out the concept of,like the handbook of gitlab and
starting to read all theprinciples and the
thoughtfulness behind theapproach, connected to the fact
(17:26):
that I had spent the last twoyears working remotely myself
without really knowing that thatwas remote work.
It's like this makes a lot ofsense, right, and I had just, uh
, spent some time teaching inburundi, in east africa.
I had also just sold a companyin silicon valley for millions,
and also being an immigrantcoming from South America, and I
(17:49):
started putting all the dotstogether of the opportunities,
the talent being kind of evenlydistributed.
What a huge missed opportunitythis was for the companies, for
the talent, of course, and I'mlike this is going to happen,
right, it's a matter of time.
But then the way that that's it, and the guilt lab culture,
like you know, came together, uh, and around values like
(18:11):
transparency.
For transparency, for example,it made so much sense in the
context of building a remotecompany creating a lot of
autonomy.
Without that transparency, it'shard to build the trust to have
the autonomy but, at the sametime, made so much sense to me
as an individual, like to theextent that, you know, I preach
transparency to everyone as theway to have fewer dramas in life
that just share things as theyare, share your feelings as they
(18:34):
come, you know, share the truth, like, and you don't ever have
to be, you know, second, outingyourself like did I say that or
that?
Like everything is so mucheasier, uh, so I'm I'm glad we
both had that, that that shared,um, I guess uh, influence in in
our lives and and yeah, andalso that we have both
experienced the problem and thepotential of, of what's
(18:55):
happening here now I want to getto the, the operational issue.
How did you get started withputting together the product?
How did you know, by the way,what version, which features of
the product were worth building,and how did you go about
(19:16):
actually putting that together?
Job van der Voort (19:18):
Yeah, I never thought of it like that.
What I did is the moment westarted the company.
I started talking withprospective customers from day
one and I would talk all thetime.
I would just email people atremote companies or companies
that would hire internationallyand I asked them we're building
this thing, you want to chat,you want to talk about it?
And I would talk with thesecompanies and I would do that
(19:40):
every week of the company sincethe very beginning.
Since before we knew what wewere going to build.
Once we decided, well, this isthe problem we want to address,
because I had the experience atGitLab of like we knew an
employer of record was like areally shitty product and they
clearly needed innovation inthat, and it was, you know,
further corroborated by speakingto all of these prospective
(20:00):
customers.
It wasn't so much about like,do we build what features?
It was more about are we ableto solve the problem?
Right, then I I really likethat approach and I I actually
think that's a really good wayof building products, especially
in the early days, which isthat, well, you got to solve a
problem, you know, and so itshould.
It should not be, um, whichfeatures?
(20:22):
Which things I'm going to do,because it sounds a lot like
seeking for problems right, butwith us the problem is really
really clear.
You have somebody in anothercountry, you want to hire them.
How do you solve the problem?
How do you do it effectivelyand how do you do it in a way
that is better than what camebefore it?
And so what I did is I spoke toall of these companies and,
like, tried to sense of like,beyond the core problem, what
(20:44):
are other things that theystruggle with, what are
problematic parts of it?
And I had some hunches, andover time you start to learn
more and more.
You know as you speak withpeople that, oh, it's a very
opaque process, it's very slow,it's very expensive.
And so then, instead ofthinking about, well, what
features should I build, wethought about, well, how can we
(21:04):
approach this in a way thatsolves fundamentally those
issues?
And so we formed strongopinions about it.
In our case, we felt like well,a lot of the problems that one
encounters when trying to hiresomebody through an employer
record come from the fact thatthere's loosely coupled third
parties.
So there's a company and theysay we can help you hire anybody
anywhere, but then they go tosome local players, not
(21:26):
incentivized to do the rightthing.
And all of that is all verymanual work.
And so we realized, well, if wecut out the middleman, so to
say, and just do everythingourselves, we can at least
streamline things.
And if we do that, then we canalso address the pricing issue.
So, actually, when we launchedremote, we priced it in a
similar way to the rest of themarkets at the time, which was a
(21:46):
percentage of total cost ofemployment, and it made the
business model incrediblyprofitable.
But the pricing was verynon-transparent, so it was very
hard to understand.
First you had to understandwhat is total cost of employment
, and then, oh, we're charging afee over a percentage of that,
which also disincentivizesemployers from giving people a
raise.
And so, rather than thinkingabout, well, which features, one
(22:07):
of the first changes we madewas we changed the pricing model
.
So we just say, oh, we're justgoing to be a flat fee and
there's upsides and downsides toit.
But we put it low enough sothat if you come from any of the
existing players in that space,it was significantly cheaper.
And so it was not at all aboutwhich features it was.
Can we do the work?
And then why would they workwith us being a new company
(22:30):
versus other companies that havebeen long established and
essentially offering the samething right or, in a lot of ways
, offering a lot more.
And so, and because I've beentalking to companies since the
very, very beginning, there werea lot of companies who I knew
might have been interested insome way.
You know, I've spoken with 100plus companies and I mean one
(22:51):
has to be the first, and one wasthe first.
I don't even remember whichcompany, because it went pretty
fast after that, because we andin our case, employer record you
have to launch country bycountry.
So there were only a smallnumber of countries that were
available and we chose those.
Basically, on what is easiest,what can we launch first.
We knew that to offer thisservice really effectively,
(23:14):
after having spoken with allthese companies, you want to be
in as many countries as possible.
It's impossible to do all atonce to boil the ocean.
So we just said well, we'regoing to take the path of least
resistance, work on a wholebunch at the same time.
And whichever said well, we'regoing to take the path of least
resistance, work on a wholebunch at the same time,
whichever available first, we'regoing to offer.
And so we launched, we hadavailability for two or three,
four countries.
And then, you know, we keptworking and opening them because
we were convinced that that wasthe right approach.
(23:36):
And 1.1 company said no, we're,we're interested in trying you
all out.
And so the first version ofproduct was essentially
spreadsheets.
It was like pretty front end.
But in the back version ofproduct was essentially
spreadsheets.
It was like a pretty front end,but in the back end it was
literally all spreadsheets.
But there was the agreementbetween us and our customers hey
, you're the first customer.
It's going to go.
(23:56):
It's going to be bumpy ride forall of us, but we're going to
work really, really hard.
You know already that we dothings in a different way and
we're going to continuouslyimprove.
And some of those customerswere exceptionally happy because
they had to pay much less andthey generally had a better
experience.
And some of them were not veryhappy because it was a bumpy
process and maybe they didn'twant that.
But that's sort of how we gotstarted and honestly, I think we
(24:20):
never really wondered whichfeatures do we have to build,
because it was all about are wesolving this very fundamental
issue?
Ariel Camus (24:29):
I think that is one-on-one of entrepreneurship
right and product in general.
It's like focus on the problem,not on the solution and also
tapping into something that youalready had experience with from
your experience at GuildLab.
Like you were not necessarilythe biggest expert or
representative of every singlecompany in the world with the
(24:49):
problem, but you already knewmore or less a problem.
And then talking to yourcustomers like that's the, I
think, uh, another one-on-one uhpiece, uh here, how, how did
you get um to 100 potentialcustomers there?
Where do those relationshipscome from?
What are some tricks, resources?
(25:09):
When I say trick, I mean hacksor simple things at work, and I
would suspect that probably youalready had some decent
connections.
You've mentioned that before.
What would you do if you didn'thave those connections?
How do you get to talk to a lotof customers even if you're
just very new in the industry?
Job van der Voort (25:27):
Yeah, just email people.
You send emails and LinkedInmessages to people.
That's it.
There's no secret to it.
I mean, if you sell a product,you just have to sell it and you
cannot be.
I think a lot of people,especially people that are
builders right, that are veryhappy like myself, that are very
happy like myself, that arevery happy to just build stuff
there's sort of this expectationEverybody knows it's not true,
(25:51):
but still there's thisexpectation that if you build it
, they will come, and it's nottrue.
And so if you want to sellthings, you have to tell people
about the thing that you areselling, and then you have to
assume that you're going to beincredibly unsuccessful with the
majority of those people.
If you accept that and justkeep talking to people, it will
get a lot easier.
And so I actually don't thinkthat we got our first 100
(26:13):
customers through anyconnections or network that we
had.
Sure, we knew some investorsand whatever else, but that
didn't really bring a lot ofbusiness.
What brought business wastalking to companies.
And how do you talk tocompanies is by approaching them
, by talking about what are youbuilding?
Like I said, I spent.
It took us almost 18 months tolaunch the first version of the
product.
In a time.
(26:34):
I spoke to so many companiesthat I think a lot of them over
time became customers.
Some took much longer thanothers, but like and I just kept
doing that you just talk tocustomers, you just reach out to
them, you say this is what weare building, this is what we're
doing, and I or hey, I knowthat you're working at this, or
are you hiring peopleinternationally?
Do you want to talk about it?
Then things work out.
