August 9, 2025 • 15 mins
Liam Martin shared his full circle moment with me at Running Remote, almost 5 years to the day he was forced to cancel Running Remote’s last visit to Austin, April 2020. With prior stops in Lisbon and Montreal, Running Remote’s return to Austin was a community fest.
Remote first organizations focus more on in-house retreats than anyone outside of the actual travel industry. Industry leaders needed their own retreat. And Running Remote was born in 2018.
After the reflection, the conversation turned to the future, and the intersection of remote management practices, AI adoption, and the impact of hiring the ‘best for the job’ AI proficient talent, regardless of location.
Please join me in welcoming Liam Martin to the Work 20XX Podcast.
Editor’s Note: Recorded 2025-April-30 at the Running Remote conference in Austin, Texas.
Special thanks to Liam, Egor, Ana, and Team Running Remote.
Liam Martin: Community Retreat, Remote, AI | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep55 from Running Remote 2025 Austin
#RemoteWork #RunningRemote #AI #Leadership #CommunityBuilding #FutureOfWork #RemoteTeams #GlobalTalent #WorkplaceInnovation #ScalingBusiness #HybridWork #SaaS #DigitalNomads #Entrepreneurship #RiskTaking #EventManagement #BusinessGrowth #Digital #Distributed #Remote #Hybrid #Office #FoW #Workplace #TechnologyAdoption #RemoteFirst #EmployeeEngagement #WorkplaceCulture #Interview #Podcast #Work20XX
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(00:00):
Okay, then we'll go here
three, two one.
Hey welcome backeverybody Jeff Frick here
coming to you from
Running Remote in Austin, Texas
I'm not in thehome office.
I'm not in the home studio
for this very specialedition of Work 20XX
I was super excited to get together
with the folks fromRunning Remote.
And they were so graciousto invite us down
to talk to the leadersthat are here.
(00:21):
Because thisis ground zero
for the futureof work.
Because likeI said before
things that are effectivein helping run remote teams
are the same types of
behaviors and processes and procedures
that help you run any team
whether they're hybrid, distributed
remote, on prem, whatever.
So we're excited to have one of the organizers
of this thing to give uskind of the rundown.
My next guestLiam Martin
(00:42):
the co-organizerof Running Remote.
And he's been the emcee.
He kicks off every day,closes every day.
So, Liam,great to see you.
Great for being here.
I am very tired
but that's actuallythe best time
to be ableto do a
a podcast like thisbecause usually
I get very honest.
Yeah. Well, exactly.
So one of thepodcast tricks
(01:02):
I'll teachyou is
all the good stuffas you said
usually comes at minute 35 to 50.
Right.
Because peopleare tired.
Exactly
They've used upall their canned stuff.
The PR people have gone home
and that's when you get to the good stuff.
Yeah.
But you've beenworking hard
so we don't have to gofor 50 minutes
to get to the good stuff.
Appreciate it.
For folks that aren't familiarwith Running Remote
give us a little bitof the history.
How did it get started?
(01:22):
How long has itbeen around?
What's kind of the story?
So Time Doctor which is theSaaS business that we run
we had a problemin 2018.
We had about 100 people
and we were trying to figure out
how to get to 500 people
how to get to1,000 people
how to get to 5,000 people.
Customers or employees?
[Liam] Employees [Jeff] Okay.
And there was a lot of content
on how to hire a virtual assistant
or how to becomea digital nomad
(01:44):
but there was very little content
on how to builda $1 Billion business.
And I had a couple of buddies of mine
from companies like WordPress and
GitHub andGitLab
and they were doing it, right.
They were building these massive businesses remotely.
There was very littlecontent out there
about thatparticular subject.
So I turned to Egor [Borushko]
(02:04):
who is now the other co-organizer of Running Remote
and I said
well why don't you stop
doing what you're currentlydoing in marketing
and let's have a ready, fire, aim philosophy,
which is we'll book a venue
and in ninemonths
I will fill thatvenue up
with as many of thesefriends that I
had built relationshipswith over the past
(02:25):
I've been doing remote work for almost 20 years now.
