Beyond The Code

Nick Holzherr (00:02.36)
Absolutely.

Maulik Sailor (00:03.558)
Wonderful. Bat, here you go.

Beth (00:06.8)
All right, well, hi, I'm Bethany Ward, Marketing Manager at CodeMonk. Today I'm joined by Nick Holzer, founder of whisk.com, which was acquired by Samsung and is now Samsung Food, and Malik Saylor, founder and CEO of CodeMonk.ai, a platform for employers to build and manage flexible tech teams anywhere. So let's start with you, Nick. Tell us about your journey at Samsung. How did you end up managing the global team at Samsung?

Maulik Sailor (00:44.106)
I think, sorry, do you want to pause that?

Beth (00:50.457)
Sorry?

Maulik Sailor (00:54.077)
I think we lost you for a moment. Maybe your Wi-Fi is dropping off. I'm not sure.

Nick Holzherr (00:57.872)
Yeah, your Wi-Fi is... We can't really hear you.

Beth (00:58.858)
See you soon, guys.

Maulik Sailor (01:02.826)
I think you did stop and start again, but I think your Wi-Fi is dropping.

Beth (01:06.561)
Any better?

Nick Holzherr (01:16.876)
There's a setting, right? So what I'm not sure how much you've used Riverside, but Riverside basically records a high quality version of the audio and the video at the same time as it, we're doing this podcast and then it uploads it, right? At the same time. So you should have a little button that says like, percentage uploaded. If yours is low, it means, oh, she's gone. Yeah, I imagine hers is low, right? And her internet is like being doubly used for both this.

Maulik Sailor (01:30.67)
Yep. Yes. Thank you.

Nick Holzherr (01:46.448)
And so she can probably change the setting and then upload it after the...

Maulik Sailor (01:50.014)
Yeah, I think so. I think so. But normally it should just do it on its own, change the upload on its own.

Nick Holzherr (02:00.152)
maybe she just has truly terrible internet.

Maulik Sailor (02:02.542)
Yeah, possibly, possibly. Or where she's at, you know, it's not really good connectivity. All right. You see, if she comes is fine. If not, then maybe you and me will just get out. You know, I'll just be the host and, you know, record this basically.

Nick Holzherr (02:20.416)
Absolutely. Sounds good.

Maulik Sailor (02:22.57)
Okay, good. All right, let's give her that minute and apologies for this, you know, not something you would expect on a good day. Today is like really bright and sunny.

Nick Holzherr (02:33.713)
Not where I am.

Maulik Sailor (02:35.021)
Don't.

Nick Holzherr (02:38.055)
It's alright, you know, well, no, it's not alright, it's terrible, it's grey. Grey as...

Maulik Sailor (02:43.699)
Yeah, but I miss, yeah, it's good here. It was very cold, but it was cold in the morning, you know. I went for, so my daughter just goes to a school nearby and I do like a morning run.

Nick Holzherr (02:58.9)
As in you do the morning school run or you do an actual run.

Maulik Sailor (03:02.434)
Mm.

like a proper run.

Nick Holzherr (03:06.852)
Oh, like in like a sports ball run. Ah, cool.

Maulik Sailor (03:10.258)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I dropped my school to the doctor and I'll just basically run like once he's like so he's into cycling. So she will cycle and I'll run behind her. And I tried to keep it up with her like a school drops. And this morning was actually quite chilly. It was nice, not gray, you know, not raining, quite sunny, actually, when right now it's very sunny, but it was quite chilly. Almost four degrees, you know, it was so in.

Nick Holzherr (03:23.224)
Cool.

Nick Holzherr (03:38.26)
Wow, yeah, that is a chilly winter time in the UK.

Maulik Sailor (03:44.306)
Okay, cool. I think that just message with that sees like struggling with wifi. So I think I'll just continue as a host. Let me change, let me just switch to host and yeah, I'll, I'll just drop and rejoin and change to host and we'll continue with this. Okay.

Nick Holzherr (04:01.932)
Cool.

Awesome, sounds good.

Maulik Sailor (04:46.422)
That's pretty good.