That really is all there is toit.
(26:56):
I, I don't.
I don't think there's anyactual hacks you can do.
Yeah, sure, there's ways toapproach a lot of people really
quickly, and they havemeaningfully changed since since
then to to now.
But, um, above all, I think thebest thing you can do is just
solve a real problem, talk aboutit publicly, which we did a lot
(27:16):
on linkedin, on twitter, onwhatever else.
Talk and approach people thatyou think might be interesting
and be ready to be rejected alot.
I never, and I think nobody atour company, especially in the
early days, was bothered byrejection ever, because we were
like oh, we're just buildingthis thing, let's just keep,
we're just going to keep goinglike if it's not good enough,
(27:36):
we'll work until it is so, and Ithink that that approach helps
um helps a lot, and just don'tgive up and don't run out of
money.
That helps as well.
And in our case, you know thehacks we used were the hacks
that venture-backed companiesuse.
So you know we raised a lot ofmoney.
If you raise a lot of money,that's a great way to get PR
right, and if you get PR, that'spotentially a great source of
(28:00):
recognition that helps companiesfind you, and so obviously we
use that.
Ariel Camus (28:04):
Makes subtle sense and I think maybe an interesting
insight that I've heard beforethat I think applies here and it
can be a way to deal with therejections is you need to have
at least one of these twocomponents for things to go well
.
Either you have a market thatis desperate for your solution
right which definitely it's areally good check to have, yeah
(28:26):
or you have an immense amount ofconviction and passion for the
problem you're solving right.
If you have neither of those two, it's going to be really hard,
and I think it helps torecognize that, probably
especially at the beginning.
Even if you're tackling theright problem, even if you have
really good ideas for how tosolve it, you might still not
(28:47):
know how to talk to yourcustomers.
It's like language market fitthing, which means you will
still be rejected and that's theonly option you have left.
There is to have a lot ofpassion and conviction.
It sounds like you and the teamhad, you know, the absolute
conviction that the problem wasreal and that it was worth
solving it, that you could solveit, and it was a matter of time
in finding the customers withthe right product that you
(29:09):
needed to be able to solve theirproblems.
Job van der Voort (29:10):
Yeah, I think if you are building a company,
especially if you'reventure-backed and you're not
profitable, you're constantlylooking into the abyss.
Right, your company is going todie.
And so I don't think it'sreally an option to like not go
really really hard at thatproblem.
And I don't mean to make longhours, I mean it's just you
really have to work hard, tokeep going until you're done,
(29:34):
until it works, and then learnfrom that.
But it's hard for me to relatebecause I never felt like
rejection is like a big deal Tome.
It's just like well, that's achallenge to do a little bit
better.
It's a big deal To me, it'sjust like well, that's a
challenge to do a little bitbetter.
It's a learning opportunity.
As much as somebody gives youfeedback about something you can
do better, that's a gift.
And the same is rejection, likeI always you know, even today,
the other day a company theydidn't that I knew and they knew
(29:59):
me and they decided to workwith another, with a competitor
or something, and so I emailedthem.
I'm not there to bedisappointed.
I genuinely want to understandwhy is it that people would not
want to work with me so that Ican adjust and be better and
(30:19):
that should be your onlyattitude.
And if you do that really hardand given that your market is
big enough, right, and you'resolving a real problem, then
you'll get there eventually.
Right, you'll get there.
Eventually.
You'll find that there's acommon denominator across all
your rejections.
You're going to solve that oneand then maybe one of these
companies is going to move overto you.
Ultimately, that is all thereis, all there is to it.
(30:40):
It's a really difficult thing,but I think it's incredibly
important.
Ariel Camus (30:43):
Focus on the problem and I think there are
two approaches there and it'sclear which one you took.
You can just try a, can justtry reaching out to a lot of
people with slightly differentmessages until one message
starts connecting.
Or you can accelerate thatprobably a hundredfold by asking
them why did that message not?
(31:05):
Why did that not solve?
Why doesn't it solve yourproblem right?
Until you get enough feedbackthat really tells you what to
change in the message, what tochange in the product so that it
actually resonates with people.
But I think sometimes thehardest part and it's not easy
to solve it's how do you get toconvince them to tell you that
(31:27):
why not right, exactly what youwere saying with this customer.
And I was thinking about thisthis week because we're working
on a new product to helpsoftware engineers with their
English for their careers, andwe had to change the entire flow
, the signup flow of the process, to force those conversations
(31:48):
to happen exactly at the momentof rejection.
So before, let's say, you could, like you know, do a self-serve
sign up thing and eventuallyyou get to try the product, the
pricing, say no, not.
For me it was really hard toget people to tell you at that
point why they were deciding notto buy.
So instead, what we did, we didthe other thing, which is do
things that don't scale.
We flipped and it was okay.
We're going to do sales calls,where you think you are getting
(32:12):
a word into the product, butwhat we're truly doing is
observing you and reallyunderstanding.
First, you know what'sconfusing, what's not there that
you're expecting, and then, asyou get to the pricing page, you
know what is your reaction andthen I can ask you face to face
hey, um, why yes, why not?
And what worked here, by theway, was because in this case,
the audience and softwaredevelopers were saying hey, do
(32:34):
you know how much it sucks to goto a job interview and the
employer rejecting you and youasking for feedback and not
getting it?
Don't do that to me.
Especially if it's negativefeedback, I want to hear it.
You know how hard it is to getit.
Don't do that to me.
And that has worked really well.
But I think it's important torecognize the importance of
(32:55):
doing things that don't scalehere.
You mentioned before thatnowadays there are tons of tools
to automate, to scale theoutreach process, and with AI
it's just getting mind-blowing.
I haven't seen this workingwell enough in the very, very,
very early stages In a way thatgives you this quality, like
really quality, qualitative.
You know, uh, conversations, itgives you more of the, the
(33:18):
quantity.
You agree with that, or whatwill you do in the end of this?
Will you look for a scale oryou look like you know extreme
personalization and you knowcustomized outreach to get those
conversations?
Job van der Voort (33:29):
no, I mean until today, I just wrote
everything myself.
I mean, I think if you're, ifyou're looking for any kind of
feedback, or even if you're justreaching out to people, for
whatever reason, you can getaway forever by just doing it
instead of necessarily using aparticular tool, if that answers
your question.
Like I, even today, I regularlyreach out directly, especially
(33:53):
if somebody so, for example, inremote, we have this product.
Like you, can rate theexperience at different parts
and, depending on your user anda lot of users, they don't write
any feedback.
So I just reach out directlymyself.
Like hey you left some negativefeedback.
Could you might elaborate?
Do you want to call about it?
Um, it's a whole motion.
Both me, my co-founder or ceo,we all all, all the times, jump
(34:15):
on calls with customers on tounderstand like, well, if, how
can we make the experiencebetter, or if you are unhappy,
how can we make you happy, etc.
I don't know.
I I've nothing really replacesjust talking to people.
Like that, it's, it's reallystraightforward.
There should never be a pointand I often hear you people say
like, oh, when a company getsreally big, I'm only delegating
things and I'm only managingpeople, and to me especially,
(34:37):
it's like a leader and to methat's um, that should never
happen.
Like you should always be busywith the actual product, the
problem and the people using theproduct, and by by just talking
to them.
You should always be talking topeople.
It it sounds so simple, but itmakes all the difference.
You have to deeply understandpeople.
(34:58):
You cannot deeply understandpeople just by their one
sentence reply to some form thatyou sent them.
That's also useful and youshould also do those things, but
you should continue to talk topeople.
Ariel Camus (35:10):
That makes sense but you should continue to talk
to people.
That makes sense and it's easyto fall in the trap of scaling
the team, delegating anddelegating also the talking to
the customer right, but then howcan you really guide the
direction of the company if youdon't deeply understand the
audience and the problem?
Job van der Voort (35:26):
Yeah, but there are great tools for that,
for what it's worth, right?
So you know, we have a verylarge sales team, as you can
imagine.
So we record sales calls, asyou can imagine.
So we record sales calls andthen you can look those back, so
sometimes you don't have tohave those calls, but you still
got to watch those recordings,right?
You still have to see what acustomer says, and you have to
make a point out of teachingpeople to actually ask for
feedback, which is also a skillthat you have to acquire, right?
(35:48):
It's very easy to just acceptthe rejection without digging
deep into why what is the reasonfor the rejection?
And so I mean there's a milliondifferent tools that make all
of even this part easier andbetter.
We use Dovetail, for example,for feedback, where we have
recordings of interviews withcustomers and prospective
(36:09):
customers on different thingsthat they like and dislike and
how they think about it, andthat can be really useful to dig
into it.
But in early days, I don't thinkyou should make things that
complicated.
You should be talking a lot topeople.
Your focus should be gaining anunderstanding of your customers
and prospective customers andthen trying to solve their
(36:30):
problems and then see how youwould do.
I think you know.
