We've all been told that businesses are designed to maximize shareholder value. And that just by creating jobs, businesses are a positive impact on the world. But what if your business creates miserable people working in terrible jobs? Or produces something that is bad for the world? Is it still 'good'?
Let’s talk about why businesses really exist, and how we as leaders can have meaningful and long-lasting impact on our teams, employees, customers, and communities.
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Okay, we're we're back and we have well, I guess we have our last keynote of of Turing Fest twenty twenty coming up. But it's a really, really great one to end on. And it's a topic close to my heart. I know a lot of the Turing Fest audience have have this is something that they care about too, that you guys all all a lot of you talk about, think about.
It's a sort of existential question about about business about, you know, what are what are we all doing here with our with our day to day and, you know, we've got a limited time to make an impact in the world and work is is mostly how we do it.
And that's what Natalie is gonna be talking about in her talk just now. And she's gonna walk you through WildBit, is a super interesting company. They've been around for twenty years now. They've got a ton of the built and deployed a ton of products that are out there like Beanstalk and Postmark and products that some of you might use.
And she's gonna cover why businesses exist. So we'll have we'll watch her video now, and then we'll have her on on in studio, as they say, for a bit more chitchat. So let's go over to Natalie Nagel from WildBit. Hi, TuringFest. I'm so excited to be here with you all today, albeit virtually.
I think I'm most excited because I get to talk about something that has become almost our core mission here at YOBIP, the real reason we have been around for twenty years and counting. I want to talk today about why businesses exist and how we can practically apply the concept of being people first.
Hopefully, you were able to attend my friend Nick Francis' talk last week, where he spoke a lot about the future of business, Milton Friedman and the stakeholder sorry, shareholder primacy, and a lot about why maybe we have been, as business leaders, convinced to steer the ship in a little bit of the wrong direction.
For those of you who don't know me yet, I am one half of what I lovingly refer to as a mom and pop shop. I run the business WildBit with my husband, Chris. We have been around for twenty years. We are profitable, private, bootstrapped.
We've been remote for all twenty years. We've been starting, running, growing, and selling various products along the way. I work with thirty one of the most amazing people in the world. You may have seen some of our products. Beanstalk is fifteen years old. It's our oldest.
Postmark is our largest product. And we actually launched two new products this year, DMARC and People First Jobs. I think what has been so interesting about turning twenty is we've had this opportunity to really reflect on what do we believe has allowed us to reach this incredible milestone.
And I can say that with that twenty years of reflection behind me, I believe without a doubt that the future of leadership and business success will be placed squarely with those organizations that prioritize people over growth, and especially growth for growth's sake. Long term, long lasting success is going to be is directly correlated to using the business as a tool, a tool towards bettering the lives of what I like to think of as four human constituents, four human stakeholders, founders, employees, customers, and community.
The only businesses that are going to survive this important transformation, what Nick shared last week, the one in which we start prioritizing stakeholders over shareholders, are those businesses that are going to be operating what we like to think of as people first. But what does it mean to be people first?
As leaders, I think we have to flip the way in which we think of decision making inside of our companies. Companies. We're used to asking ourselves, what does the business need to grow? What does the business need to be successful? But I challenge us to change that and instead start asking ourselves, how can the business help people grow?
How can the business help people succeed? These are the people inside and around the business, founders, employees, customers, community. It's not a fully balanced system, right? Different organizations are going to prioritize these four constituents differently. And that's Okay. Sometimes decisions make us focus on one more than the other, or a decision can impact one constituent more than the other.
The important thing isn't that they're constantly balanced. It's that they're constantly in the forefront. What we're aiming for is an understanding that the business, it's a tool, ultimately designed to further the living of people, the people who surround the business. And what I want to always remind folks and what I try to think about all the time is that the business itself isn't a real thing.
It can't control us. We invented it for ourselves. And so therefore, we really need to be controlling the business and using it for good. Now, something that I feel very strongly about is that no two businesses can ever be the same. And I know this is controversial.
I had a consultant once tell me that every entrepreneur thinks their business is a snowflake. Well, I'd like to argue that every entrepreneur is right. Every business is a snowflake. Because every business is just a collection of a bunch of human beings that bring their own human experiences to the table, make decisions in various ways.
Every business, success and failure can be directly tied to the decisions of those people. And even if you're in the same market working on the same product, you're going to make different decisions and build a different company. So what I share with you today is a very personal perspective on how we, over the last twenty years, have attempted to balance these four human constituents.
And also to maybe convince you that what we found is that operating by prioritizing people over business ends up producing a much, much stronger business in the long run. So let's dive in. The first constituent that I really care deeply about is founders.
And this funny thing happens when I start talking to other founders about being people first. They immediately assume that by being people first, they put founders last. And I promise there can't be anything further from the truth. The founders are owners of the business, the shareholders of the business.