Maulik Sailor (04:51.819)
Did you just have like a quick, quick drum? That's good, that's good. So I'm the host now. I think we'll just continue with the plan recording. But before I kick off, you know, are you like a professional drummer or just hobbyist? That's good.

Nick Holzherr (04:54.624)
Just a quick drum.

Nick Holzherr (05:01.688)
Cool.

Nick Holzherr (05:07.972)
No, just for fun, just for fun. Something to break up the day, right? Something I can do in two minutes between calls when I've got just something to... otherwise I'm just on looking at a screen all day and it sucks. Cause yeah, I also got myself an SAD light. When I turn it on, it changes the whole thing, right? It's like weirdly slightly flickery, but it's like super bright light in my face to try and wake me up, you know, mimic the sunshine because we have such shit sunshine in the UK.

Maulik Sailor (05:15.995)
Yeah, that's pretty good.

Maulik Sailor (05:21.427)
Yeah. That's the. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (05:37.103)
Yes. All right. I think we're good to kick off and I think it's already starting to record. I think it left it on from the last one. But it's good. I think in three to one, we'll kick it off. Okay. As you as ready you are. Okay. In three to one, we are going live. Hello and welcome to

Nick Holzherr (05:39.712)
All right, cool.

Nick Holzherr (05:46.924)
Great.

Maulik Sailor (06:07.151)
which was acquired by Samsung family recently. We'll be talking about journey that Nick has undertaken, some tips about building your globally distributed tech teams, some upcoming challenges and so forth. And we are just hosting him today. This is first in our series, so quite a chuff to have Nick Yu as our inaugural guest. I think your journey has been impressive.

So why don't we start with your journey? You know, how did you get where you are today over the last few years?

Nick Holzherr (06:46.628)
Thanks for having me on the podcast. So it's been a kind of a long journey and even Wisk, now Samsung Food, has been really not just one company, but three or four companies as it's kind of evolved and as we've tried to find product market fit. But we started off as a consumer application trying to...

basically solve a personal problem I had, which was how do I get all the ingredients for the recipes that I want to cook in a way that feels less burdensome? And how do I, um, make that cooking experience, uh, go wrong less often, um, as I was kind of learning to cook and learning to cook for myself just after university that we, the, we tried that for a couple of years, we raised money. Um, for that I had previously been a contestant on the BBC apprentice.

which had got a lot of media coverage. I got to the final. That meant I had lots of people come to me and offer investment. So we've got some cash for this business. The challenge that we faced really was how do you get user acquisition in a consumer business? So we had to basically restructure the whole business when we basically failed to get enough users. And looking back, we actually didn't do that badly. Like, you know, we had about half a million users, I think.

time, but it just didn't feel like we'd get to the place where we wanted to get to. So we built a B2B platform, selling our core technology that we've basically built to big, big grocery retailers like Tesco and Walmart and Amazon and publishers. And then we expanded that. It's kind of like a third phase into some building the platform for some big IOT companies like Bosch and Samsung.

Um, and then we were acquired by Samsung and, um, Samsung sort of saw that we had basically integrated powering a lot of their experiences for a lot of their hardware or not a lot, but for the digital appliances space, in particular, the fridge, but not just the fridge, also other appliances that they had. And they've got the smart fridge with a massive screen on it. Right. So we, we basically powered the shopping lists, the meal plans, the lot of the images about for content there, um, the matching of the pantry to the shopping list. Uh, so we. And then.

Nick Holzherr (09:09.832)
As we joined Samsung, it became clear that the opportunity that we actually saw right at the beginning of our journey in WISC, you know, of building a consumer proposition made a lot of sense at Samsung because they have distribution, you know, being able to distribute a app through the hardware they have, they've got these screens and these, and these devices in almost every home in the world. And, you know, if you can install it on that device set, then you actually get to users in a way that you

that you don't have to go and acquire your own users with paid ads or whatever. But in that journey, we have scaled right at the beginning, we scaled to 20 people. We then went down to like three people and then we went up to like 10 people and then down to five again, and then back up to 20. And we were like really trying to find product market fit. And it, you know, it, it's different businesses. It was a different business model in that journey, different people, different experiences, um, and learned a lot. Uh, it's been great fun.