For us, as I told in thebeginning, a big learning was
that the problem was not in anypiece of software.
The problem was in that theydidn't feel like they could
reach out to somebody.
They felt like it was veryexpensive the services, and so
that's what we addressed.
(36:50):
And I still wanted to buildbeautiful software, but when I
started the company I figuredthat was all I would be doing.
In the end it turned out to bewell, that's actually not even
the second concern of ourcustomers.
It's like somewhere down theline oh yeah, the software
should be nice to use.
No, it's.
Primarily, does it solve theproblem that I have?
Is it affordable?
Is it easy to understand?
(37:11):
Do I feel alone or do I feelsupported?
You know if you can solve all,for us, solving those things
were much more important thananything else Makes total sense.
Ariel Camus (37:32):
And you did all of this from the very early
building of the first person, ofthe product, in just you know a
few countries, all the way towhere you're today, surrounded
by a lot of competition, withalso very, very deep pockets.
In which way did thecompetition like influence?
Um, what you had to do, whatyou had to prioritize, didn't
really change anything at all,both positive and negatively.
Job van der Voort (37:55):
I mean ultimately.
I think competition is positivebecause it forces you to do
better, it forces you to focuson what is actually delivering
value and what isn't.
And you have to learn to be verygood at not copying products,
because it's very easy to fallinto the trap of trying to copy
what others are doing, and Ithink that's a very dangerous
trap to fall into, becausethere's always going to be
(38:17):
somebody bigger raising moremoney than you, and so if you're
going to follow, you're goingto lose, right, and so you have
to be really, really strict onthat.
I think the most interestingthings are very specific.
You know, pricing dynamics arepretty interesting because
obviously there's going to be alot more pricing pressure on the
industry as a whole in whichyou are in, but nobody wants to
(38:38):
give away the product for free.
They have to build asustainable business.
So that certainly is a veryinteresting angle, and beyond
that it's it's mostly just goodlike it creates more awareness,
right.
If if you have a competitorwho's suddenly very successful
or raises a round, it will alsohave a positive impact on
traffic to you and peoplelooking at you, because even if
you're much smaller, they willlook for Google alternatives,
(39:02):
and so with that, it probablyhelps the industry as a whole
and grow your market as a whole,given that you're solving a
real problem.
Ariel Camus (39:10):
Absolutely, and especially if you're a
venture-backed company and thereare many investors that won't
be able to get into the roundsof the other competitor that
will want to get in the roundsof other players, and those are
really good opportunities forany company, especially if it's
a very competitive market.
Everyone's trying to get aslice of the opportunity.
(39:32):
Everyone's trying to get aslice of the opportunity.
How do you approachdifferentiating yourself from
the competition, especially whenthere's a lot of capital, a lot
of velocity?
What was your hypothesis, andwhy, behind how we're going to
compete?
Job van der Voort (39:49):
We never worried about differentiating.
We worried about solving thereal problem and then being able
to show that to customers.
How we think about solving thisproblem, what do we think is
important, what don't we thinkis important that's the most
important thing.
If you do that, then you don'thave to do this feature
checklist thing, which is verydangerous, because if you fall
(40:10):
in the trap of, like, doingfeature checklist, it's just
whoever does more checklistsright, and of course in the end
in many sales conversations youare going to fall into that.
So to some degree you know youdon't have a choice in that
matter.
But above all, you should beable to really worry about the
problem that you're solving, notfocus too much on your
(40:30):
competition, because the momentyou start focusing on
competition, you're focusing.
You know, maybe something willhappen to the market and, like
everybody will walk past you,and that has happened many times
in the history of companiesright, that competitors are so
focused on competing with eachother that they missed, you know
, the the forest for the treesand and, and you don't want that
to happen.
So, again, focusing veryclearly on what do you think is
(40:53):
important, how do you solve theproblem and why are you good at
solving the problem, then it'smuch less about how others are
doing it.
It's more or less about what webelieve is important, and that
in and of itself is enough.
Ariel Camus (41:06):
Makes sense too.
Like, yeah, just focusing onthe problem and not in terms of
the competition.
Like, probably you are yourbiggest threat by losing focus
on the right things.
Job van der Voort (41:17):
Yeah, for sure.
I mean like the biggest threatis like you breaking up with
your co-founder or you runningout of money, and like that's
mostly up to you.
Ariel Camus (41:25):
How is that?
Since you mentioned the peopleelement, how is the process of,
like choosing who to build thiswith and I'm talking both about
you know, Marcelo, yourco-founder, but also the early
team?
How do you make that decisionof what kind of team do you need
?
And I will suspect you'll saywhat do I need to solve this
problem, which makes a lot ofsense, but I'll let you provide
(41:46):
your answer.
Job van der Voort (41:48):
Yeah, so with Marcelo, we were best friends.
We were always planning tobuild a company together.
We tried before several times,and this was just the one time
it worked, and so that was areally obvious choice.
We had already long agocommitted to doing this together
.
Then the first people you wantto hire are just indeed the
people you need to solve theproblem.
But I think in particular, whenyou're building a company, you
(42:10):
want to have builders on boardright, and so our first eight
hires were just people buildingthe product in some way shape or
form.
In our case it was a mix ofengineers, operational people,
but, above all, people that justget shit done, independent of
what their title was before,independent of what they cared
about before.
We just wanted people thatcould do whatever work we needed
(42:31):
them to do and would be willingto do that, would be excited to
do that.
That's the kind of people wehired.
And also you know people thatare willing to join a startup,
which is like super risky and isvery likely to fail.
So and then you know a good wayto do that is to hire people
that you've worked with before,or that people that you know
very well have worked withbefore, so that they have really
good references.
I think that that certainlymade a huge difference to us.
Ariel Camus (43:01):
What do you do if you are like a new entrepreneur,
maybe don't have as muchexperience working with people
before, and you want to find thepeople that get shit done?
How do I identify those people?
Job van der Voort (43:08):
You know it's an attitude thing, right, and
so you learn about it in severalways One by working with people
, right, ultimately, that's theway to do it.
And so you have to get reallycomfortable anyway when you're a
founder and entrepreneur reallycomfortable firing people,
because if it's not working out,you have to deal with it
immediately.
We were really lucky and we hadto fire very few people in
early days, but nonetheless,like you have to get extremely
(43:31):
comfortable just saying topeople sorry, this is not
working out Because we needcertain skills or whatever, and
you just don't have that.
I think that is one of the mostimportant things.
But on the other hand, yeah,it's an attitude thing.
You figure it out by talking topeople and explaining to them
hey, I need you to just buildthe product.
All the direction you're goingto get is make the product and
(43:55):
now we're going to figure it out.
We're going to do this together.
And if somebody is not excitedabout that, if somebody wants
very specific specificationsearly on or only wants to do a
certain kind of work, you knowit's not going to work out, but
I don't really want to make a.
I wouldn't make blanketstatements about where those
people come from, because youknow I have a background in
neuroscience changements aboutwhere those people come from,
because you know I have abackground in neuroscience.
Um, you know, one of our ourfirst designers had barely ever
(44:16):
worked in a company, only workedindependently.
Another one of our designers,um, she was educated to be, uh,
drawing like technical drawingsof, like insects and such.
So you know, it's all over theplace.
Uh, our our first salespersonwas also our first support
person and she had come from avery different place.
So, yeah, it's I.
Ariel Camus (44:37):
I think it's, above all, just an attitude kind of
thing yeah, it's about thecapacity and the willingness to
do it, not so much the, theprevious experience with it.
Right, sure, yeah, all right,how?
How have things changed?
Uh, after the and I think weare now getting into the after
product market territory forsure, but I'm just curious to
(44:59):
see where it's, like, you know,remote going now.
Job van der Voort (45:02):
So we went from doing only employer records
to now providing all servicesand HR team names.
So we provide payroll foreverywhere, but also all the
other.
First, you can find peoplethrough us, you can hire them
directly, you can onboard themdirectly, you can onboard them,
you can manage them etc.
And everything.
Anything else really, you needum as an, as an hr team you can
do instead of remote, and we doit particularly well for
(45:22):
international teams.
I think as a market as a whole,it's been very interesting.
Right, because we went frompandemic, which really
accelerated us as a company, butwe also went from this like
zero interest rate time to avery different environment where
interest rates are reallyreally high and venture money is
much less available.
So there's a lot of companiesstruggling and we also benefited
(45:46):
a lot from startups growingfast and getting funded really,
really fast, and it's much lessthe case today.
Luckily, we did well and we'restill growing well and faster
than before, but certainly themarket is very different.
Ariel Camus (46:01):
Makes sense.
If you had a way to tell yourfive-year younger version of
yourself give some piece ofadvice for this journey of the
last five years, what would itbe?
Job van der Voort (46:16):
uh, I don't know, I think we did pretty well
and I'm not a person to beharsh on myself, so I, I don't
think, uh, I don't think I wouldhave much to say other than
good luck, but uh, it would bevery specific things.