They're a very, very important constituent. I speak as a founder, so my perspective is very singular in that way. But I think it applies to all types of shareholders. From day one, Chris and I have always viewed WildBit as a necessary part in providing success for our families.
It was always a necessity that WildBit provided for us. So as WildBit made more money, Chris and I made more money. Now, we didn't bleed the business, but we also didn't prioritize growing WildBit over making sure that we and our family was living well.
And I've talked to a lot of founders. And what I found is founders, especially funded ones, they end up paying themselves last. And that has directly, in my experience, correlated with how quickly they sell a business, how quickly they get burned out, hate their work, or even take on predatory financing deals.
Here's the thing. You can't be people first if you don't include yourself in the overall priority list. Paying yourself as a founder is almost like an insurance policy. It's a protection plan. Founders who don't pay themselves, who don't prioritize their well-being and their goals and their dreams become increasingly vulnerable.
So don't be a martyr. You work hard, and you deserve to see your dreams become a reality. And maybe more importantly, personally for me, is you deserve to reach your goals as an operator of the business, not just when you sell or have some crazy capital event.
Second constituent of being people first that we have to talk about is obviously employees. Now, being people first is most often associated with prioritizing your employees in decision making, And that makes sense. Our team is arguably where our biggest capacity lies for positive impact.
So at YLbit, we design and iterate our work around how it impacts every single individual's potential to feel fulfilled and how to allow our team to maximize their personal lives. In practice, here's how we see it. I believe that work is a part of life, a necessary part of life.
But if you can provide your folks with high quality work, it can be a very important, fulfilling part of life. But at the end of the day, life is priority. So our work, it needs to sync up with life, to add to it, not to take away from it.
And so for that reason, I never really liked this idea of work life balance because it requires one to be at the top at any given point. I guess, in my view, it's like a seesaw work life balance. Instead, I argue, we should integrate it into life, but only in a positive and meaningful way, allowing people to feel fulfillment from their work and using work as a way to fulfill our dreams and our goals.
That takes two parts, this fulfilling work and this prioritization of human over the business. When you can provide both of those pieces, which is what we do and what we strive for at WildBit, is what you end up with is an incredibly high performing team, a team that cares deeply for each other, a team without politics, that trusts each other, and really supports each other to do the work of our lives.
Fulfilling work and prioritization of humans is what it means to be a people first when you think about your employees. Now, what Weilbut is very well known for is that we operate on a thirty two hour work week. Everybody on the team works four days a week, thirty two hours.
We all have Fridays off, except for the support team. But what folks don't realize is that thirty two hours isn't like the perk. It wasn't goal. It was the end result, the end result of prioritizing the team in our decision making. We, as a company, are constantly fighting the status quo of how we all define work.
We prefer to base our processes internally as a company and our collaboration on science and experience and not necessarily the playbook that we're all given. As an example, we know that the most important tool for knowledge workers is the ability to efficiently use our brains.
I don't think that's I think everybody knows that. So we spend a lot of time at YLbit figuring out how we can maximize the brain's ability to do good work. For example, we don't work sixty hour workweeks because we know that the quality of work deteriorates dramatically the more time you spend using or torturing your brain.
We have flexible hours because we know that deep work, deep focused work, the stuff we get paid to do requires rest in between. So we encourage our team to walk away from their computers throughout the day, to refresh, to recharge their minds. And we encourage scheduling time to think.
I have time on my calendar specifically just to think, time away from the keyboard, to do deep thinking that predates any actual execution that we can do. And we even have cycles for collaboration and cycles for independent deep work across the entire company so that we can minimize thrashing between teams, any kind of confusion or stress around strategic planning or strategic thinking versus doing the actual work.
The other way in which we prioritize our employees instead of the growth of the business is by making sure that we recognize that fulfilling work means working on things that mean something to people. We can't always work on the most fun things in the world, but we can make decisions that add up to a really positive impact.
And for a while, that means the decision to run multiple products at once. There's a lot being said out there that if you have multiple products, can't grow one to be huge. You're going to divest your attention, divest your efforts. But we have multiple products for a few reasons, one big one being that we want to provide the team the ability to move around and experience new work within the company.
In a way, we look at having multiple products as an opportunity to allow our team to switch jobs within WildBit without ever having to leave WildBit because we know that every individual, every one of us, no matter our job description, has other interests, other skill sets.
We're all multidimensional. We can't be putting people in boxes. And so business can create a space for folks to be able to flex those different muscles. And in return, you're able to innovate and create multiple successful products because the team gets to work on great things.
We believe in this so much that we actually launched a product called People First Jobs this year that is currently a job board for folks to find more companies that prioritize people. Because we know, and we've seen this, that employees, especially high performing folks, are desperately looking for companies who feel this way.
We see this trend. People are choosing companies strictly based on whether or not they prioritize them, the employees, above profits and revenue. And in return, they reward the company by doing spectacular work. We launched People First Jobs, like I said, at the job board.