And it was great.
We ended up with about 250 people
for that very first event
and we've been doing it since 2018.
Obviously, Covid therewere a couple of years
that we weren’tdoing it in-person
but we're backto in-person
and it'sso great
to be able to get backto an in-person event.
A lot of people actuallyhave been telling me that
(02:48):
when they're going through immigration
to try to get in
for the event
and they explain tothe immigration officer
I'm going to a conferenceabout remote work.
They're likewhat do you mean
a conference aboutremote work?
But it makesperfect sense
because a lot of people know that
in remote first companies,we have company retreats.
(03:08):
So we bring everyoneto one particular place
once a year, twice a year,that kind of thing.
Right.
And we see this as that for business leaders
that are runningremote organizations.
Where's their company
Where's their retreat
where they getto go through
go to really kind of collaborate
with those otherremote founders
to be ableto figure out
how to continue to buildand scale their business.
Yeah, I lovethat framing.
(03:30):
And you can certainly see the validation of it
if you just go look at LinkedIn right now.
Of all the peopleyou know
all these people have a strong relationship
and none of them live near
anywhere nearone another.
So to finally come together and kind of
I don't even want to say ‘cement’
because the relationshipsare already real.
But to really tie them together
you know, face to face andbe able to touch and hug
and give a handshakeand share a meal
(03:51):
really just makes iteven that much stronger.
Yeah, there's peoplethat have said
there's like ten people
that I've known for 3, 4, 5 years
remotely, digitally
and this is the first timethat we've met in person.
Right?
Which isso cool.
To be able to createthat type of connection.
It just reinforcesthe community.
And for us
our mission is
we want to empowerpeople to work
(04:12):
wherever they wantwhenever they want
regardless ofwhether or not
you're an employer,an employee.
We think thatthat makes the world
fundamentallybetter
and a big part of thatis actually just
reinforcingthese connections,
turning it from a
hey, I might have you know
the podcaston zoom
is completely differentfrom in-person.
Right.
And you probably arerecognizing that today
Right
with doing all thesedifferent podcasts is
(04:34):
it just feels different.
It has that extrakind of just intimacy
that you don't get witha virtual environment.
Virtual is way cheapermore productive
more effective, butit lacks that intimacy.
And that's what we'retrying to provide here.
And it’s interesting right like
Chase [Warrington] from Doisttalks about they spend
they spend as much money.
They just don't spend iton real estate.
(04:55):
They spend iton the events.
So it's just a differentprioritization of the spend
But it's reallyabout connecting.
I wonder if you could share
how Covid kind of changed your guy’s trajectory?
Because that wasa little bit fortuitous.
Starting in 2018.
Well, so in January of 2020
I really startedto see Covid
as something that we should
(05:16):
be looking outfor because
our event wasgoing to run
end of April
like it doesevery single year.
And where?
In Austin, Texas
[Jeff] Okay, okay[Liam] in 2020
It's full circle.
Okay.
So we had and
for anybody thatdoesn't know
when you runan event like this
you got to pay thefantastic AV guys
that arebehind us.
(05:36):
You've gotto pay
for the foodfor the caterer
for the food trucksfor the tents
for theLED walls.
And all of this stuffis money up front.
Right.
You got to put 50, 60, 70% down
to book outall of that stuff.
And so you pay all of thoseamounts of money up front
and then hopefully you get sponsors and attendees
(05:58):
to be able to come to the conference.
So it was exactlythe wrong time.
I rememberI wanted to drop
I wanted to basically say, like
we gotto stop.
We've got to cancelRunning Remote
around early February.
And this is before
I think Trump kind ofshut down the economy
(06:18):
[Liam] March 5th[Jeff] I can tell you exactly
when It was. It wasFriday, March 13th
when Dr. Sarah Cody said
no more events of larger than
[Liam] There you go[Jeff] 50 people
Right.