I think.
You know, I I hear other peoplesay this as well but if you've,
you have a strong intuitionabout something as a founder,
(46:36):
you should probably trust thatand not lean too much on other
people's opinions.
I think that's the mostimportant one.
Ariel Camus (46:42):
Well, it goes well with this other saying that if
everyone thinks it's a good idea, it's really not a good idea,
right?
Those ideas are.
Usually they don't haveconsensus in the market.
So, yeah, you need to find thepeople telling you that's not a
good idea to know that it's agood idea.
Job van der Voort (46:58):
Maybe yeah.
Ariel Camus (46:59):
Well, yeah, it's definitely a really good idea to
invite you to the podcast.
Thank you so much for your time.
Again, I know you're super busy.
It's been super insightful.
It's a roller coaster of astory and I look forward to
seeing what happens next withyou on remote.
Thanks for having me, thank you.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
(47:21):
Your support means the world tome.
If you enjoyed today's episode,please consider subscribing and
leaving a review.
It's one of the best ways youcan help this podcast get off
the ground and help moreentrepreneurs like you.
Thank you, get off the groundand help more entrepreneurs like
you.
Thank you and until the nextepisode.
To me, success is am I doing the
activity that I want to be doing?
For me, this is not aboutmaking a shitload of money.
It's about doing something thatI find fun, right and find
challenging, and I like to beambitious and have a change in
the world, and so, in that sense, we've already been successful.
So, raising venture money, I dothink that the bar for success
is insanely high.
(00:20):
Right, you end up comparingyourself to well-known named
companies, but those are one ina million, and so if you define
success as, like, monetarysuccess, I do think it's much
easier to make less money.
Ariel Camus (00:45):
Welcome everyone.
This is Ariel Camus, and thisis the Only Thing that Matters
the podcast where I interviewsuccessful founders to
deconstruct their path toproduct market fit and extract
the principles and frameworksbehind their success.
My guest today is Job Van der V.
He's the CEO and co-founder ofRemote, a company that helps
(01:06):
businesses of all sizes pay andmanage full-time and contract
workers around the world.
Remote handles internationalpayroll benefits, taxes, stock
options and compliance in dozensof countries, making it easier
for companies to hire globally.
Making it easier for companiesto hire globally.
Since its founding in 2019,remote has raised over $500
(01:28):
million, reached an evaluationof $3 billion and has over a
thousand employees servingcustomers in 67 countries.
Before Remote, ob was the VP ofProduct at GitLab, where he
helped grow the team from 5 to450 people, gaining invaluable
experience in building aremote-first company.
(01:48):
Join us as we explore theintricacies of launching and
scaling a very complex businessin a highly competitive market
With all of you.
Job van der V hey, job, thankyou so much for being here.
Really appreciate you beinghere.
You, I know you're quite busy.
Thanks, thanks for having me.
(02:08):
Well, I was checking on myinbox earlier today.
When did we meet and it was on2019, I think, august.
Uh, we were introduced by nico,who he participated in your
seed round too.
Job van der Voort (02:26):
He participated in our seed round
with General Catalyst and everyround after.
So yeah, good investor.
Ariel Camus (02:34):
I remember having that doubt of like you know, is
it a good idea to get aninstitutional investor in your
seed rounds and you know, ifthey don't follow on that's the
downside, but that they canfollow on in every single round
after that?
it's uh, it's, it's an amazinguh thing, and and he's awesome,
I'm so glad that that you knowwe were introduced to each other
by him and, yeah, the the thingis when, when we're introduced,
(02:57):
I remember him mentioning, yeah, like job is like working on a
way to like help people likefind remote jobs, and I'm like
that looks very different towhat you're doing today.
Maybe that can be a good way tostart the conversation.
Where did the initial idea comefrom and what was that idea?
And then how did that evolve towhat remote is today?
Job van der Voort (03:19):
Yeah, the funny thing is that we're back
at it.
So today we again helpcompanies find people.
Yeah, the funny thing is thatwe're back at it.
So today we again helpcompanies find people.
But indeed, so I joined GitLabbefore I started remote, very
early on, just getting startedas a company, and there we built
a fully remote company and wefound that that works incredibly
well.
It works so incredibly well,and I think the two things that
it did really well was one itsolved all these problems that
(03:44):
companies typically strugglewith, which is scaling and
expanding quickly.
That suddenly became reallyreally easy, and finding great
people became really easy as aremote company.
And, inversely, we found thatthe people that we hired were
incredibly happy, and so to me,it showed that the way we were
building GitLab as a company,that's how companies will work
in the future, and, given that,I should do something to help
(04:09):
that, because we encountered allthese problems at GitLab
building that company, and so Ialways wanted to start my own
company.
Always, when I joined GitLab, Itold Sid, the CEO and founder.
I told him I'm going to stayfor a year and then I'm going to
found my own company.
I ended up staying five,because the company grew really
fast and I was having a goodtime, but still I always want to
start my own company, and sowhen I finally had the
(04:30):
opportunity to do somethingmyself, I think I had a bit of a
financial cushion build up.
If it wouldn't work out, Iwouldn't have to give up on life
.
So when that was the time, Imanaged to acquire remotecom,
the domain, and I got Marcelo,my co founder, to join me and we
started building, and at thevery beginning we had the idea
(04:52):
of what remote is today.
So we wanted to become anemployer of record and we knew
that we could do this as one ofthe options.
We also knew that it wouldrequire an immense amount of
money, and on remotecom itselfthere was already a website, a
freelancer connecting kind ofplatform running, and so we
figured well, maybe we can makethat work for a while, make some
money while we work on otherthings, so we don't have to
(05:12):
raise a lot of cash up front.
We did it for a while and itdidn't really work out.
And then we figured well, youknow, the change in the world we
want to see is more remoteorganizations, and so helping
more people find remote jobs iscertainly going to help in some
way in that, and so that's howwe started early on.
(05:33):
So we built the job board andeverything else, but then very
quickly after that, we realized,well, the real problem we have
to solve is this employer recordbit, and that's what we started
to build then for a long time,and I think around the time that
we were connected, we hadalready started building that,
but we still had a job boardonline and we tried to connect
companies and made some moneyand nothing significant.
Ariel Camus (05:53):
So the mission, the why, was pretty clear.
It was more about, like thewhere to start building towards
that right.
Job van der Voort (06:01):
One thing that was really incredibly clear
to us was that we either builtthe employer record thing that
we ended up doing, but we wouldneed to raise money.
And if we need to raise money,like you and I were saying
before you started recording,you have to go incredibly hard.
Right, you have to grow at allcosts, essentially, and so
that's a.
This is a really die-hardchoice.
You cannot calmly build aventure business.
(06:23):
You have to be all in, reallyfocused, really focused on
growth for a decade.
It's quite a commitment, andthe alternative route for us was
well, we're going to dowhatever else, just not this
thing to help remote companiesand whatever else and then we
can build more of a lifestylebusiness, right, so we can
calmly scale it.
And so we ended up obviouslychoosing to raise capital and uh
(06:46):
, and then we then things growgrew really really fast, but and
and for us it was sort of like,well, it feels like the stars
are aligning to do this rightnow.
We want to do this, so let'stake this opportunity and see
where it goes right.
We and I think we wereextremely willing to fail as
well.
We were just we're going towork really hard on this if it
works out out, it works out.
If it doesn't, we can always goback to do something else.
Ariel Camus (07:07):
Will you say, going on the venture path increased
the chances of failing theventure path.
You mean yeah, like?
Do you think that by going witha more?
Job van der Voort (07:17):
It just depends on how you define the.
I think if you can sustainyourself, arguably, you're a
successful entrepreneur,absolutely.
And so, in a venture business,what is a successful venture
business?
Is it one that exits?
Because many companies exit ina way that's not really
profitable for the founders,right, and so very, very few of
(07:39):
them actually have large exits.
Is that success?
Is it success reading aparticular milestone?
I don't know.
I think to me, success is am Idoing the activity that I want
to be doing, like, am I tryingto?
You know, for me, this is notabout making a shitload of money
.
It's about doing something thatI find fun, right and find
challenging, and like I like tobe ambitious and have a change
(07:59):
in the world, and so, in thatsense, we've already been
successful.
So, raising venture money, I dothink that the bar for success
is insanely high.
Right, you end up comparingyourself to well-known named
companies, but those are one ina million, and so, yeah, I guess
(08:23):
I would agree with that.
If you define success as, like,monetary success, I do think
it's much easier to make lessmoney, and if you don't have any
external investors, then it cango to your own bank account, so
to say and the moment you raiseany kind of capital, that's no
longer on the table.
Now you have to find other waysto make yourself rich, if that
is your goal.
Ariel Camus (08:40):
And it's amazing how both things can be true.