And we recently received this great quote from one of our People First companies. And he says, I'm reviewing over three hundred applicants for a product manager job, and only three percent to five percent of those are from People First jobs. But those are by far the best candidates other than direct referrals.
We know this to be true, and we know that by prioritizing employees above growth, you're going to attract a much higher caliber of folks. The third constituent in our people first business are your customers. But what does it mean to think of your customers in a people first way?
At WildBit, that means we think of our customers as people, real human beings, and not a number in a database somewhere that you can squeeze every ounce of profit out of. I think we can all notice ourselves as consumers and other consumers are starting to really direct their money towards organizations that they believe in, that maybe have missions bigger than themselves.
At WildBit, we service B2B customers, and we very much see that even in business purchases. While an employee can't solely prioritize the good feelings that they feel about a company in choosing a new vendor, they will go to bat for that company and really fight to select them.
We've seen this in we have an incredibly strong customer base at Postmark. We hardly spend any money on marketing. We have no sales team. And yet, over and over, we have tens of thousands of businesses that choose us over our competitors and stay with us for many, many years.
Even though those competitors have huge their huge public companies have huge marketing budgets. It's because we treat them as human beings, and they reward us by choosing us. There's kind of two practical examples of how we do this in the business. The first is in in the way in which we do customer support.
Now we have an incredible support team that is very good at helping you solve, you know, account related issues and things like that, but they take everything a step further. They can troubleshoot not only your account issues but also errors in your code, and even more significantly, really obscure email deliverability issues.
We do this because we understand that it's extremely unfair to expect our customers to dig into some insane Gmail deliverability issue that even the experts struggle to understand. Our customers have access to some of the best deliverability folks in the world directly. And we competitors don't do this. Why?
Because it doesn't scale, and I'm sure there's some formula where the cost benefit analysis doesn't add up. It costs us more money at YLP and time and people, but our customers rave about our support. They trust us. They know how much we respect and care for them.
And one unexpected benefit we found over the many years Postmark's eleven years old, I think, out of the many years of running Postmark is that not only do they love us while they're in the company, they bring us to new companies. We've seen over and over again a customer advocating internally for switching to Postmark, dedicating development time because they know we're going to do good by them because we've done good by them in the past.
The other way another way another example in which we think about our customers as humans is in product upgrades and product changes. We think about our customers and how they use our products as individuals, not in an abstract way. So, of course, any change in product development that we decide to make, a change that we think is important for expanding the offering, we make sure that it's always backwards compatible.
We always spend extra development time making sure that we don't screw anybody else's day because we thought it was important. We don't let our customers test our code. It costs us more money. We know that. But it means a lot to our customers.
And we know that there's nothing worse than having a vendor switch things up on you and cause you extra development work that you didn't you didn't expect or need. Thinking about your customers as human beings is often very uncomfortable, especially when I talk to other folks in other software companies.
Because I think you start to realize how crappy you've been treating them. It's much easier to think of them as these anonymous numbers, these things that just feed the beast that is your business. But at the end, you're never going to have the loyalty and the support of folks.
They will choose the company that treats them as individuals with respect. And they will repay your hard work as they have us with their loyalty and, maybe unexpectedly, with their forgiveness when we inevitably do something wrong. So fourth and final constituent, human constituent in a people first business is what we refer to as community.
Nick shared five constituents where he also talks about the environment. And in our at home or at home at YL, we think of the environment as part of our community because they think of the human beings and that community as being the recipients of whatever we do to the environment.
So for us, community includes environment. But we think of community really as just the people that are one step removed from our day to day business operations. And we think a lot about what can we do to positively impact the community by our work and our decision making.
So I think of community impact as almost these ripple effects. When I throw a stone into the water, it creates ripples. Our decisions are those stones, and the larger ones can create the most ripples. But even the smallest ones, they will have impact day to day.
So we think of how can the business have the most impact and make the most ripples. And prioritizing the community doesn't have to be philanthropy, right? I want to make sure that's clear. It's not always about donating money or donating time. There's other ways in which we can all, as businesses, think of this fourth constituent.
At Weil, but a few examples in which we prioritize the community. A lot of these are done actually on our Fridays off of work because we only work four days a week. We do it through mentorship. Our team has put together a program to mentor underrepresented folks looking to enter or advance their careers in the tech space.
We have a committee that came together to look at the environment and especially our impact on the environment, which is kind of tricky because we're a fully remote team. So we're looking at people's homes and their their where they how they receive energy and how long they work in front of their computers.
It's pretty pretty intense. But we figured out a way to continuously monitor and measure our usage. We figured out different processes and different we started different processes to mitigate our environmental our energy usages and looked into in the start of purchasing carbon offsets.
And then finally, we regularly release high quality projects to the community that we think can have impact. They can be small projects, and sometimes they're big ones. Like we have a free DMARC tool that allows brands to monitor for email spoofing. And that product's been used by tens of thousands of brands, some of the biggest brands in the world.