And of course, at the end, we, you know, getting the exit to Samsung was a good outcome for shareholders. It was a good outcome because we then scaled to a hundred, over a hundred people with them. Um, so it was a good ending to the story. Um, although it's not ended yet, of course, it's, it's still, it's still ongoing. Um, but in terms of the whisk journey and the founding story, that kind of, you know, the exit is kind of an end. Um, uh, so a good end, but definitely lots of turbulence and lots of learnings. And.

definitely not a smooth straight journey on the way up.

Maulik Sailor (10:39.195)
Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I think as we are trying to scale this code platform as well, we have seen similar experiences where we are like few months we are growing, we have like, you know, quite a few users, signing up to the platform requesting services and all a few months. Then it's like, okay, you know what? We are not getting users. We are not getting customers. You know, what do we need to change? How do we pivot?

Uh, you know, we go back to the drawing board and again, try to figure out, okay, what's going wrong, what's working for us, what's not working, uh, and take the next step, right? So it's, it's never the straight line, you know, as a founder, uh, you know, it's quite interesting that it's now always a straight line and it's a lot of, uh, experimentation, uh, that we end up doing. And, uh, we'll come back to that, uh, journey, but you know, you, you mentioned about your, your current team at, uh, Samsung, uh, I.

I think you said just more than 100 people. So how is your current team structured? You know, I would be great to know about that.

Nick Holzherr (11:46.892)
So we're globally, we made in 2016, before we were acquired, we decided to go fully distributed as in remote first, not, and we had some offices at that time still, but that's gonna be made the big switch. And we've always had team members that were not, were located in a different country, right from the starting of founding in 2012. But 2016, we made that full switch. When we were acquired by Samsung, they were like,

We had never acquired a company that was fully distributed, right? They were like, so can we come and announce the acquisition in your office? And we're like, well, we actually don't have many people in an office. There's no real place to come. And they were like, could you bring them all? And we're like, well, we could bring them all, but what are we going to tell them all that why they're coming to the UK and why they have to apply for visas, which might take like two months. And like, so it's kind of a weird moment for them as well. I think where they're like, wow, we're acquiring a company that's like fully distributed and that's like so.

like so different to what Samsung was used to in pre-COVID in 2019. This is like right at the beginning of 2019. So as we scaled, I was grateful that Samsung actually supported the culture that we had built and the methodology we had been using in building a distributed team and allowed us to continue that. And it actually encouraged us in ways of, you know, to expand it in places where

we didn't have presence before, but Samsung had presence so that we could integrate well with Samsung. So we scaled super fast. We went from 30 to 90 people within about nine months, right, so like, you know, of joining. So by the end of 2020, sorry, the end of 2019, we were acquired in 2019. By the end of 2019, we had almost 100 people. And that transformation of being acquired, getting integrated, getting used to kind of building, okay, what's the new norm now?

And then hiring a bunch of people to scale up all happened within like, you know, tripling, quadrupling the team size essentially all happened within like nine months. So that was loads of lessons learned about how to hire, how not to hire, what to do, you know, things I would do a little bit differently, but on balance, I think we did a good job because that team we have today is, I, I'm very proud of, um, but we definitely made some mistakes too, but distribution, you know, globally distributed wise, we now had some office presence in Tel Aviv.

Nick Holzherr (14:08.372)
we opened up an office presence in LA and in San Francisco and in Berlin and in Seoul. And we were suddenly, we were previously working at like maybe four or five hours time difference in our WISC team. And now suddenly at Samsung, we had minus eight GMT to plus eight GMT, Seoul and Korea, Seoul and Korea and San Francisco on the West Coast of the US are like,

about as far away from each other, but like triangulated basically, perfect triangle on the time zones, right? Eight hours, all of us are eight hours apart from each other. Makes it almost impossible to be on the same call at the same time, although we do it. We do it. We do calls at the same time. And then cultures, very, very different too, right? We had lots of people who were from Russia. We had some from Eastern Europe. And the Russian Eastern European culture is kind of one big group in our team. We then had Seoul.