Right, the fact that it'sharder to be successful
monetarily speaking is true, butso is the importance of
defining your own success,precisely because the odds are
against you on the other side.
So if you are conditioning yourdefinition of success to that
monetary success, you're mostlikely going to be unsuccessful.
And who wants that?
(09:01):
So I'm also of the belief thatyou have to choose something
that you're going to be enjoyingand proud of doing every day.
So it's the the journey, notthe destination.
Job van der Voort (09:10):
Otherwise you're like setting yourself up
for for failure yeah, you'regoing to be incredibly depressed
, right, because you're going tostruggle to do something and,
at the end of the day, even ifyou make a whole lot of money,
then you'll feel empty.
I spent 10 years doingsomething I didn't like now, now
I have some money, but what doI do with all the time?
Ariel Camus (09:26):
It happens with anything that we say my goal to
be successful or to be happy isto achieve X.
Everything I say, if X has tohappen, then it's a recipe for
finding or continuing to be sad.
But in this case, you ended upmaking a decision of like okay,
we'll go with this venture path.
Why?
Why did you end up deciding notto go with the lifestyle
(09:50):
bootstrapped model?
Job van der Voort (09:52):
Because we had worked Marcelo and I, my
co-founder we had worked atventure-backed companies for
years but never ran oneourselves.
So we had a good understandingof what those businesses looked
like and we know a lot about theups and downs.
We were very ambitious and weknew that this potentially big
idea would not be feasible if wewere to do it in a bootstrap
(10:13):
manner.
And it turned out.
You know, then the pandemichappened.
Really, the stars aligned evenmore than they ever did before.
But it was like, well, we areyoung, I mean, we both had small
kids, but nonetheless we sortof were in a right place still
to do it, and we felt like wehad the skills, we had somewhat
of the network necessary toactually do something big.
But above all, yeah, it feltlike, well, it's now or never
(10:37):
kind of deal, right, like if you, I don't know.
Ariel Camus (10:40):
I guess it's like inherent ambition that we had to
do something big, and so that'swhy the now or never was more
because of the timing of thepandemic or because of where you
were in life?
Job van der Voort (10:51):
No, this was way before the pandemic.
No, it was more about the timewhere we were in life Like we
had a, really we were able toget the domain right.
So we had a really strongdomain, we had a really good
idea and we had investorinterest or we were able to, you
know, drum up some investorinterest.
And so, you know, there's thismoment where, if you feel like
(11:12):
all the things come togetherreally nicely, that you can
choose not to capitalize on it.
But for us it was like no, thisis clearly something and you
know you, I guess, many peoplethat are in a world of startups
often you look up to thesestartups being really successful
.
I kind of feel like, well, ifthat is something you want, why
not try it?
And so we did.
Ariel Camus (11:34):
Absolutely.
It makes total sense.
And then the stars probablykept getting aligned in some
ways and I want to hear aboutthat.
I want to double-click intosomething that probably is not
the you know fancy, flashy stuffthat is happening remote today,
but I think it's a probablyoften neglected side that is
really important.
(11:55):
You said that the first thingyou were doing with the job
board website that you hadacquired as part of the domain,
you tried to give it a.
You know, you give it a chance,but it wasn't really working.
What did it mean back then thatit wasn't working?
How did you make the decision?
This is not good enough.
Job van der Voort (12:13):
It was not so much that we didn't think it
was good enough, it was morethat we decided we had a better
idea and we wanted to startworking on that.
Because as a small business, itwas working fine.
It was making quite a bit ofmoney.
And because as a as a smallbusiness it was working fine, it
was making quite a bit of money, and how?
Just through blood, sweat andtears.
But the product itself didn'thave any particular moat, Right,
Other than you know.
(12:33):
There were a few small things,but like a strong domain, and it
looked nice and it worked.
It worked reasonably well.
We had some specific decisionsthat we took, but ultimately we
were selling a slightlydifferent thing of a
commoditized product right, Inthis case, job ads and so you
can make perfect money with thatand you can make some people
(12:55):
very happy with that.
It just it was not a thing wewanted to build right, Like it
was not necessarily like thenthere was no particular reason
that it would be very successfuland so.
But the most important factorin all of this is that we didn't
decide this doesn't work.
No, we decided no, there'ssomething else we want to do,
and I think that is more how wetook that decision at the time
(13:17):
than anything else.
Ariel Camus (13:19):
It sounds like, if I understand correctly, there
were at least three elements ofplaying different weights.
There was your passion for theproblem you were trying to solve
.
There was the absence of a mode, of a sustainable competitive
advantage that could actuallymake this a viable business for
a long period of time, and thenthere was the opportunity cost
(13:41):
of working on that instead ofworking on something that seemed
to be a much better idea.
Job van der Voort (13:47):
Yeah, I think so, I think so.
I mean, if you were, you knowagain, I really believe that the
last one is the most importantone, like nothing else you know
it's we decided it is also not avery intellectually interesting
challenge, right to just createa job board, no matter how you
cut or slice it like, it's justnot a super interesting
intellectual challenge.
And building an employer recordsure was, because we were
(14:11):
facing unknown unknowns andthat's very scary but also fun.
Ariel Camus (14:18):
That's a part like as an operational efficiency
nerd myself too.
Really, really I can't wait toget to that part.
Uh, but let me let me ask onething before um, in which way
did the pandemic play a role onthe success of remote in the
(14:39):
early days?
Of course, maybe I know howthings have changed very
recently, but in the early days,what would remote look like if
the pandemic hadn't happened?
I think maybe that's one way toput it.
Job van der Voort (14:50):
Well, smaller I think that's the main way.
Smaller, we would have raisedless money and grew a lot
smaller.
We didn't have a product beforethe pandemic, so we only
launched right after thepandemic and, yeah, the whole
world started working remotely,and only as a second order
effect did people start hiringinternationally, which is
ultimately what our productallowed and allows you to do.
(15:13):
Right Is to hire people inother countries, and so that
trend of hiring moreinternationally, that was going
to happen.
It's just that we took a suddenleap 10 years into the future.
Actually, I think we went like20 years in the future and then
we went 10 years back, you know,in the years that followed the
pandemic, something like that.
That's the main thing.
I think we would have grownobviously much slower if that it
(15:35):
hasn't happened.
That wouldn't have happened, um, we would have been able to not
raise as much money, right, wewouldn't have as much organic
interest.
You know we had a strong domainand everything that comes with
that.
But eventually, like, theproblem we are solving is a real
problem, and we see this now.
Now we're in, like thepost-pandemic years.
It's like, well, it's a realproblem that really needs to be
(15:57):
solved.
And now we're also solving awhole bunch of other problems,
so there is luckily more to behave done.
It just has accelerated theirtimelines quite significantly.
Ariel Camus (16:06):
So probably it increased both the amount of
capital available to solve theproblem, which I think you're
able to capture it's like 500million.
Job van der Voort (16:15):
That's a lot in two years.
Ariel Camus (16:16):
That's a lot, and also a much larger number of
companies having experiencingthe problem or seeing the
opportunity and finding theproblem on the way of that
opportunity.
So I can clearly see that, butalso by the way, I don't know if
you know this um, sid, uh, thefounder of gitlab, also played a
huge role on me as aprofessional and uh on the
(16:40):
company and also as a person.
I think you know the value oftransparency.
For example, I remember my Imet sid in 2012, right after
selling my previous company whengitlab.
You were already there,probably as one of the very
early team members, um, and butI remember gitlab solving I
don't know 100 people, somethinglike that 2013 I think, and but
(17:02):
2013, gitlab had five employees, so okay, five or four wow,
okay, so, so it was that thattiny.
Today it's thousands too.
And but I remember, um, alittle bit after meeting sid, uh
, finding out the concept of,like the handbook of gitlab and
starting to read all theprinciples and the
thoughtfulness behind theapproach, connected to the fact
(17:26):
that I had spent the last twoyears working remotely myself
without really knowing that thatwas remote work.
It's like this makes a lot ofsense, right, and I had just, uh
, spent some time teaching inburundi, in east africa.
I had also just sold a companyin silicon valley for millions,
and also being an immigrantcoming from South America, and I
(17:49):
started putting all the dotstogether of the opportunities,
the talent being kind of evenlydistributed.
What a huge missed opportunitythis was for the companies, for
the talent, of course, and I'mlike this is going to happen,
right, it's a matter of time.
But then the way that that's it, and the guilt lab culture,
like you know, came together, uh, and around values like
(18:11):
transparency.
For transparency, for example,it made so much sense in the
context of building a remotecompany creating a lot of
autonomy.
Without that transparency, it'shard to build the trust to have
the autonomy but, at the sametime, made so much sense to me
as an individual, like to theextent that, you know, I preach
transparency to everyone as theway to have fewer dramas in life
that just share things as theyare, share your feelings as they
(18:34):
come, you know, share the truth, like, and you don't ever have
to be, you know, second, outingyourself like did I say that or
that?