And we don't charge for it. It's totally free. But we believe in kind of making the internet a better place, and DMARC is just one small piece of that. Now, while we're a bigger company we're definitely not a big company a bigger company or a bigger team, I know that not everyone has the capacity to be able to do that work within the organization.
So I want to also remind folks that they're having impact on community through their employees as well. Every person who works for a company has an impact on others, their families, their friends, their local communities, their religious organizations. When we prioritize our employees and provide them with a safe, fulfilling space to work, they are having a positive impact on the community around them.
And those, in my view, are often our biggest opportunity for ripples, our biggest ripples, multiplying the impact on people with every new person that we hire, which is kind of why I'm not in love with the metric of revenue per employee that you see a lot of bootstrapped companies pay attention to.
It optimizes for hiring less people. And I've been thinking a lot about how do we hire more people? How do we have more ripples, more impact? I started earlier to say that I don't I believe that no two businesses are the same. So I just wanna remind everybody that I don't think our solution is for everyone.
I only offer our experience of how we have implemented a people first business by prioritizing these four human constituents, right? Founders, I ask you not to martyr yourselves for the sake of some future potential for success. When we risk it all, when we're vulnerable, we're ultimately unhappy along the entire way.
Employees deserve to work on things that are fulfilling. They deserve work that is fulfilling and that fits into their lives. No one should have to choose between work and life. So we have to build our business around their fulfillment, which has directly led, in my case, to our success of twenty years and counting.
We have to remember that customers are human beings, so we should treat them like that, empathizing with their experience in every single product decision that we make. You'll end up building a better product, and you'll gain that support and loyalty that I shared, which doesn't require a huge marketing and sales team to maintain or to replenish.
And finally, we have to think of whom else we can help with the business. What is the community around your business that you are able to impact positively? If we think about them in our everyday decisions, whether it's in policies for our teams or in time outside of product work, it will make a difference.
I think as Nick said last week, and I just want to reiterate, I think the evidence has become abundantly clear. The future of capitalism and the future of business is a steady march to a more ethical, people focused way of commerce. Our customers, our employees, and our communities, they're going to demand it.
There's no question about it. We all have a chance to just jump in early, and we can reap those benefits a little bit in advance of when everybody else wakes up. Being people first has been directly responsible for a while of its success for the last twenty years.
I can I I can I'm sure of that? For Chris and I personally, our successes and for our team. So I hope that we can be one many ultimate examples of how not only is it the right thing to do, it's also an extremely lucrative way to be in business.
So with that, I want to thank you all. Sorry for the earpiece. I did put up wildbit dot com slash turingfest. Has lots of resources, lots more to dig into if this stuff is interesting and valuable to all of you. Thanks. Okay. So let's let's jump straight into it with Natalie.
Natalie, thanks very much for that really thought provoking and interesting presentation. I've I've been a fan of WildBit for a while, but there's lots of stuff in there I didn't know. So that was that was great. So, yeah, first of all, you know, how how are you doing?
How are you how's life right now? And how's Wildwood doing? Hi. We are doing well. Things are things are okay. We're excited to be wrapping up, I think, twenty twenty and focusing on twenty twenty one. And I think we feel a lot like we're entering maybe a year with some new renewed hope.
So I I feel good. I feel tired, but definitely ready to kick start twenty twenty one. Yeah. I think we can all I think we can all agree on all of those points. Something that comes across in, you know, and I've I've heard you I heard you speak on Chris's Chris Savage's podcast a couple of months back.
I've seen some other interviews with you. I'm listening to your talk there. What the maybe the core value at WildBit seems to be respect for your customers, for your team. Is that would you agree with that? Yeah. I mean, I think it's all probably baked together.
There's there's a lot of words. Respect is definitely one of them. I think there's trust is also something that's really important. But maybe if we think about respect, I guess, one of the things that's really interesting about our history for Chris and I is that neither one of us are software developers.
So, you know, everything that we've built over the last twenty years has been all thanks to these incredible people that have chosen to work with us, trusted us, our customers in the early days buying SaaS products, you know, before that was a thing.
And so I think there's a tremendous amount of respect to all the people who have allowed us to get here. Because without them, we would be nothing. So like, we don't have this, I guess, we don't have a history of being the the people who do the work.
And, you know, with that, I think can come a lot of baggage. We come here with a huge support system of folks who have trusted us, and we respect greatly in return. It's yeah. It's it is interesting that you and your husband are running a software company, but not but not from software backgrounds.
So I'd I'd wanted to dig into the husband and wife part because that you didn't really discuss that in the in the presentation, maybe deliberately. And let me know if if if that's something that you don't wanna go into. But I'm fascinated by it.
I mean, my I love my wife to bits. She has her own business. Sometimes we sit down and talk about business. We disagree on virtually everything. We can never work together, I think. How do you how do you make it work? What are and what are the pros and cons, I guess, is maybe the the question.