Maulik Sailor (14:42.007)
Yes.

Nick Holzherr (15:08.456)
and Korea, where, you know, again, their culture is very different, almost the opposite, I would say, in some aspects to kind of a Russian culture. And, you know, it's nowhere near as direct as Russians are quite direct. Koreans are the opposite. And then you've got the Americans who we had a whole bunch of Americans join the team, right, who, again, were so different as well. So you've got these really different cultures. I would say, the British culture is kind of maybe a middle ground somewhere, although I don't think you can call it that because they're all such different cultures.

Um, so fascinating to kind of go from this small team, small nation, 30 people to suddenly over a hundred working with thousands of people in Samsung, so many different cultures, so many different time zones can't get everyone on the call at the same time. Like how the hell do you manage this? Um, it was, it was, it still is fun. Um, but it was lots of learnings of how to do it.

Maulik Sailor (15:58.955)
That's interesting, you know, we currently have full interest with the team at the code bank as well. We never had any physical office. And I think 90% of our team members have not met each other in person ever. And most of them have certainly not seen me in person. Everybody has seen each other on calls, but not in person. And when you talked about this whole, you know,

Nick Holzherr (16:23.253)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (16:28.087)
plus eight and minus eight time zone. You know, funny enough, I had a similar setup with Nokia. I used to work for Nokia back in 2008, 2009 time period. And my delivery team was spread all the way from Japan in the East to Vancouver in the West. And we had a few teams in like in India, in Germany, in the UK and...

We also have a team in China actually. And every single day was like 24-7 high-paced delivery model and nothing really ever stops, you know. You end the day and come back in the morning and so much has happened when you come back. But I loved it. I think the pace of delivery was crazy. You know, I've never experienced something like that before. And I think the learnings I had there always stayed with me.

And wherever I went after that, you know, any kind of delivery things I tried to build, always try to see how can you, what's the word, you know, how can you, you know, time multiplies different capabilities across different time zones. So you, your day is just a lot more longer from productivity point of view and you get a lot more done faster, you know, and it's all about speed. You know, I think in startup world,

which you also come from, speed is the everything, right? You know, speed matters. How fast can you go to the market? How fast can you trade? And how fast you can improve your offering to win the customers, you know? So I think this, I'm a big fan of this, you know, just having like distributed teams, you know, getting people in the office. Okay, there might be some use cases for that. Maybe, you know, it's always good to meet people in person, you know, have more social contacts to it.

Uh, but I think wasting time in commuting, you know, all those things that I think I'm done with that, to be honest, I hate going to office now. Um, if you ask me, I like going out as in meeting people, but not to an office to, to do my nine to five, you know, if you know what I mean.

Nick Holzherr (18:40.444)
Yeah, I mean, I miss the office and I say that having not been in an office, or not long term anyway, not for more than a few days at time for, you know, four years or five years or probably more actually. I mean, I haven't had it at my own office for probably almost 10 years. Um, I miss some of that like connection with people that you get when you're working in person, but.

the advantages that I, the things I gain outweigh that, the things that I miss, right? And I'm able to get some of that kind of, the things that I miss by meeting up with, I meet up with local people to me who sometimes, once every couple of weeks or once a month, we do a day of coworking in WeWork, I was doing a day of coworking yesterday with a friend of mine in WeWork. So I get, I can fill some of that need, personal need that I have through that.

But the advantages I get, as you said, through not having to commute and being able to spend time with my family by being way more productive, right? I think you, as long as you're good at, you know, working in a home office, which I think I've become, not everyone is naturally suited to it, but if you are and you can make it work for you, you can be super, super productive, I think. And I, so that I find I value a lot.

But the main thing I value in building distributed teams, I would say is the talent that you're able to hire as a business. And it comes down to budget too. People don't talk about the budget thing that often because they kind of like, it feels like a dirty topic in some ways, but it is cheap depending where you hire. Obviously my American and Korean hires are not cost effective compared to UK salaries, but they bring other things. But...

you know, experience and in the West Coast, in the US, amazing experience in building scale tech businesses, which we just don't have in some of the other jurisdictions that you can hire in. And then in Seoul, obviously, the Korean, the closest to Korean culture is super important understanding of that. But we hire, you know, the fact that we're able to hire people across Eastern Europe and Russia at what local, for local rates was, you know, brilliant salaries.