Like everything is so mucheasier, uh, so I'm I'm glad we
both had that, that that shared,um, I guess uh, influence in in
our lives and and yeah, andalso that we have both
experienced the problem and thepotential of, of what's
(18:55):
happening here now I want to getto the, the operational issue.
How did you get started withputting together the product?
How did you know, by the way,what version, which features of
the product were worth building,and how did you go about
(19:16):
actually putting that together?
Job van der Voort (19:18):
Yeah, I never thought of it like that.
What I did is the moment westarted the company.
I started talking withprospective customers from day
one and I would talk all thetime.
I would just email people atremote companies or companies
that would hire internationallyand I asked them we're building
this thing, you want to chat,you want to talk about it?
And I would talk with thesecompanies and I would do that
(19:40):
every week of the company sincethe very beginning.
Since before we knew what wewere going to build.
Once we decided, well, this isthe problem we want to address,
because I had the experience atGitLab of like we knew an
employer of record was like areally shitty product and they
clearly needed innovation inthat, and it was, you know,
further corroborated by speakingto all of these prospective
(20:00):
customers.
It wasn't so much about like,do we build what features?
It was more about are we ableto solve the problem?
Right, then I I really likethat approach and I I actually
think that's a really good wayof building products, especially
in the early days, which isthat, well, you got to solve a
problem, you know, and so itshould.
It should not be, um, whichfeatures?
(20:22):
Which things I'm going to do,because it sounds a lot like
seeking for problems right, butwith us the problem is really
really clear.
You have somebody in anothercountry, you want to hire them.
How do you solve the problem?
How do you do it effectivelyand how do you do it in a way
that is better than what camebefore it?
And so what I did is I spoke toall of these companies and,
like, tried to sense of like,beyond the core problem, what
(20:44):
are other things that theystruggle with, what are
problematic parts of it?
And I had some hunches, andover time you start to learn
more and more.
You know as you speak withpeople that, oh, it's a very
opaque process, it's very slow,it's very expensive.
And so then, instead ofthinking about, well, what
features should I build, wethought about, well, how can we
(21:04):
approach this in a way thatsolves fundamentally those
issues?
And so we formed strongopinions about it.
In our case, we felt like well,a lot of the problems that one
encounters when trying to hiresomebody through an employer
record come from the fact thatthere's loosely coupled third
parties.
So there's a company and theysay we can help you hire anybody
anywhere, but then they go tosome local players, not
(21:26):
incentivized to do the rightthing.
And all of that is all verymanual work.
And so we realized, well, if wecut out the middleman, so to
say, and just do everythingourselves, we can at least
streamline things.
And if we do that, then we canalso address the pricing issue.
So, actually, when we launchedremote, we priced it in a
similar way to the rest of themarkets at the time, which was a
(21:46):
percentage of total cost ofemployment, and it made the
business model incrediblyprofitable.
But the pricing was verynon-transparent, so it was very
hard to understand.
First you had to understandwhat is total cost of employment
, and then, oh, we're charging afee over a percentage of that,
which also disincentivizesemployers from giving people a
raise.
And so, rather than thinkingabout, well, which features, one
(22:07):
of the first changes we madewas we changed the pricing model
.
So we just say, oh, we're justgoing to be a flat fee and
there's upsides and downsides toit.
But we put it low enough sothat if you come from any of the
existing players in that space,it was significantly cheaper.
And so it was not at all aboutwhich features it was.
Can we do the work?
And then why would they workwith us being a new company
(22:30):
versus other companies that havebeen long established and
essentially offering the samething right or, in a lot of ways
, offering a lot more.
And so, and because I've beentalking to companies since the
very, very beginning, there werea lot of companies who I knew
might have been interested insome way.
You know, I've spoken with 100plus companies and I mean one
(22:51):
has to be the first, and one wasthe first.
I don't even remember whichcompany, because it went pretty
fast after that, because we andin our case, employer record you
have to launch country bycountry.
So there were only a smallnumber of countries that were
available and we chose those.
Basically, on what is easiest,what can we launch first.
We knew that to offer thisservice really effectively,
(23:14):
after having spoken with allthese companies, you want to be
in as many countries as possible.
It's impossible to do all atonce to boil the ocean.
So we just said well, we'regoing to take the path of least
resistance, work on a wholebunch at the same time.
And whichever said well, we'regoing to take the path of least
resistance, work on a wholebunch at the same time,
whichever available first, we'regoing to offer.
And so we launched, we hadavailability for two or three,
four countries.
And then, you know, we keptworking and opening them because
we were convinced that that wasthe right approach.
(23:36):
And 1.1 company said no, we're,we're interested in trying you
all out.
And so the first version ofproduct was essentially
spreadsheets.
It was like pretty front end.
But in the back version ofproduct was essentially
spreadsheets.
It was like a pretty front end,but in the back end it was
literally all spreadsheets.
But there was the agreementbetween us and our customers hey
, you're the first customer.
It's going to go.
(23:56):
It's going to be bumpy ride forall of us, but we're going to
work really, really hard.
You know already that we dothings in a different way and
we're going to continuouslyimprove.
And some of those customerswere exceptionally happy because
they had to pay much less andthey generally had a better
experience.
And some of them were not veryhappy because it was a bumpy
process and maybe they didn'twant that.
But that's sort of how we gotstarted and honestly, I think we
(24:20):
never really wondered whichfeatures do we have to build,
because it was all about are wesolving this very fundamental
issue?
Ariel Camus (24:29):
I think that is one-on-one of entrepreneurship
right and product in general.
It's like focus on the problem,not on the solution and also
tapping into something that youalready had experience with from
your experience at GuildLab.
Like you were not necessarilythe biggest expert or
representative of every singlecompany in the world with the
(24:49):
problem, but you already knewmore or less a problem.
And then talking to yourcustomers like that's the, I
think, uh, another one-on-one uhpiece, uh here, how, how did
you get um to 100 potentialcustomers there?
Where do those relationshipscome from?
What are some tricks, resources?
(25:09):
When I say trick, I mean hacksor simple things at work, and I
would suspect that probably youalready had some decent
connections.
You've mentioned that before.
What would you do if you didn'thave those connections?
How do you get to talk to a lotof customers even if you're
just very new in the industry?
Job van der Voort (25:27):
Yeah, just email people.
You send emails and LinkedInmessages to people.
That's it.
There's no secret to it.
I mean, if you sell a product,you just have to sell it and you
cannot be.
I think a lot of people,especially people that are
builders right, that are veryhappy like myself, that are very
happy like myself, that arevery happy to just build stuff
there's sort of this expectationEverybody knows it's not true,
(25:51):
but still there's thisexpectation that if you build it
, they will come, and it's nottrue.
And so if you want to sellthings, you have to tell people
about the thing that you areselling, and then you have to
assume that you're going to beincredibly unsuccessful with the
majority of those people.
If you accept that and justkeep talking to people, it will
get a lot easier.
And so I actually don't thinkthat we got our first 100
(26:13):
customers through anyconnections or network that we
had.
Sure, we knew some investorsand whatever else, but that
didn't really bring a lot ofbusiness.
What brought business wastalking to companies.
And how do you talk tocompanies is by approaching them
, by talking about what are youbuilding?
Like I said, I spent.
It took us almost 18 months tolaunch the first version of the
product.
In a time.
(26:34):
I spoke to so many companiesthat I think a lot of them over
time became customers.
Some took much longer thanothers, but like and I just kept
doing that you just talk tocustomers, you just reach out to
them, you say this is what weare building, this is what we're
doing, and I or hey, I knowthat you're working at this, or
are you hiring peopleinternationally?
Do you want to talk about it?
Then things work out.
That really is all there is toit.
(26:56):
I, I don't.
I don't think there's anyactual hacks you can do.
Yeah, sure, there's ways toapproach a lot of people really
quickly, and they havemeaningfully changed since since
then to to now.
But, um, above all, I think thebest thing you can do is just
solve a real problem, talk aboutit publicly, which we did a lot
(27:16):
on linkedin, on twitter, onwhatever else.
Talk and approach people thatyou think might be interesting
and be ready to be rejected alot.
I never, and I think nobody atour company, especially in the
early days, was bothered byrejection ever, because we were
like oh, we're just buildingthis thing, let's just keep,
we're just going to keep goinglike if it's not good enough,
(27:36):
we'll work until it is so, and Ithink that that approach helps
um helps a lot, and just don'tgive up and don't run out of
money.
That helps as well.
And in our case, you know thehacks we used were the hacks
that venture-backed companiesuse.
So you know we raised a lot ofmoney.
If you raise a lot of money,that's a great way to get PR
right, and if you get PR, that'spotentially a great source of
(28:00):
recognition that helps companiesfind you, and so obviously we
use that.
Ariel Camus (28:04):
Makes subtle sense and I think maybe an interesting
insight that I've heard beforethat I think applies here and it
can be a way to deal with therejections is you need to have
at least one of these twocomponents for things to go well
.