Yeah. I I think, you know, I I can only speak obviously to our experience. So while but as twenty, Chris and I have been together for seventeen years. So he started, Chris started the business, the first couple years was doing client work. And then we got together, I think the a few things that, you know, we've in our reflection have kind of given credit to this working out so well.
One, I think we're, we have very opposite interests and opposite brains in a lot of ways. So in terms of co founders, we're a perfect match, because we have, we don't compete in what we wanna do. Right? Like, I like the front of the house stuff.
I like the the company branding and marketing and the business side of things, and he's a product person through and through. And so it works really well that way. I think on a very personal level, we're very grateful to be able to work this way because we're both very ambitious, very driven individuals.
And I think would have found tension in maybe having to compete for that attention to drive, you know, one of either careers forward. So the thing that we're really grateful for is, you know, when we're on vacation together, just the two of us, we scheme on wild, but together, you know, when we come home at the dinner table, if one has to, you know, do some work or think about something or has a problem on their mind, we can talk about it together.
There's no competing interests at home. And it's also pretty cool because we have two daughters and, you know, they know a lot about WildBit and they know when a new employee comes on, what their name is, where they live, you know, they're very well connected because it's a family business.
That's how we think of it. I think, you know, I don't know cons. Truly, I I say that we've been together for seventeen years to also say that it's been my entire adult life, most of Chris' adult life. So I don't know anything else.
And I I can't, you know, I can't speak for what would have been different. But I think for us, it's all pros. There was this one nine month stint when I graduated college where I went and did a thing, like, worked with a with a company based on my degree that I that I that I graduated with.
And those nine months, we, as a couple, fought more than we had previously. And I think a lot of that had to do with, you know, I was working sixty hours for random, you know, anonymous big corporation. And Chris was like, why would you give somebody else your time when we can be doing on something together?
I also grew up with entrepreneurs as parents. So it's very just it just fits my personality and fits my upbringing that we would be working on something together. So I don't no cons that I can think of, except for maybe sometimes we drive each other crazy, pushing each other a little bit too much.
But I also think that's probably a benefit. I like that. I like your point about growing up with entrepreneurial parents, and it's all a fit for your personality. It's yeah. I know what you mean. I I think a lot of founders are sort of condemned is not the right right word, but, like, we're we're sort of you know, we're entrepreneurs.
We that's what we do. We're not gonna work for other people probably, even though you're always working for your customers. So depends how you frame it. But I something I wanted to dig into from your talk is, I think, really, really important idea.
And so an idea that's getting more traction in the in the tech industry, something that maybe got subdued or or the message got lost somewhere around exits. And, you know, we've we've kind of been given this message for a long time in tech from, you know, very crafty VC messaging that it's all about the exit.
That's where the win is and, you know, put in the time now. It'll all be worth it in the end. And then at the same time, we have the stats that, you know, ten percent or less ten percent or fewer companies make it from startup.
So how how much do you think, you know, you're talking about it's gotta be it's gotta be fulfilling, but it's also gotta be rewarding on a financial front for the founders and for the team from, you know, the whole way through. How much do you think that mindset of it not being about the exit that it's about the you know, we're building something for the long term.
We wanna be earning and and enjoying what we're doing and productive and fulfilled all the way. How much do you think that changes the way founders operate, the way companies operate? I mean, for us, I think it's been kind of the driving force in a lot of ways.
It's funny because you're right, it's a tech thing. Well, maybe it's it's very prevalent in tech. I spent a lot of time with founders and other businesses, manufacturing, services, all kinds of stuff. And they build their businesses around this idea of like, what does this do for my family?
How can I how can I balance the needs of my family and our personal goals and the success of the business, you know? And I was researching for a talk a year or so ago, like founder salaries. And most of the data, of course, is around venture backed founders.
And, you know, they're being starved. I mean, they're not being paid at all. And there's, you know, some venture capitalists who believe that they should be paid just enough to just enough to eat, so that they're hungry and that they're gonna fight for it.
I guess my perspective has always been different, because entrepreneurship to me a lot is a lot about control. And I can control a lot more when I have more kind of tools at my disposal. And so like, when I think of this lottery ticket, or this idea that I'm gonna just struggle through it and hope one day wins that you to me, there's a lot of there's a lack of control there because there's a lot of external forces that are gonna be at play that are going to decide whether or not I'm gonna see some success.
For Chris and I, having clear financial goals and, you know, looking at the long term and saying, like, where do we wanna be financially has all has has really driven, like, the decisions to build longer term for long term products to to work with a team for a long time.
To also, I think, redirect how we work. You know, there's we've had a lot of soul searching as to just human individuals. It's like, what do we like to do? What do we not like to do? How can we structure the business in a way so that it fulfills us in what we want to be doing?
Right? Because this thing belongs to us. And I I think, you know, it's it's very obvious that the incentives are skewed in in the other scenario. Right? They're skewed towards these big wins on the backs of entrepreneurs, and there's some really big wins out there.