Nick Holzherr (21:01.46)
way more than they were previously on in most cases. And, but it was maybe half of the rate that we would need to pay someone in the UK to get that same quality of candidate. And also the quality of candidate you're able to get at that time, it's changed a little bit now, but I think it's still true. The quality of candidate you're able to get in places that were not in the UK were like, equivalent of someone who would in the UK would be working for Google or Facebook or something in London.

and be getting paid like a crazy high salary. And as a startup, we just weren't able to pay the kind of salaries that Google or Facebook or whoever was paying, right? So we just couldn't compete. And then there's also the fact that you can get really specialized talent. So you can get specialized talent like, you know, we were looking for someone who could build out our knowledge graph back in 2014, and it is in the food space, food knowledge graph.

needed to have a lot of like scientific understanding of how the food stuff works. And we literally found someone who was, you know, could code, who had worked building ontologies before, who had worked in a, um, science company, building food knowledge graphs, like the exact thing we needed, right. And it's like, so when you, when you search on this global, uh, and this global database of people, you, you can find that needle in a haystack in a way that I just, there's no way I'd be able to find that in my city or, or maybe even in my country.

And the other problem we had was we built our entire backend on Scala, which had pros and cons and there's a different, probably a whole different podcast on whether or not to build your backend in Scala or not. But we did build it in Scala and like, how do you find Scala developers? Like there's not that many of them in the world. And again, like being able to hire globally and find all the right Scala developers was like really, really valuable for us. So I think there's like, you can find amazing talent. You can afford that amazing talent.

Maulik Sailor (22:41.299)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (22:54.584)
The speed of hiring is way faster. You can, you can put a job advert out and you can have someone in seat within a week. It's not always that fast. It can sometimes be three months, but you can have it within a week. And there were other startups that were competing with what we were doing at WISC back in 2014, um, ZipList was one of them and who raised way more money than we did and they shut down because they ran out of money, right? And we were, we were kind of the cockroach in the market. We were able to kind of hang on in there.

Not shut down, still run, still get, still have stuff up and running, still get, still get through. And then when the market timing was right for us, because we were too early initially, when the market timing was right for us in 2018, 2019, we were there. We had the experience, we had the back, we had, we had been in the market for six, seven years, we had a really mature platform and lots of experience doing it. We had some of the customers on our roster and we took advantage and were able to scale and get, you know, get, get a good outcome. Um, so it's like, there's.

Without distributed work, we would not be here. Like it was core to why we were able to do what we do.

Maulik Sailor (23:55.67)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (24:01.095)
Another thing, I think at least the key tech ecosystem, they are more diverse. You have people from all over the world, people with different backgrounds and cultures working, even in London or in Silicon Valley or in New York, Berlin, let's say you want to build a local team and still your local team will be so diverse, right? With people with different...

ways of getting things done with different talent levels, right? And you can probably get similar or better talent when you are going distributed. Maybe you are just opening up a more wider net for you to get more and better talent. You can filter them out more to really push up the bar. So yeah, I kind of look, I'm a big fan, right? That's why

That's why we are doing code monk and like yourself, we always had a remote and distributed team. We had offices, but I think quite a lot of people were working from home as well before pandemic. And when pandemic happened, uh, it was like very, very little disruption for us. You know, we just like continued working naturally. Uh, you know, all we had to do is getting rid of our offices and save some cost. Uh, but the way we were working did not really change a lot.

But I want to come back to your experience of managing this distributed team. Now given that you have done it for many years and very, very successful setup that you have currently, what are a few tips or insights you can give to potential managers who are looking to, maybe they are already running a distributed team or they're looking to form a distributed team?

What are a few tips that you can share from your own experiences?