Either you have a market thatis desperate for your solution
right which definitely it's areally good check to have, yeah
(28:26):
or you have an immense amount ofconviction and passion for the
problem you're solving right.
If you have neither of those two, it's going to be really hard,
and I think it helps torecognize that, probably
especially at the beginning.
Even if you're tackling theright problem, even if you have
really good ideas for how tosolve it, you might still not
(28:47):
know how to talk to yourcustomers.
It's like language market fitthing, which means you will
still be rejected and that's theonly option you have left.
There is to have a lot ofpassion and conviction.
It sounds like you and the teamhad, you know, the absolute
conviction that the problem wasreal and that it was worth
solving it, that you could solveit, and it was a matter of time
in finding the customers withthe right product that you
(29:09):
needed to be able to solve theirproblems.
Job van der Voort (29:10):
Yeah, I think if you are building a company,
especially if you'reventure-backed and you're not
profitable, you're constantlylooking into the abyss.
Right, your company is going todie.
And so I don't think it'sreally an option to like not go
really really hard at thatproblem.
And I don't mean to make longhours, I mean it's just you
really have to work hard, tokeep going until you're done,
(29:34):
until it works, and then learnfrom that.
But it's hard for me to relatebecause I never felt like
rejection is like a big deal Tome.
It's just like well, that's achallenge to do a little bit
better.
It's a big deal To me, it'sjust like well, that's a
challenge to do a little bitbetter.
It's a learning opportunity.
As much as somebody gives youfeedback about something you can
do better, that's a gift.
And the same is rejection, likeI always you know, even today,
the other day a company theydidn't that I knew and they knew
(29:59):
me and they decided to workwith another, with a competitor
or something, and so I emailedthem.
I'm not there to bedisappointed.
I genuinely want to understandwhy is it that people would not
want to work with me so that Ican adjust and be better and
(30:19):
that should be your onlyattitude.
And if you do that really hardand given that your market is
big enough, right, and you'resolving a real problem, then
you'll get there eventually.
Right, you'll get there.
Eventually.
You'll find that there's acommon denominator across all
your rejections.
You're going to solve that oneand then maybe one of these
companies is going to move overto you.
Ultimately, that is all thereis, all there is to it.
(30:40):
It's a really difficult thing,but I think it's incredibly
important.
Ariel Camus (30:43):
Focus on the problem and I think there are
two approaches there and it'sclear which one you took.
You can just try a, can justtry reaching out to a lot of
people with slightly differentmessages until one message
starts connecting.
Or you can accelerate thatprobably a hundredfold by asking
them why did that message not?
(31:05):
Why did that not solve?
Why doesn't it solve yourproblem right?
Until you get enough feedbackthat really tells you what to
change in the message, what tochange in the product so that it
actually resonates with people.
But I think sometimes thehardest part and it's not easy
to solve it's how do you get toconvince them to tell you that
(31:27):
why not right, exactly what youwere saying with this customer.
And I was thinking about thisthis week because we're working
on a new product to helpsoftware engineers with their
English for their careers, andwe had to change the entire flow
, the signup flow of the process, to force those conversations
(31:48):
to happen exactly at the momentof rejection.
So before, let's say, you could, like you know, do a self-serve
sign up thing and eventuallyyou get to try the product, the
pricing, say no, not.
For me it was really hard toget people to tell you at that
point why they were deciding notto buy.
So instead, what we did, we didthe other thing, which is do
things that don't scale.
We flipped and it was okay.
We're going to do sales calls,where you think you are getting
(32:12):
a word into the product, butwhat we're truly doing is
observing you and reallyunderstanding.
First, you know what'sconfusing, what's not there that
you're expecting, and then, asyou get to the pricing page, you
know what is your reaction andthen I can ask you face to face
hey, um, why yes, why not?
And what worked here, by theway, was because in this case,
the audience and softwaredevelopers were saying hey, do
(32:34):
you know how much it sucks to goto a job interview and the
employer rejecting you and youasking for feedback and not
getting it?
Don't do that to me.
Especially if it's negativefeedback, I want to hear it.
You know how hard it is to getit.
Don't do that to me.
And that has worked really well.
But I think it's important torecognize the importance of
(32:55):
doing things that don't scalehere.
You mentioned before thatnowadays there are tons of tools
to automate, to scale theoutreach process, and with AI
it's just getting mind-blowing.
I haven't seen this workingwell enough in the very, very,
very early stages In a way thatgives you this quality, like
really quality, qualitative.
You know, uh, conversations, itgives you more of the, the
(33:18):
quantity.
You agree with that, or whatwill you do in the end of this?
Will you look for a scale oryou look like you know extreme
personalization and you knowcustomized outreach to get those
conversations?
Job van der Voort (33:29):
no, I mean until today, I just wrote
everything myself.
I mean, I think if you're, ifyou're looking for any kind of
feedback, or even if you're justreaching out to people, for
whatever reason, you can getaway forever by just doing it
instead of necessarily using aparticular tool, if that answers
your question.
Like I, even today, I regularlyreach out directly, especially
(33:53):
if somebody so, for example, inremote, we have this product.
Like you, can rate theexperience at different parts
and, depending on your user anda lot of users, they don't write
any feedback.
So I just reach out directlymyself.
Like hey you left some negativefeedback.
Could you might elaborate?
Do you want to call about it?
Um, it's a whole motion.
Both me, my co-founder or ceo,we all all, all the times, jump
(34:15):
on calls with customers on tounderstand like, well, if, how
can we make the experiencebetter, or if you are unhappy,
how can we make you happy, etc.
I don't know.
I I've nothing really replacesjust talking to people.
Like that, it's, it's reallystraightforward.
There should never be a pointand I often hear you people say
like, oh, when a company getsreally big, I'm only delegating
things and I'm only managingpeople, and to me especially,
(34:37):
it's like a leader and to methat's um, that should never
happen.
Like you should always be busywith the actual product, the
problem and the people using theproduct, and by by just talking
to them.
You should always be talking topeople.
It it sounds so simple, but itmakes all the difference.
You have to deeply understandpeople.
(34:58):
You cannot deeply understandpeople just by their one
sentence reply to some form thatyou sent them.
That's also useful and youshould also do those things, but
you should continue to talk topeople.
Ariel Camus (35:10):
That makes sense but you should continue to talk
to people.
That makes sense and it's easyto fall in the trap of scaling
the team, delegating anddelegating also the talking to
the customer right, but then howcan you really guide the
direction of the company if youdon't deeply understand the
audience and the problem?
Job van der Voort (35:26):
Yeah, but there are great tools for that,
for what it's worth, right?
So you know, we have a verylarge sales team, as you can
imagine.
So we record sales calls, asyou can imagine.
So we record sales calls andthen you can look those back, so
sometimes you don't have tohave those calls, but you still
got to watch those recordings,right?
You still have to see what acustomer says, and you have to
make a point out of teachingpeople to actually ask for
feedback, which is also a skillthat you have to acquire, right?
(35:48):
It's very easy to just acceptthe rejection without digging
deep into why what is the reasonfor the rejection?
And so I mean there's a milliondifferent tools that make all
of even this part easier andbetter.
We use Dovetail, for example,for feedback, where we have
recordings of interviews withcustomers and prospective
(36:09):
customers on different thingsthat they like and dislike and
how they think about it, andthat can be really useful to dig
into it.
But in early days, I don't thinkyou should make things that
complicated.
You should be talking a lot topeople.
Your focus should be gaining anunderstanding of your customers
and prospective customers andthen trying to solve their
(36:30):
problems and then see how youwould do.
I think you know.
For us, as I told in thebeginning, a big learning was
that the problem was not in anypiece of software.
The problem was in that theydidn't feel like they could
reach out to somebody.
They felt like it was veryexpensive the services, and so
that's what we addressed.
(36:50):
And I still wanted to buildbeautiful software, but when I
started the company I figuredthat was all I would be doing.
In the end it turned out to bewell, that's actually not even
the second concern of ourcustomers.
It's like somewhere down theline oh yeah, the software
should be nice to use.
No, it's.
Primarily, does it solve theproblem that I have?
Is it affordable?
Is it easy to understand?
(37:11):
Do I feel alone or do I feelsupported?
You know if you can solve all,for us, solving those things
were much more important thananything else Makes total sense.
Ariel Camus (37:32):
And you did all of this from the very early
building of the first person, ofthe product, in just you know a
few countries, all the way towhere you're today, surrounded
by a lot of competition, withalso very, very deep pockets.
In which way did thecompetition like influence?
Um, what you had to do, whatyou had to prioritize, didn't
really change anything at all,both positive and negatively.
Job van der Voort (37:55):
I mean ultimately.
I think competition is positivebecause it forces you to do
better, it forces you to focuson what is actually delivering
value and what isn't.