[Jeff] And that was a Friday[Liam] So
that was terrifying for us.
And I just said
we have to get outin front of this.
We are aremote company.
This is our opportunityto be able to be a leader.
[Jeff] Right.
And the issuewhich I can discuss now
(06:41):
because I think all thoseNDAs are kind of dead
is there are a whole bunch of
the hotel chain thatwe were working with
the venue that we were working with
they were all saying
well no, you've signedthese contracts
and there has to bea force majeure.
There's a forcemajeure clause.
Right.
But, you know
(07:01):
the U.S. hasn't declareda state of emergency.
The state of Texas hasn't declared a state of emergency.
And the city of Austin hasn'tdeclared an emergency.
And until all thosethree things happen
none ofthat money
is going back to you underany circumstances whatsoever.
So we were in areally tough spot
and then thankfully
South By [SXSW] took a leadership direction on this
and canceled everything.
(07:22):
And I said, I don't care if we get sued.
We've got the video cued up.
Let's just go.
And nothing happened.We didn't get sued.
But we did lose about a quarter of a million dollars
Right, right.
in lost revenue that wereally couldn't get back.
But thankfully
the attendeesand the sponsors
every single sponsorthat we booked
said no problem.
Let's just push itinto the future.
(07:42):
And I thinkout of the 300
tickets that we had booked
two people askedfor a refund.
[Jeff] Wow, just said[Liam] Everyone said
[Jeff] just hold it[Liam] don't worry about it.
Hold it.You know
and that's what keptRunning Remote up.
[Jeff] Yeah[Liam] Up and running.
That says somethingabout the community
[Jeff] in a major, major way.[Liam] It was fantastic, yeah
it was, I mean, if we hadn't had that
we would have been screwed.
Right.
And then actually,three months later
(08:05):
we, or one month
off of the date that we were
supposed to runRunning Remote
we ran a virtual event
and that ended up havingover 6,000 people.
Right.
That came to it.
Nothing like thatexisted before
in terms of virtual events.
And we had thisreally cool feature.
It was like a chat roulette for video.
(08:26):
So you'd push a button
and you'd berandomly connected
to someonefor five minutes.
After the entire event was over
which ran for two days.
That video rouletteran for another 12 hours.
Peoplewere just
and I think it was just Covid, right?
It was three.
We were 2 or 3 months into Covid.
Right, right.
[Liam] And people are just like[Jeff] Everyone's going
[Liam] I want to connect with human beings.[Jeff] crazy
(08:48):
Where are thesehuman beings?
And you knowwe just said
okay, we'll keepit running until it
until it actually shuts downand it was amazing.
Yeah.
And thena year later
everyone was tiredof virtual events
and everythingkind of changed.
But there was kind of a cool
lightning in a bottlemoment
Right
for us.
Well and to is likeMelinda just said
in all thenegative
there's a gift inthere somewhere.
And the gift was you know
normalizationof remote work
(09:09):
more acceptance of remote work.
You've got a young group of kids
growing up nowthat have
not knownanything different.
Yeah.
They graduated from collegeduring Covid and stuff
So in a sense
I guess it was more of a blessing
than a negativein the long term.
Yeah and I mean
Running Remotedid not do well.
We lost a ton of money
But Time Doctormy SaaS company
which was a workforce analyticstool for remote teams.
(09:32):
We grew 220%in 2020.
So it wasyou know
we were holding onwith our fingernails.
It was I mean, the firstsix months of Covid
we had this.
It was a
let's not pay attention to anyone
that has less than a thousand employees.
(09:52):
And previously
if someone came inthat had a 1000 employees,
you had me for the day.
Right, right.
And it was just acomplete reordering
of where technology was.
One other thingthat was hilarious is
there was a fundthat was born out
of Running Remote
called Remote First Capitalrun by Andreas Klinger
It's still run now by him.
