foreign [Applause] thank you so much um so I struggled a lot with the keynote topic for today essentially I wanted to write something that I'm not sure I'm supposed to write some like gotcha done or how to deal with of building your company it always will end up with like a crazy weird word so just with a safe option like Focus nice the clicky thing works my name is Marcelo I'm CEO and co-founder of remote and you know the only reason I'm in sort of entitled to be here uh is to talk talk to you
about my experience as a Founder someone building stuff um you know how you know what I've done as well remote is a company of a thousand people we're all across the world um all distributed we don't have an office we started in 2019 and we built you know very big large organization and you know if not my first time being a co-founder uh let alone you know a leader in a company so today my talk is going to be you know not to tell you exactly what to do but what you should avoid because you
know advice goes it's very free um but it's not doesn't mean it's good so I'm going to talk to you about two phases two things that usually go when you're building out a product or building out a company for one um let's talk through how you build a company and then we'll talk a bit about how to build a business and that why and why that is somewhat different as far as building your company goes there are three important things ego mutation and outcomes one of the things that I learned at my own expense is
that throughout the years the one thing that is not needed while you're building a business or a company is your ego it adds nothing to the table if anything it actually detracts you're leading a lot of people it's a bunch of people um either small and you're very small very young young as a company or quite big so if everyone being brings their ego to the table you're probably gonna double the amount of people in that room as well so ego is often confused as being proud being happy being delivered or even pushy has nothing
to do with being successful at all ego is typically a manifestation of your own our own intrinsic instinct to win above everything it's like almost like a survival mode but it most often detracts from your your the end game so I've never seen a case where the ego actually add anything to the discussion to the success or the role of the company then it goes through mutation you know as people um we're not yet robots yet big emphasis on that we change quite a lot we learn we grow companies go through the same process and
what we know from building a company is that companies as a call as far as culture goes they change drastically every 12 to 18 months if you're in a company building a product you understand if you look back where you were 12 to 18 months ago it's probably a completely different place too right so when setting out to build you know a team hiring growing this is something that has to be very well defined even with the expectation of your own employees your colleagues because that means that either the company is going to outgrow a
lot of the people but also that the people will all grow the company and the odds are it will happen quite a lot and so if the rules of the game are quite explicit you avoid situations like you know someone trying to get onto a job that they are not no longer fit for or they actually are fit for something bigger more impactful and that if the company is aware of this it is fundamentally true that your chances for Success together are a lot better but at the same Pace if none of the parties realizes
this then you get to a point where you you're in a company for three four years and maybe you feel that your career stalled or maybe the company feels that you're no longer suited to do the job that you're doing and often is the case that it's good thing that you both part ways because you decide to leave the company or that the company decides that you know you're great at what you're doing but not to move forward with the company or in that role that you thought you'd be taken so level the expectation of
that even writing that down as you hire someone you know make sure that you're both set up in a in a sort of employer employee relationship that is quite transparent so ultimately the last item that is super important in my opinion is to understand what matters for every company for every business for any project product project task is what comes out of it it's very easy to get bogged down with the details of you know the task of doing the thing of the meeting about the meeting for the meeting or even the bike shedding of
the meeting so ultimately what you get out of things is the only thing that matters if you go through you know several processes of discussions you know goals Milestones road maps discussions around every any kind of topic the outcomes are the only things that matter yes you can look at all the work that went through it all the investment that went through it but if you achieved nothing or if you achieved half of we wanted to to achieve that doesn't mean that you were successful that means that you were a busy bee but probably you
didn't go where you wanted to go so these are the three main things that as far as building your company goes it is important to keep in mind like of course there are many situations you know hurdles problems um that you're going to face throughout the whole process and you know it's fine not to be fine in several situations you will not have the answers but at least if you if you realize that these three things are core to how you run a business you understand that without ego you can look at things pragmatically you
can analyze your data and make the best decisions out of it if you understand that both your business your projects the changes that you know the market pushes on you or that you push on the market make have you changes on your business in your company then you're ready to adapt to it and you're not clinging to the status quo of what a company is or should look like or used to look like six months ago and ultimately how that together drives the outcomes the success of that company so ultimately as a baseline it enables
you to start building your business so as long as you have a baseline to operate internally you can start building and addressing your needs externally one of the things that I've learned you know is building a business as big as remote and as challenging complexes remote is that it's super easy to you know follow the rabbit right go down the rabbit hole especially when you think you know you have all the anxiety if you're you know pumped with all that you know that need and drive to get stuff done and you know you have this
pool 10 customers saying they also want that feature another 20 customers saying they're super Keen to sign if you add that one thing but all this data all this information means nothing because if you're not able to hyper prioritize it means that you're gonna half has a bunch of things rather than you know focus and actually deliver one it's a very big difference when you get to the end of a quarter semester whatever you want to measure and you say well actually we have six half features all in the way great how many customers are
affected by that none how much revenue can you drop by that none so hyper prioritization comes when it's painful to go through the motions of every day and say yes I will not do that extra thing that I think it's important and as Leaders it's very easy for you to say well yeah but I really need this like my customers really also need that and I could be really good and it's gonna take less time that I'm gonna end as many capacity or resources odds are you're always going to need more time always going to
need more people and you're gonna end up distracting you from the main goal so hyper prioritization is one of the things that I've found is more Super common across all founders that you say hey are you prioritizing yeah absolutely so how many things are you doing and then comes the shopping list of all the things that are super important for your business like yeah my business can survive without these 10. now the fact is that probably from those 10 only one will drive your business forward in the next year or in the next six months
and what you're doing actually is adding more stuff to your plate that you're and you're not going to complete them all at all and so it's important to understand you know hyper period decision happens when from a grocery shopping list you can pick only one to two things or three tops if you're really good and really big and you have the money for it and the rest is just slated to be reduced if hits the fan you know that all those things can go and you're only going to focus on that and so you apply