And you have to learn to be verygood at not copying products,
because it's very easy to fallinto the trap of trying to copy
what others are doing, and Ithink that's a very dangerous
trap to fall into, becausethere's always going to be
(38:17):
somebody bigger raising moremoney than you, and so if you're
going to follow, you're goingto lose, right, and so you have
to be really, really strict onthat.
I think the most interestingthings are very specific.
You know, pricing dynamics arepretty interesting because
obviously there's going to be alot more pricing pressure on the
industry as a whole in whichyou are in, but nobody wants to
(38:38):
give away the product for free.
They have to build asustainable business.
So that certainly is a veryinteresting angle, and beyond
that it's it's mostly just goodlike it creates more awareness,
right.
If if you have a competitorwho's suddenly very successful
or raises a round, it will alsohave a positive impact on
traffic to you and peoplelooking at you, because even if
you're much smaller, they willlook for Google alternatives,
(39:02):
and so with that, it probablyhelps the industry as a whole
and grow your market as a whole,given that you're solving a
real problem.
Ariel Camus (39:10):
Absolutely, and especially if you're a
venture-backed company and thereare many investors that won't
be able to get into the roundsof the other competitor that
will want to get in the roundsof other players, and those are
really good opportunities forany company, especially if it's
a very competitive market.
Everyone's trying to get aslice of the opportunity.
(39:32):
Everyone's trying to get aslice of the opportunity.
How do you approachdifferentiating yourself from
the competition, especially whenthere's a lot of capital, a lot
of velocity?
What was your hypothesis, andwhy, behind how we're going to
compete?
Job van der Voort (39:49):
We never worried about differentiating.
We worried about solving thereal problem and then being able
to show that to customers.
How we think about solving thisproblem, what do we think is
important, what don't we thinkis important that's the most
important thing.
If you do that, then you don'thave to do this feature
checklist thing, which is verydangerous, because if you fall
(40:10):
in the trap of, like, doingfeature checklist, it's just
whoever does more checklistsright, and of course in the end
in many sales conversations youare going to fall into that.
So to some degree you know youdon't have a choice in that
matter.
But above all, you should beable to really worry about the
problem that you're solving, notfocus too much on your
(40:30):
competition, because the momentyou start focusing on
competition, you're focusing.
You know, maybe something willhappen to the market and, like
everybody will walk past you,and that has happened many times
in the history of companiesright, that competitors are so
focused on competing with eachother that they missed, you know
, the the forest for the treesand and, and you don't want that
to happen.
So, again, focusing veryclearly on what do you think is
(40:53):
important, how do you solve theproblem and why are you good at
solving the problem, then it'smuch less about how others are
doing it.
It's more or less about what webelieve is important, and that
in and of itself is enough.
Ariel Camus (41:06):
Makes sense too.
Like, yeah, just focusing onthe problem and not in terms of
the competition.
Like, probably you are yourbiggest threat by losing focus
on the right things.
Job van der Voort (41:17):
Yeah, for sure.
I mean like the biggest threatis like you breaking up with
your co-founder or you runningout of money, and like that's
mostly up to you.
Ariel Camus (41:25):
How is that?
Since you mentioned the peopleelement, how is the process of,
like choosing who to build thiswith and I'm talking both about
you know, Marcelo, yourco-founder, but also the early
team?
How do you make that decisionof what kind of team do you need
?
And I will suspect you'll saywhat do I need to solve this
problem, which makes a lot ofsense, but I'll let you provide
(41:46):
your answer.
Job van der Voort (41:48):
Yeah, so with Marcelo, we were best friends.
We were always planning tobuild a company together.
We tried before several times,and this was just the one time
it worked, and so that was areally obvious choice.
We had already long agocommitted to doing this together
.
Then the first people you wantto hire are just indeed the
people you need to solve theproblem.
But I think in particular, whenyou're building a company, you
(42:10):
want to have builders on boardright, and so our first eight
hires were just people buildingthe product in some way shape or
form.
In our case it was a mix ofengineers, operational people,
but, above all, people that justget shit done, independent of
what their title was before,independent of what they cared
about before.
We just wanted people thatcould do whatever work we needed
(42:31):
them to do and would be willingto do that, would be excited to
do that.
That's the kind of people wehired.
And also you know people thatare willing to join a startup,
which is like super risky and isvery likely to fail.
So and then you know a good wayto do that is to hire people
that you've worked with before,or that people that you know
very well have worked withbefore, so that they have really
good references.
I think that that certainlymade a huge difference to us.
Ariel Camus (43:01):
What do you do if you are like a new entrepreneur,
maybe don't have as muchexperience working with people
before, and you want to find thepeople that get shit done?
How do I identify those people?
Job van der Voort (43:08):
You know it's an attitude thing, right, and
so you learn about it in severalways One by working with people
, right, ultimately, that's theway to do it.
And so you have to get reallycomfortable anyway when you're a
founder and entrepreneur reallycomfortable firing people,
because if it's not working out,you have to deal with it
immediately.
We were really lucky and we hadto fire very few people in
early days, but nonetheless,like you have to get extremely
(43:31):
comfortable just saying topeople sorry, this is not
working out Because we needcertain skills or whatever, and
you just don't have that.
I think that is one of the mostimportant things.
But on the other hand, yeah,it's an attitude thing.
You figure it out by talking topeople and explaining to them
hey, I need you to just buildthe product.
All the direction you're goingto get is make the product and
(43:55):
now we're going to figure it out.
We're going to do this together.
And if somebody is not excitedabout that, if somebody wants
very specific specificationsearly on or only wants to do a
certain kind of work, you knowit's not going to work out, but
I don't really want to make a.
I wouldn't make blanketstatements about where those
people come from, because youknow I have a background in
neuroscience changements aboutwhere those people come from,
because you know I have abackground in neuroscience.
Um, you know, one of our ourfirst designers had barely ever
(44:16):
worked in a company, only workedindependently.
Another one of our designers,um, she was educated to be, uh,
drawing like technical drawingsof, like insects and such.
So you know, it's all over theplace.
Uh, our our first salespersonwas also our first support
person and she had come from avery different place.
So, yeah, it's I.
Ariel Camus (44:37):
I think it's, above all, just an attitude kind of
thing yeah, it's about thecapacity and the willingness to
do it, not so much the, theprevious experience with it.
Right, sure, yeah, all right,how?
How have things changed?
Uh, after the and I think weare now getting into the after
product market territory forsure, but I'm just curious to
(44:59):
see where it's, like, you know,remote going now.
Job van der Voort (45:02):
So we went from doing only employer records
to now providing all servicesand HR team names.
So we provide payroll foreverywhere, but also all the
other.
First, you can find peoplethrough us, you can hire them
directly, you can onboard themdirectly, you can onboard them,
you can manage them etc.
And everything.
Anything else really, you needum as an, as an hr team you can
do instead of remote, and we doit particularly well for
(45:22):
international teams.
I think as a market as a whole,it's been very interesting.
Right, because we went frompandemic, which really
accelerated us as a company, butwe also went from this like
zero interest rate time to avery different environment where
interest rates are reallyreally high and venture money is
much less available.
So there's a lot of companiesstruggling and we also benefited
(45:46):
a lot from startups growingfast and getting funded really,
really fast, and it's much lessthe case today.
Luckily, we did well and we'restill growing well and faster
than before, but certainly themarket is very different.
Ariel Camus (46:01):
Makes sense.
If you had a way to tell yourfive-year younger version of
yourself give some piece ofadvice for this journey of the
last five years, what would itbe?
Job van der Voort (46:16):
uh, I don't know, I think we did pretty well
and I'm not a person to beharsh on myself, so I, I don't
think, uh, I don't think I wouldhave much to say other than
good luck, but uh, it would bevery specific things.
I think.
You know, I I hear other peoplesay this as well but if you've,
you have a strong intuitionabout something as a founder,
(46:36):
you should probably trust thatand not lean too much on other
people's opinions.
I think that's the mostimportant one.
Ariel Camus (46:42):
Well, it goes well with this other saying that if
everyone thinks it's a good idea, it's really not a good idea,
right?
Those ideas are.
Usually they don't haveconsensus in the market.
So, yeah, you need to find thepeople telling you that's not a
good idea to know that it's agood idea.
Job van der Voort (46:58):
Maybe yeah.
Ariel Camus (46:59):
Well, yeah, it's definitely a really good idea to
invite you to the podcast.
Thank you so much for your time.
Again, I know you're super busy.
It's been super insightful.
It's a roller coaster of astory and I look forward to
seeing what happens next withyou on remote.
Thanks for having me, thank you.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
(47:21):
Your support means the world tome.
If you enjoyed today's episode,please consider subscribing and
leaving a review.
It's one of the best ways youcan help this podcast get off
the ground and help moreentrepreneurs like you.
Thank you, get off the groundand help more entrepreneurs like
you.
Thank you and until the nextepisode.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com