(10:13):
Andreas is the
was the CTO of Product Hunt.
Which is kind of like Reddit for tech startups.
Okay.
And it was a $2 million fund.
Was fully deployed inDecember of 2019
and the thesis was
investing in the remotetechnology stack.
So all these $10 millionvaluation companies
(10:36):
turned into $4 Billionvaluation companies
[Jeff] overnight[Liam] in three months
I mean the absolute perfect black swan event.
Right.
Which wasamazing.
And that fund
I thinkwas
not even paper returnslike actual concrete returns.
Up until this pointI mean the fund’s
Fund One is 4 or 5 years old
(10:58):
has done amazingly well.
Right.
It's funny asyou tell that story.
I can't help but thinkback to nine like 1996
when the web was just going for enterprises
beyond just web pages.
And I had a friendthat worked at
you know all the digital agencies.
the first ones Scient and Viant
and all these guys indowntown San Francisco.
And I was begging my buddy
Right
to help us with our e-commerce site
(11:19):
begging my buddy.
And this was a very well financed startup
by Intel and SAP.
And he's like
he's like Jeff,
I have like pages of paper
falling out of my fax machine
all day long.
Unless you're ready towrite a monster check
up frontnow.
I'm sorry. I love you, but I'll talk to you later.
(11:40):
So, I mean, just one of these crazy,
you know, super demand
bumps in the curve moments that
they do come every now and then
and it sounds like you were in a good position
to take advantage.
Yeah, yeah.And I think
right now we're reallykind of entering
and probably you've seenthis over the last two days.
The age of AI and work.
And that's thatnext big wave
that I think everyone'sgonna really
(12:01):
going topick up on.
And fundamentally whenyou look at AI in work
remote is absolutelycritical inside of that
particularprocess, right?
When you have global talent.
Well, global talent utilizing artificial intelligence is just
such a huge
it's almost going to belike a Cambrian explosion
of new companiesand new organizations.
And new waysto work.
(12:22):
Right.
That I think arefundamentally
going to add up to
one word which is freedom.
More freedom for everyoneto be able to work
however they want,whenever they want.
And the other interesting thing Brian Elliott talks about a lot
he was the first oneto kind of surface it
is that in termsof the management
behaviors, attitudes,best practices
that enable people to besuccessful in remote work
are the exact same
(12:43):
attitudes, behaviors of
ways of managing
that will help peoplebe successful
in getting their teamsto implement AI.
Yeah.
It's the same thing.It's risk taking.
Yep
It's measuring the right objectives, etc. so
Yep
It's almost a perfect storm of
of taking theseskill set now
and applying them to thisnext new big giant wave.
Absolutely.
And especiallywhen you already have
(13:03):
the beautifulinfrastructure of saying
Well I'm not going to hire
the best person in Austin
I'm going to hirethe best person.
[Jeff] Right, right.
And that's sucha huge advantage
when you layer onAI on top of that, right?
Someone that can use AI effectively is
probably ten times more effectivethan someone that can't.
Right.
Okay, so we'regetting out of time.
(13:24):
We're coming to the end of two days.
Great show.
Give a quick plugfor next year.
Next year, same time,same place.
Well that makes it easy
We're going to be doing itin Austin, Texas yet again.
There's probably going to bea really good deal
specifically that we can set up for
this podcast so that everyone can get access to it
and then hopefully seeyou come back next year.
Awesome.
You've been doing a fantastic job.
(13:45):
Awesome. Thank you.
It would be great to be able to get
some people coming backfrom your audience
to be able to say like
Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that
if you're thinking about running a remote team
or a hybrid team or
even in just a distributed team
this is absolutelythe place
to learn it.
And it’s never been easier
particularly for North Americans
because thisis really
the first time that we've done it in the U.S.
(14:07):
and we've loved it up until this point.
Great.
Well, congrats againon a great event.
Working with the teamhas been fantastic.
Everyone has been super graciousand easy to work with.