Relentless iteration and dedication to those items and yes you're not going to deliver 10 things but you're going to deliver three and then more three and then more three and then more three and you can measure your progress and you can start capitalizing on that progress too and as far you know we're bombarded every single day with customer requests customer complaints with internal ideas especially you know all founders have great ideas in the shower either because you know they spend too much time on that or just they they take their time to cry a bit
in the shower and so there's always going to be room in source for inspiration across all what you do all that you do but then how do you use high Auto prioritize you know I've spoken about you know the things about building a company and the three motors but you know how does hyper prioritizing help you go through you know picking from that list so this is what I usually call taming chaos well it's a sort of a fancy name but I needed to put something there I don't really know what and so mathematically speaking
you can look at this from a very well known very old mathematical issue which is local maximum and Global maximum local maximum local maximum so on local maximum this is usually what we reach when we have a big set of problems a big set of features a big set of things that we want to tackle because the noise is so so so big and so loud that your quality of signal to noise ratio is very poor that means that because you're not really able to fire proprietary ties that you're going to be last with the
things that you think are the best for you to do now the problem is when you're blindsided by the what you don't know that you don't know and this is what leads you to the global maximum the global maximum tells you from the whole universe what is that one thing that you could be doing to propel your business for your team force your project forward at the best available speed so this is typically done when you're able to read the whole universe in a way section how you read it and also understand it and Hyper
prioritize helps you do that and also is fueled by that process and there are many ways in many you know Frameworks that you can read about it through experience I managed to you know get through something very basic you'll probably not read about this anywhere I made it up it works for me if it doesn't work for you well tough to be you but to be honest it does work very well in a matter of simplicity so if you think through a capacity pipeline a processing pipeline you get an input you end up with an
output right these things are typically uh you know what do you see and you know in a shopping store right you you have someone processing your your shop your stuff it goes beep and then pass it on and you have you can measure all that goes around from speed capacity efficiency how fast then can that person process that you know how many things that can that person process in parallel and how well does it get done and so if you look at you know any project any company any task from these three angles and they
can take completely different aspects let me give you an example from engineering perspective you have a team and you need to understand how good that team are doing because you need to understand like if you've reached a local maximum or if you can improve how that team is doing right maybe you have a hunch that that team is fast enough or good enough maybe you think that they're not really good enough so you need to understand if they reach the local maximum or if they're already in a global maximum so the way to declutter information
is to try to match it so find the one thing that Maps speed speed could mean different things across the business for an engineering team it could be how fast you ship features how fast do you fix a bug or how fast how fast you you attend or reply to the first ticket capacity is essentially how many things can you process at the same time how many features does this team ship in a given cycle how many things get tackled in a different uh same cycle and efficiency how many bugs are created how many you
know escalations technical escalation do you have or even downtime do you have so ultimately you can spin this around for different aspects in different you know timelines but ideally you're going to single out the three more important things per stage of your company be it Revenue be it customer success or wherever they are and you balance them across the three edges and so by doing that it brings a very good picture of overall how your business is doing and so doing this you know you can get whatever data you want but it forces you to
hyper prioritize on these three parameters and you can absolutely be certain that if you look into the three you know top things that you could be doing at a certain point in time you're going to focus only on that and you know by the theory of optimization if you focus on the three biggest problems and you eliminate them your system by default is optimized so applying a very short you know efficiency model like this it helps you to propel quite forward in completely hyper optimized way now of course this matters nothing if you keep doing
it apply try to apply that to 10 different things and that's why a hyper prioritization is super important so ultimately ations of you know a quarter it's fine to look at this and say okay now I've eliminated you know my biggest problem with speed I'm actually going to change this into something else you'd be amazed at how fast you know this can Propel both your team or your projects because of how much Focus can drive a business and how much efficiency it can bring onto what you're doing on a day-to-day basis it you know I
can promise you that this will work 100 in all the cases that you have but I can promise you that's going to be it's going to help you do better than not knowing because when you don't know what you don't know then you're going to be completely focused on a local maximum much rather than a global maximum so on a last topic you know how do you know if hyper prioritization and taming the amount of chaos that you have is working well it's quite simple now it's for one you keep the main thing the main
thing if you ask anyone around your team your business they should all say the same things if you have three priorities if you have one priority if you ask anyone in the business and you can do this today maybe you think well my company's pretty much hyper prioritized we all very much focus on delivering what we need to deliver easy do that exercise walk around there's a very old way of doing business which is Walking the Floor you talk to all your employees ask them the same things what is the main thing for you and
if you see the disparity and the responses that means that you're super far away from what do you think you are and I can bet that you know all of you that think well but we're Super Hyper prioritized 99 you would not be hyper prioritized even you know we try to apply this as much as humanly possible and to a point that is painfully simple and painfully simple I mean if you're a leader you're always thinking about new things that extra thing that thing that you also want to nail that new goal that new business
line it's going to hurt when you wake up and then you think well I'm doing these things but I should also be doing that and also to add that so at the end of the day it's going to be painful for you because you'll you'll have to remind yourself that you cannot expand upon that that you're going to get stuck but when you see the results of your discipline then you understand how success looks like so these have been the things that I've been following the next the last few years you know it's a very
simple approach um there's no magic to it there's no secret sauce there's no rocket science behind it um this is not behind any you know 300 Page book but this is something that I've we've put together across a lot of different iterations different models growing many different teams and learnings that resonate across you know an entire organization that spans across the world it is about keeping things simple it is about hyper focus and reducing chaos to its minimum form and only that you have a glimpse of you know what Focus means to your business and
that's it thank you so much going to be here [Applause]