But, you know, in private, I talk to founders all the time, and we compare, you know, how much Chris and I make and have for a very long time, and we almost always make more money. And it's, like, so shocking to me because they have these bigger businesses with lot you know, lots more in revenue.
And Chris and I can accomplish personal goals faster and with more control. Right? Because this is my business, and we can decide what we work on and how we work on it. And I I also I'm I'm always kind of surprised by how how shocking that is to people, because they think that that means that we're not growing or not investing back in the business.
But there's so much room there, and especially in SaaS products, because our margins are so great, that there's there's room to do both. The my favorite thing to to to talk about with other founders is to just have them write down what their goals are.
Like, Chris and I have this very concrete sense of what we want. We know how much money we wanna make. We know what our we want our work to look like. We're constantly looking at that. We're constantly evaluating it. And I can write down on a sheet of paper, like, this is what I want for a house.
This is what I want for vacation. This is what we need. Like, we we have it all mapped out. And I often sit down with founders and say, just map it out. What do you need? And it's quick to you you realize quickly how little you think you how much more you think you need than what you actually need.
Right? And that you don't need these hundred million dollar exits that you're chasing and are most likely gonna fail at, but you can actually succeed in those financial goals. And what it does for the team, I guess, is another constituent is I'm very transparent with the team that, like, you know, for this to be successful, like, we need to be making enough money so that selling it isn't interesting to me.
Because they want y but to also be around, and I want it to be around. So there has to be this, like, balancing act to make sure that YOB is as valuable to me as an operator as it would be to sell it.
I think there was a DHH that a while ago, and it's always resonated with me that, like, even our tax incentives are or our tax structures incentivizes selling more than operating. Right? Like, we have capital gains tax in the US that is lower than, you know, income tax.
So there's just like a lot of structural things that I think are built into these exits, these capital events. And, you know, I don't know what that really does in the long term. For us, it's been always the other way around. Yeah. DHH has always got some interesting thoughts on on well, on everything, but particularly around this kind of thing.
On the on the the capital or the taxation incentives in the UK, it's even more, I guess, perverse, you might say. So capital gains tax in the UK, think, is at twenty percent, but there's an entrepreneurial relief at ten percent. So if you sell your company and the company is under, I think, ten years old, you you only pay ten percent on the on the profits, which is incredible.
Like, that's gotta be one of the lowest in the western world. And and there's there's discussion about it in entrepreneurial circles, even at government level, think about, you know, is it an effective is it is it incentivizing the right thing? Because I think most founders don't really get into the business financially.
Of course, the financial incentives are part of it, but it's rarely it's it's never all of it, think, and it's rarely the even the most important, I think. There's a question that's come in, just switching topic a little bit, from, Adafei Honorim. I'm not very hope I'm not getting that too badly wrong.
Question is around the four day week. And what do you think about the approach to push towards the four day week and New Zealand being mentioned as a country that's talking about it, Unilever as a a massive company that's that's also mentioning it.
Obviously, it's something you guys embrace. And how how did you get to the start of it? I there's a company in in in Edinburgh in Scotland called administrate, a software company here, and they moved to a four day week a few years ago.
And I think it was a bumpy enough ride to get there, and some tea some teams within their organization got to the four day week sooner than others, etcetera. How how was it for you? And how I guess, how important is it to your your culture and your company strategy?
Yes. So I was just thinking, I think this is year four for us that we've been in a four day work week. Think yeah. Four sounds right. So we, you know, I've I've talked I've written a ton about this and talked about it too.
So I don't wanna, like, go too deep into it. But for us, the thirty two hour work was a result of really looking internally and figuring out how we work and what's important. And so we're always a company that really prioritize the focus deep work.
And in Cal Newport's deep work, the book, he mentions a lot about the brain's capacity for deep, meaningful work maxing out of four hours a day. And I think, you know, as any knowledge worker can attest, I think we all know that to be true.
And even four hours of really, really focused work is really hard to accomplish. So we just looked at it and said, well, four times five is twenty. And so what are we doing for forty hours a week? And that was kind of really a simple of a let's kick it off as an experiment and see what happens.
After a year of doing thirty two hour work weeks, we reflected and felt like we accomplished a lot more in that year than we had in many years past. And we attribute a lot of that to being extremely intentional. Like, you don't just throw in a four day work week.
You think about all the ways in which you can empower that time to be really successful. So we got rid of a lot of meetings. We are extremely intentional with what we work on. We spend time kind of planning and spend time synchronously planning as a remote team so that we can separate.
I think I I said, like, we can separate when we plan and when we work, and that allows people to really manage their time. And especially for us, the thirty two hour week is a result of just tremendous trust in the individuals. Like we look at every person on the team as an a responsible adult.
And our job as a company is to provide an environment in which they can do deep, meaningful work in a peaceful, supportive team, and their responsibilities to come and be as productive as they can in that environment. And that's kind of the compact.