So really appreciate it.And congrats.
I know it's a lot of work
to put one of these things on.
Yeah, thanksa lot
and hopefully we see you next year.
Absolutely.
All right.
He's Liam I'm Jeff
you're watchingWork 20XX.
We're coming to you fromAustin at Running Remote.
(14:29):
Thanks for watching.Thanks for listening.
See you next time. Take care.
Oh. Oh.
Thanks a lot.
Hey, Jeff Frick Here
big shout out to the podcast audience.
Thanks for listening in.
You can get show notes and transcripts at Work20XX.com
And that also has links to the videos as well.
(14:49):
Appreciate you listeningin on the podcast
Do reach out
say hello, like subscribeand smash that notification bell.
Thanks for listening.Take care. Bye bye.
Okay, then we'll go here
three, two one.
Hey welcome backeverybody Jeff Frick here
coming to you from
Running Remote in Austin, Texas
I'm not in thehome office.
I'm not in the home studio
for this very specialedition of Work 20XX
I was super excited to get together
with the folks fromRunning Remote.
And they were so graciousto invite us down
to talk to the leadersthat are here.
(00:21):
Because thisis ground zero
for the futureof work.
Because likeI said before
things that are effectivein helping run remote teams
are the same types of
behaviors and processes and procedures
that help you run any team
whether they're hybrid, distributed
remote, on prem, whatever.
So we're excited to have one of the organizers
of this thing to give uskind of the rundown.
My next guestLiam Martin
(00:42):
the co-organizerof Running Remote.
And he's been the emcee.
He kicks off every day,closes every day.
So, Liam,great to see you.
Great for being here.
I am very tired
but that's actuallythe best time
to be ableto do a
a podcast like thisbecause usually
I get very honest.
Yeah. Well, exactly.
So one of thepodcast tricks
(01:02):
I'll teachyou is
all the good stuffas you said
usually comes at minute 35 to 50.
Right.
Because peopleare tired.
Exactly
They've used upall their canned stuff.
The PR people have gone home
and that's when you get to the good stuff.
Yeah.
But you've beenworking hard
so we don't have to gofor 50 minutes
to get to the good stuff.
Appreciate it.
For folks that aren't familiarwith Running Remote
give us a little bitof the history.
How did it get started?
(01:22):
How long has itbeen around?
What's kind of the story?
So Time Doctor which is theSaaS business that we run
we had a problemin 2018.
We had about 100 people
and we were trying to figure out
how to get to 500 people
how to get to1,000 people
how to get to 5,000 people.
Customers or employees?
[Liam] Employees [Jeff] Okay.
And there was a lot of content
on how to hire a virtual assistant
or how to becomea digital nomad
(01:44):
but there was very little content
on how to builda $1 Billion business.
And I had a couple of buddies of mine
from companies like WordPress and
GitHub andGitLab
and they were doing it, right.
They were building these massive businesses remotely.
There was very littlecontent out there
about thatparticular subject.
So I turned to Egor [Borushko]
(02:04):
who is now the other co-organizer of Running Remote
and I said
well why don't you stop
doing what you're currentlydoing in marketing
and let's have a ready, fire, aim philosophy,
which is we'll book a venue
and in ninemonths
I will fill thatvenue up
with as many of thesefriends that I
had built relationshipswith over the past
(02:25):
I've been doing remote work for almost 20 years now.
And it was great.
We ended up with about 250 people
for that very first event
and we've been doing it since 2018.
Obviously, Covid therewere a couple of years
that we weren’tdoing it in-person
but we're backto in-person
and it'sso great
to be able to get backto an in-person event.
A lot of people actuallyhave been telling me that
(02:48):
when they're going through immigration
to try to get in
for the event
and they explain tothe immigration officer
I'm going to a conferenceabout remote work.
They're likewhat do you mean
a conference aboutremote work?
But it makesperfect sense
because a lot of people know that
in remote first companies,we have company retreats.