Nick Holzherr (25:58.74)
Yeah, well, I think the main kind of way of working would be, you know, be very deliberate about asynchronous work. So I think it's a huge productivity boost. And I think it's really important for distributed teams, because you can't just go over that you can't just watch what everyone else is working on over their shoulder, or

You can't, you can't tap your colleague on the, on the, on the, and say, Hey, well, you can on Slack, I guess, but people don't ask a colleague, Hey, what's, how does this work? You kind of need to have documentation for what's going on and what's happening. So I think it's important to be clear to set up effective communication, um, make sure that's, that can happen asynchronous asynchronously. So if someone has a, uh, once a meeting about a new project or whatever, like write a document.

a briefing document about what it is, like an RFC, a request for comment, share that out so people can digest it, can read it, can comment on it, and all that kind of thinking can happen asynchronously. And then you, so that you can use the sync time, the live in call time to do the things that you really need to do live, which is, you know, those debates, those discussions, which often drive a lot of ideas too, to still have those, but try and do some of the work asynchronously.

you know, not live and, and then make sure that you can share information across the organization easily. Right. So, you know, we use Google docs and we've used, we use some, some things we use notion and click up and things like that. But like that in Google docs, all the stuff, all our briefs, all our thinking, all our plans, our strategy, our everything essentially in the, in the company is, is accessible in one place to everyone in the organization. Um, so the default visibility is everyone can see it. Right. So it's.

transparent, it means when you have someone new coming into the project, you know, it's easy to get caught up with what's going on and what the plan is. Or if someone's done some work, it's easy to share that out and get feedback from other people, um, without having to interrupt their schedule and say, Hey, I need all these live meetings, you know, um, or, or without having to make loads of live meetings, which, you know, if you've got different time zones, that can be very disruptive to people's personal lives, right? I mean, people, you have to accept some disruption to your, like nine to five, you know, box, you know,

Nick Holzherr (28:19.892)
you do end up being on calls at 8 p.m. or at 6 a.m. or whatever, sometimes at 10 p.m. But you can minimize how disruptive that is in your life by having your organization work in an asynchronous way. And then it also makes time for asynchronous work, also allows you to have less calls.

Um, so you're not on calls the whole time. So you have more time to be productive and actually think and actually do real work, uh, and ultimately also have time to fit personal commitments around work. Like picking up your kids and, you know, from, from school or going to, to a school play in the middle of the day or something like that's okay. You can kind of shift it, shift things around a little bit. Right. So I think, you know, being very deliberate about the intent of how you do asynchronous work, I think using video and you, when you do a live call, try and make it as rich as possible. So don't, you know,

Maulik Sailor (29:04.589)
Okay. Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (29:15.288)
trying all the asynchronous possible stuff is already done. So you're having that real debate, real discussion. Make sure you use video. Don't sit there with your video off because the whole point of this live discussion is that you're communicating in a more human way, I guess. I think experiment with different asynchronous tools is important. I would say that's all asynchronous. I mean, that's probably the biggest topic for me. The other thing is about being deliberate on culture. So deliberate on how you manage your culture for...

Maulik Sailor (29:29.283)
Mm.

Maulik Sailor (29:39.116)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (29:45.576)
a distributed work environment, I think, or distributed team. I think you need to, you know, we can talk about values, we can talk about all sorts of things there. One thing that we do is, which I think is the right thing, is once a year, we fly everyone in our team to one place in the world for a week, and we spend that week together getting to know each other and making like friendships. And I think that's something that people sometimes miss with just video calls. It's quite hard to make friendships if you haven't met someone in person. And...

So we do that every single year and that is quite a big cost to us too, right? Because we're so distributed. So we've, we've flown everyone into, um, into Seoul, uh, into Belgrade, into, um, Lisbon, into Madrid, into, um, uh, Florence, like different places around the world. And it's that week kind of builds those really personal connections that when everyone goes back into their own place around the world, they then kind of have friends that they're working with.

Maulik Sailor (30:39.339)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (30:42.26)
on the video and I think that's also been very helpful to us.