And so when you have tremendous trust in people, and you give them the space and autonomy to do great work, you'll see you you actually get so much, like, much more work done in thirty two hours than you ever did in four in in five day work weeks.
And I I we have my head of marketing, Justine, who might be listening. She told me once that when she came on, she works harder in these four days than she did when she worked five days a week. Because it's intense. It's good quality work.
And it's just and it's better for you. And then on the flip side, what you get is, which I think is extremely meaningful, is we're not just maximizing productivity. Because if we're maximizing productivity, we'd probably do five, six hour days. Because, you know, you just start to drain as the day goes on.
But we're we're kind of balancing peak productivity with regeneration. And so we want that three day consecutive day off, three three days consecutive off to regenerate and give your brain space. Because we know, you know, what we know about the brain, what little we know about the brain, we know that it does a lot of work subconsciously when we're when we're just physically active and when we're doing things.
And so we want to give the brain that space to solve really difficult problems in a longer period of time. So that refresh and regeneration frequently turns into really inspired Mondays. People are productive and really just love their work. So it yeah. I mean, it's it's basically a defining factor of who we are.
I I attribute a lot of our success to that. But I I always worry that people look at it as a perk or some kind of way to, like, work less. It's it's we we have a hardworking, highly productive, highly effective team. It's just that they can do a lot of work in a lot less time.
And I guess with more free time, they're probably happier in just generally in themselves. Right? I mean, something one of the slides in your presentation, the one about the story of WildBit, the history, you mentioned that you've got thirty two family members in seven countries, think was the phrase.
I just wanted to ask you about that and the idea you know, the analogy of family versus team. And, you know, we we hear lots of I know. We see sports metaphors used a lot, all that kind of stuff, you know. It it but, obviously, you've got a particular and very special culture by the sounds of it.
What's your turn your turnover, I'm I'm guessing, is of people is is pretty low. And what does hiring and firing look like in in WildBit? I don't think I've ever measured turnover, and I can't say I mean, we've had moments where we grew too fast or where we're working on the wrong things.
You kinda have those moments in twenty years. But Eugene on our team just celebrated his sixteenth anniversary with Wildeit. We've got a couple folks that are in their twelves, tens, eights. So like, people stay. Definitely more than the what's the average now? Two years or eighteen months or something crazy like that.
But, you know, hiring and firing. I think we are very particular with making sure that our messaging is honest and transparent on the type of folks that are usually successful here. We like I said, we we try to create an environment where people can do their best work.
It's an extremely caring team. One of the things that I hear a lot when folks come to Weilbit, you I've never experienced, because I never worked anywhere else, is that at Weilbit, there's a lot less politics, a lot less fighting over work or fighting over territory.
Everybody kind of just really cares about the mission and cares about supporting each other to do the work of their lives. I think firing, you know, in a in a similar way, we are a very caring community of folks. And so we take hiring extremely seriously.
So firing is not a thing we have to do very often, and we try to really avoid it. If anything, we spend a lot of time making sure that WildBit's the right place for people. And if there is if there is a change that's happened either in somebody's life or in the business's life, where it needs to be a separation, we do look long transitions.
We really support people in finding what's next for them, and making sure that they feel connected to the team as they make those transitions and connected afterwards. So it's, you know, it's it's like it says, I think to your comment on the family, we took that off the website, I think, some point, it's still on my slide.
I go back and forth on that. I I understand the pushback against family. I I really genuinely do. The that title, the term family was on there because for a long time as a small team that, again, like we've been together for a long time.
You know, a lot of us like got married while working a while, but had our kids, bought our first house, you know, and we spent a lot of time together. And we had four families that moved to the US to from from different countries, and so, like, our kids played together.
And so there is this sense of true commitment, but I do realize you don't pick your family. You, you know, maybe pick your friends. But so, you know, I I I get the sentiment. But regardless of how it looks on the outside, it's it's truly on the inside a team of people who care very deeply about each other and care deeply about supporting each other to do this work.
And to show kind of to be an example of how there are opportunities to be very successful companies that care deeply about human beings, like those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive. It's inadvertently, I think, or subconsciously on my part, the programming for this year's TuringFest ended up including quite a few people and quite a few companies that think along these similar lines, which and, you know, philosophically, I'm I'm pretty aligned with that as well.
You know, we had Chris Savage from Wistia speak. We had Rand Fishkin on from SparkToro. We had Nick from from HelpScout. On Thursday, we've got Paldi from from Balsamiq. Yeah. I don't know. In in other years, we've had I mean, we've also had some VC backed companies.
We've had Eyes Attle. We've had Shopify, we've had Spotify. You know, there's there's there's lots of there's lots of different perspectives on it. But, yeah, there's an interesting conversation, I think, happening in maybe twenty twenty in the year that it's been has prompted a bit more introspection.
But definitely, we're I think we're all starting to think more about what work we do and how we do it, where we do it, why we do it. And it's great to see I'm really glad that you made that your presentation because it's it's a great contribution to that to that discussion.