(03:08):
So we bring everyoneto one particular place
once a year, twice a year,that kind of thing.
Right.
And we see this as that for business leaders
that are runningremote organizations.
Where's their company
Where's their retreat
where they getto go through
go to really kind of collaborate
with those otherremote founders
to be ableto figure out
how to continue to buildand scale their business.
Yeah, I lovethat framing.
(03:30):
And you can certainly see the validation of it
if you just go look at LinkedIn right now.
Of all the peopleyou know
all these people have a strong relationship
and none of them live near
anywhere nearone another.
So to finally come together and kind of
I don't even want to say ‘cement’
because the relationshipsare already real.
But to really tie them together
you know, face to face andbe able to touch and hug
and give a handshakeand share a meal
(03:51):
really just makes iteven that much stronger.
Yeah, there's peoplethat have said
there's like ten people
that I've known for 3, 4, 5 years
remotely, digitally
and this is the first timethat we've met in person.
Right?
Which isso cool.
To be able to createthat type of connection.
It just reinforcesthe community.
And for us
our mission is
we want to empowerpeople to work
(04:12):
wherever they wantwhenever they want
regardless ofwhether or not
you're an employer,an employee.
We think thatthat makes the world
fundamentallybetter
and a big part of thatis actually just
reinforcingthese connections,
turning it from a
hey, I might have you know
the podcaston zoom
is completely differentfrom in-person.
Right.
And you probably arerecognizing that today
Right
with doing all thesedifferent podcasts is
(04:34):
it just feels different.
It has that extrakind of just intimacy
that you don't get witha virtual environment.
Virtual is way cheapermore productive
more effective, butit lacks that intimacy.
And that's what we'retrying to provide here.
And it’s interesting right like
Chase [Warrington] from Doisttalks about they spend
they spend as much money.
They just don't spend iton real estate.
(04:55):
They spend iton the events.
So it's just a differentprioritization of the spend
But it's reallyabout connecting.
I wonder if you could share
how Covid kind of changed your guy’s trajectory?
Because that wasa little bit fortuitous.
Starting in 2018.
Well, so in January of 2020
I really startedto see Covid
as something that we should
(05:16):
be looking outfor because
our event wasgoing to run
end of April
like it doesevery single year.
And where?
In Austin, Texas
[Jeff] Okay, okay[Liam] in 2020
It's full circle.
Okay.
So we had and
for anybody thatdoesn't know
when you runan event like this
you got to pay thefantastic AV guys
that arebehind us.
(05:36):
You've gotto pay
for the foodfor the caterer
for the food trucksfor the tents
for theLED walls.
And all of this stuffis money up front.
Right.
You got to put 50, 60, 70% down
to book outall of that stuff.
And so you pay all of thoseamounts of money up front
and then hopefully you get sponsors and attendees
(05:58):
to be able to come to the conference.
So it was exactlythe wrong time.
I rememberI wanted to drop
I wanted to basically say, like
we gotto stop.
We've got to cancelRunning Remote
around early February.
And this is before
I think Trump kind ofshut down the economy
(06:18):
[Liam] March 5th[Jeff] I can tell you exactly
when It was. It wasFriday, March 13th
when Dr. Sarah Cody said
no more events of larger than
[Liam] There you go[Jeff] 50 people
Right.
[Jeff] And that was a Friday[Liam] So
that was terrifying for us.
And I just said
we have to get outin front of this.
We are aremote company.
This is our opportunityto be able to be a leader.
[Jeff] Right.
And the issuewhich I can discuss now
(06:41):
because I think all thoseNDAs are kind of dead
is there are a whole bunch of
the hotel chain thatwe were working with
the venue that we were working with
they were all saying
well no, you've signedthese contracts
and there has to bea force majeure.
There's a forcemajeure clause.
Right.
But, you know
(07:01):
the U.S. hasn't declareda state of emergency.
The state of Texas hasn't declared a state of emergency.
And the city of Austin hasn'tdeclared an emergency.