Maulik Sailor (30:45.371)
Yeah, that's great. You know, you're talking of getting team together. You know, I'm actually going India next week to meet the team. And most of the people I'll be meeting first time. Uh, we are all getting them together in one location, uh, for a weekend away. And, you know, hopefully, you know, we'll have a good time. Uh, everyone together. One, one, uh, Chris, and I want to ask you, uh, regarding like distributed team. Now this topic often come up.

Nick Holzherr (31:02.06)
Yep.

Maulik Sailor (31:14.699)
in our internal discussion every now and then, should we have time tracking for the team members or not? What's your view on that? Logging time and tracking time, quite a few tools available for that.

Nick Holzherr (31:27.591)
Mm.

Nick Holzherr (31:30.82)
Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know where I sit on it. We don't. In my teams, we don't track time. So I guess that's where I sit on it, right? But I can see both sides of the argument. I don't, you know, sometimes I track my own time, not to share with anybody, but just so I can track my own productivity and be...

aware of how I am spending my own time. Like how much of my time am I spending on a podcast or on emails or on one-on-ones or doing this kind of work or being unproductive or whatever. So I think there is definitely advantages of time tracking. We have opted to focus more on outputs of people.

and not so much on time track, and not on time tracking at all. And I think, and my gut is that we get more back from people because of that kind of trust and that way of working. But, you know, there are times when I, you know, I'm sure we all saw the articles on, I think there's a gartner called Hacker News about a year ago of this individual that was boasting that they had 10 jobs or something like that, and that they're...

Maulik Sailor (32:49.629)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (32:50.324)
Yeah, they were like, Hey, I've got 10 jobs. Each of them is paying me a hundred K I'm on a million ARR. Um, I'm, you know, for each job, I've got these 10 different screens open. And I, you know, I, I just, I say a few words in meetings, my camera's always off. And you just like, as a manager, you're just like, wow, I wonder how many people have got this kind of setup, uh, up and running right in the world. Um, so the, I think there was advantage to individuals and to teams in time dragging, I think there's advanced, you know, there's. I find.

time tracking sometimes useful for my own time. So I obviously no one's asking me for it. I'm not sharing with anybody just for me. So I definitely is value there, but I am on the side of the fence of trust and not time tracking. Actually people end up giving you back more, but I'm not, I'm not, I don't know. I've undecided on that topic. Where are you on that?

Maulik Sailor (33:42.195)
Yeah. Good one. You know, this we have a few months, you know, this debate will come up in our company. Now, so far, you know, we running almost remote, fully remote setup for about five years now. And so far we have not implemented any time tracking for anybody. And I have a fundamental belief that when you hire people, you know, especially in a remote setting, you should be able to trust them.

to do that job, right? If you do trust them, that they will do their respective job. And if they do it, then there is no need for any time tracking, you know, because you know the work is getting done or, you know, problems are being solved. But if you have a situation where, you know, let's say things are not progressing, you're not getting clear communication from a team or a particular team member,

And you know that, okay, there's definitely some concerns here. Then I think it's better to remove or address that particular concern or problem had on trying to cover it up with a time tracking solution. Uh, and if the problem is commute, like, you know, your process or tooling or anything else, fix that. If the problem is a particular individual, that is better to do that.

that particular individual because clearly he's not performing. He or she is not performing. Uh, we'll drag the rest of the team down. Uh, you will create unnecessary friction by implementing time tracking and so on. Uh, so, so far, uh, every time this discussion comes up, we, that decision always is like, okay, no, we don't want to do it actually. Uh, we have some really good people, really good people in our team. Um, sometimes we don't even.

need to check whether they are available or not. We know the work is completed. We can see it in different blogs. We can see it like a proactive communication in Slack. And sometimes, you know, even like weekends, some people are working. I mean, we are flexibly working. So some of them will work over the weekend and will notify that, hey, this is what I have got done. Just make sure that you get x-ray that done when you come back.

Maulik Sailor (36:08.799)
online and so on. So I think we are getting good mileage out of it from our team members. And I think time tracking is not something that I'm a big fan of or want to do actually. It just looks like, you know, that big brother continuously watching you. And suddenly you are trying to justify your time than actually doing productive work.