Final question before we wrap, Natalie, and it's a question that's come in from Paldi who's who's watching. That's Paldi Gulcioni from from from Balsamiq. And his question is, what's the next big people first project that you have planned for WildBit? And I don't know if he already knows the answer to this.
Is this a plant? That's not fair, probably. It's a plant. No. Oh, gosh. I don't know. I mean, I think we there's a bunch of really big ideas brewing right now. We have dedicated all of January as a company to just think together.
And so we're like not doing any product work. We're obviously supporting our customers, but we're not doing any product work for the whole month of January to talk about some bigger things. I think the the biggest project that I we'd like to come out, at least in twenty twenty one, is a better documented kind of based on experience, a better documented way of being people first.
I think there's a lot that we ourselves wanna understand more, like, what does that mean? And and how do you do it in practice? And how do you maybe use that as an example to apply in your own organization? I don't I can't there's there's projects, Pelley, you know, there's always projects, but I think people first jobs, I'm super excited about that.
It's kind of it was born as a job board. But what we're hearing from a lot of people first companies is that there's a lot of desire to connect as a community and to share ideas and experiences. And from job seekers, there's a lot of interest in kind of having a seat at that table, I think, right, having sharing that perspective with companies who actually care, what is it like looking for a job?
What kind of jobs are meaningful? What kind of information do you want to know when you seek a job from a company that, know, cares? And I think that that dialogue together is really, it can be really important for what my ultimate goal is, is just to have many, many, many more people first companies, right?
Many more companies that are listening to that inner voice that says, like, is this really how I have to run a business? And to, like, finally be able to feel comfortable in saying like, oh, okay, I can be both successful and focus on the right things and be ethical and and and do meaningful work.
Right? Like, they're not mutually exclusive. So that's my ultimate goal. But in terms of, like, an actual product, I'll text you in February. Okay. That's by the way, I absolutely Definitely plans. Idea that yeah. He's got his agenda. I love the idea that you're taking January as a whole team to think.
I mean, like, I think that again, I could maybe go back to that idea of of VC backed companies and where growth is one of the high priorities. It's hard to imagine that kind of company taking a whole month to to figure out what's next.
But it sounds great. I mean, it sounds like such a good I can't cultural and sort of strategic position. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I guess, know, we end up being what we what we do and what we know. Right? So, Natalie, we we are out of time.
Unfortunately, I feel like we can have a longer chat here. Let's let's do this in person sometime somewhere, you know, because at some point, we're all going to be able to hang out together again soon soon ish. Maybe vaccinations have started in the UK today.
Hey, I saw that. Saw that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's progress. Light at the end of the tunnel. Okay. Well, listen. Thank you so much for great presentation, great chat. And and like I said, a really interesting and thoughtful contribution to a bigger debate that, you know, we're trying to be part of at Turing Fast, but I think a lot of a lot of us in well, I guess everywhere.
In everything we do, we're we're we're starting to think about things maybe a bit differently, which has gotta be a good thing. Right? For sure. Okay, Natalie. Thanks very much, and we'll see you again soon. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Bye. Bye bye.
Alright. So, yeah, tons of, tons of stuff to think about. I I don't know about all of you, but I've I've found myself, at the end of all of these sessions, really thinking about the a lot of the stuff that's come up in the talks afterwards and, you know, discussing it at home in the evening and, like, probably my wife that she's gotta watch some of these.
I mean, of course, watches all of them. I'm sure. But it's there's there's been lots of fascinating subjects and and topics and even just little tactical insights throughout the the past eight weeks. We've covered tons of ground along our build, grow, lead axis.
It's been there've been some some meanders here and there, but mostly, I think, interesting diversions and and segues. We've one more one more session to go, not today, unfortunately. As I mentioned earlier, Spectra Sala has had a family emergency. She can't join us today.
We'll try and get her talk recorded and out to all of you guys as soon as we can. But on Thursday, we have our final session of TuringFest twenty twenty. We'll be wrapping up after eight weeks, but we've got a great one to end on.
Paldi from Balsamiq, who has already been making mischief in the questions there today. He and Nat Natalie are our old friends, I think. So really looking for one of the most thoughtful, interesting people in in the industry, built a great company in balsamic.
Lots of you will know it. So looking forward to that on Thursday. But for today, we're wrapping up. Just again, a quick thank you to the sponsors that have made this all possible, particularly the the headliners, if you like Amazon Dev Center Scotland, Mailchimp, Deliveroo, and Current Health.
If by the way, almost all of the the the company sponsored TuringFest this year, almost everybody's hiring. So if you are thinking about making a move, there's lots of jobs worth checking out on the platform. It's in the expo or in the job center.
That's it for today. Enjoy. I hope you get to enjoy all of the if you missed any, check out the videos from the past seven weeks, and we'll see you on Thursday for our last session. So take care. See you then.
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