And until all thosethree things happen
none ofthat money
is going back to you underany circumstances whatsoever.
So we were in areally tough spot
and then thankfully
South By [SXSW] took a leadership direction on this
and canceled everything.
(07:22):
And I said, I don't care if we get sued.
We've got the video cued up.
Let's just go.
And nothing happened.We didn't get sued.
But we did lose about a quarter of a million dollars
Right, right.
in lost revenue that wereally couldn't get back.
But thankfully
the attendeesand the sponsors
every single sponsorthat we booked
said no problem.
Let's just push itinto the future.
(07:42):
And I thinkout of the 300
tickets that we had booked
two people askedfor a refund.
[Jeff] Wow, just said[Liam] Everyone said
[Jeff] just hold it[Liam] don't worry about it.
Hold it.You know
and that's what keptRunning Remote up.
[Jeff] Yeah[Liam] Up and running.
That says somethingabout the community
[Jeff] in a major, major way.[Liam] It was fantastic, yeah
it was, I mean, if we hadn't had that
we would have been screwed.
Right.
And then actually,three months later
(08:05):
we, or one month
off of the date that we were
supposed to runRunning Remote
we ran a virtual event
and that ended up havingover 6,000 people.
Right.
That came to it.
Nothing like thatexisted before
in terms of virtual events.
And we had thisreally cool feature.
It was like a chat roulette for video.
(08:26):
So you'd push a button
and you'd berandomly connected
to someonefor five minutes.
After the entire event was over
which ran for two days.
That video rouletteran for another 12 hours.
Peoplewere just
and I think it was just Covid, right?
It was three.
We were 2 or 3 months into Covid.
Right, right.
[Liam] And people are just like[Jeff] Everyone's going
[Liam] I want to connect with human beings.[Jeff] crazy
(08:48):
Where are thesehuman beings?
And you knowwe just said
okay, we'll keepit running until it
until it actually shuts downand it was amazing.
Yeah.
And thena year later
everyone was tiredof virtual events
and everythingkind of changed.
But there was kind of a cool
lightning in a bottlemoment
Right
for us.
Well and to is likeMelinda just said
in all thenegative
there's a gift inthere somewhere.
And the gift was you know
normalizationof remote work
(09:09):
more acceptance of remote work.
You've got a young group of kids
growing up nowthat have
not knownanything different.
Yeah.
They graduated from collegeduring Covid and stuff
So in a sense
I guess it was more of a blessing
than a negativein the long term.
Yeah and I mean
Running Remotedid not do well.
We lost a ton of money
But Time Doctormy SaaS company
which was a workforce analyticstool for remote teams.
(09:32):
We grew 220%in 2020.
So it wasyou know
we were holding onwith our fingernails.
It was I mean, the firstsix months of Covid
we had this.
It was a
let's not pay attention to anyone
that has less than a thousand employees.
(09:52):
And previously
if someone came inthat had a 1000 employees,
you had me for the day.
Right, right.
And it was just acomplete reordering
of where technology was.
One other thingthat was hilarious is
there was a fundthat was born out
of Running Remote
called Remote First Capitalrun by Andreas Klinger
It's still run now by him.
(10:13):
Andreas is the
was the CTO of Product Hunt.
Which is kind of like Reddit for tech startups.
Okay.
And it was a $2 million fund.
Was fully deployed inDecember of 2019
and the thesis was
investing in the remotetechnology stack.
So all these $10 millionvaluation companies
(10:36):
turned into $4 Billionvaluation companies
[Jeff] overnight[Liam] in three months
I mean the absolute perfect black swan event.
Right.
Which wasamazing.
And that fund
I thinkwas
not even paper returnslike actual concrete returns.
Up until this pointI mean the fund’s
Fund One is 4 or 5 years old
(10:58):
has done amazingly well.
Right.
It's funny asyou tell that story.
I can't help but thinkback to nine like 1996
when the web was just going for enterprises
beyond just web pages.
And I had a friendthat worked at
you know all the digital agencies.
the first ones Scient and Viant
and all these guys indowntown San Francisco.
And I was begging my buddy
Right
to help us with our e-commerce site
(11:19):
begging my buddy.
And this was a very well financed startup
by Intel and SAP.
And he's like
he's like Jeff,
I have like pages of paper
falling out of my fax machine
all day long.
Unless you're ready towrite a monster check
up frontnow.
I'm sorry. I love you, but I'll talk to you later.
(11:40):
So, I mean, just one of these crazy,
you know, super demand
bumps in the curve moments that
they do come every now and then
and it sounds like you were in a good position
to take advantage.
Yeah, yeah.And I think
right now we're reallykind of entering
and probably you've seenthis over the last two days.
The age of AI and work.
And that's thatnext big wave
that I think everyone'sgonna really
(12:01):
going topick up on.
And fundamentally whenyou look at AI in work
remote is absolutelycritical inside of that
particularprocess, right?
When you have global talent.
Well, global talent utilizing artificial intelligence is just
such a huge
it's almost going to belike a Cambrian explosion
of new companiesand new organizations.
And new waysto work.
(12:22):
Right.
That I think arefundamentally
going to add up to
one word which is freedom.
More freedom for everyoneto be able to work
however they want,whenever they want.
And the other interesting thing Brian Elliott talks about a lot
he was the first oneto kind of surface it
is that in termsof the management
behaviors, attitudes,best practices
that enable people to besuccessful in remote work
are the exact same
(12:43):
attitudes, behaviors of
ways of managing
that will help peoplebe successful
in getting their teamsto implement AI.
Yeah.
It's the same thing.It's risk taking.
Yep
It's measuring the right objectives, etc. so
Yep
It's almost a perfect storm of
of taking theseskill set now
and applying them to thisnext new big giant wave.
Absolutely.
And especiallywhen you already have
(13:03):
the beautifulinfrastructure of saying
Well I'm not going to hire
the best person in Austin
I'm going to hirethe best person.
[Jeff] Right, right.
And that's sucha huge advantage
when you layer onAI on top of that, right?
Someone that can use AI effectively is
probably ten times more effectivethan someone that can't.
Right.
Okay, so we'regetting out of time.
(13:24):
We're coming to the end of two days.
Great show.
Give a quick plugfor next year.
Next year, same time,same place.
Well that makes it easy
We're going to be doing itin Austin, Texas yet again.
There's probably going to bea really good deal
specifically that we can set up for
this podcast so that everyone can get access to it
and then hopefully seeyou come back next year.
Awesome.
You've been doing a fantastic job.
(13:45):
Awesome. Thank you.
It would be great to be able to get
some people coming backfrom your audience
to be able to say like
Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that
if you're thinking about running a remote team
or a hybrid team or
even in just a distributed team
this is absolutelythe place
to learn it.
And it’s never been easier
particularly for North Americans
because thisis really
the first time that we've done it in the U.S.
(14:07):
and we've loved it up until this point.
Great.
Well, congrats againon a great event.
Working with the teamhas been fantastic.
Everyone has been super graciousand easy to work with.
So really appreciate it.And congrats.
I know it's a lot of work
to put one of these things on.
Yeah, thanksa lot
and hopefully we see you next year.
Absolutely.
All right.
He's Liam I'm Jeff
you're watchingWork 20XX.
We're coming to you fromAustin at Running Remote.
(14:29):
Thanks for watching.Thanks for listening.
See you next time. Take care.
Oh. Oh.
Thanks a lot.
Hey, Jeff Frick Here
big shout out to the podcast audience.
Thanks for listening in.
You can get show notes and transcripts at Work20XX.com
And that also has links to the videos as well.
(14:49):
Appreciate you listeningin on the podcast
Do reach out
say hello, like subscribeand smash that notification bell.
Thanks for listening.Take care. Bye bye.
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