Nick Holzherr (36:31.7)
Yeah, exactly. Although I don't think time tracking takes that much time, right, like when I've done it for myself, it doesn't take that much time to do it. I think that's a relatively poor excuse, but I think it's that like trust and also for the organization to measure outputs rather than, you know.

Maulik Sailor (36:41.024)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (36:54.996)
hours, right? I think that's also really important. And to be clear across your whole organization, like what everyone's trying to achieve is, you know, the things that have been set, things that they're working on. And I think that kind of, rather than the hours, like, you know, I was when I was in, you know, yesterday when I was in a, in the WeWorks space, there was this guy that was sat in the table next to me and he spent the whole day talking quite a loud voice about choosing chairs for the office.

And I was just like, wow, this guy is wasting a lot of time on like, you know, deciding on chairs for a whole day. Right. You get, you get, you know, the, the lack of like productivity on certain days of individuals is not unique to distributed work. I think in fact, it happens more, I think, in a office environment, but people, uh, don't notice it because the person, the person is there physically, right. They're like, oh, they're there and therefore they are at work. It doesn't matter what they're actually doing or how productive they actually are.

So it's not a unique problem. And I think, you know, just like in, in offices, people wouldn't have this discussion. I don't think about should everyone in the office create a time sheet for every minute they're spending at work. Um, that wasn't the topic that came up in the office, right? Like no one ever asked that question. At least I wasn't aware of that question, but now that people are working in a remote situation, they're now thinking, oh, well they're remote and therefore they're going to be less productive and can be, um, you trusted less. And I actually think that's, that's not true.

I think fundamentally that's not true. I think they're just as trustworthy as they were in the office. And they're probably more productive than they were in the office. That does not mean that you should not try and optimize productivity in a team. You absolutely should. Um, but time tracking is probably not the right, it's not, it's not the, not the tool that I've chosen. But I would be very interested in it. I would love to hear the counter argument to this, right? I would love for you to bring us on someone else on this podcast that says time tracking is the answer. Let's have that debate. That sounds super, that sounds fascinating.

Maulik Sailor (38:49.227)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I would like to hear that as well. You know, if somebody coming in and say, hey, by doing time tracking, we have been able to scale up our productivity by 10%, 20%, whatever, right? Or remove this problem for the org and so on, right? So yeah, anyways, let's move on a little bit from this whole distributed theme to more around the technology trends that are happening

Nick Holzherr (39:00.664)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (39:04.236)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (39:19.071)
the key tech trends right now or in coming or near future that you're most excited about.

Nick Holzherr (39:26.508)
I mean, AI and LLMs and GenAI, that single topic is the topic, I think, for me. It's... we built... we were doing AI back in...

2013, we were doing natural language processing, not with AI, not with deep learning at that time, because it wasn't really a thing. It was a thing, but it was a thing that scientists did. But then when TensorFlow came out, we started doing deep learning-based natural language processing. We basically been building knowledge graphs since 2012, so for 12 years. And now, we've built this massive, huge knowledge graph, and a huge amount of like,

you know, historic capability in this. But LLMs can do pretty much what we, what took us 10 years, they can do it kind of at the box. And it's kind of like, you know, when you look at that, and it's not entirely true, but it's kind of true. You look at it and you go like, wow, like, AI is moving so fast. It levels the playing field. Like everyone's got access to these large models. The number of large models out there are relatively, there's a relatively large amount. You can, you know,

you can choose to send a call to OpenAI or Google or Microsoft or Anthropic or Huggingface or so many, right, that you can choose to use and different costs and different capabilities. It's amazing. I think it's like it totally opens up. It's a whole new world from a product side. It's also a little bit like, I think you have to understand.

when you're building a new product though, that everyone's got access to it. It's not, you're not unique in being able to access it. You might be first to market, but everyone's going to have access to it or has access to it. So then it does change the question. I think of like, what is your competitive advantage with your sustainable competitive advantage? Your competitive advantage might be that it's open, you know, based you're using open AI's API and you're building a thin layer on top.

Nick Holzherr (41:38.004)
it might be in a competitive advantage this week, maybe even next couple of months, and maybe you can acquire enough customers to give you, for that to then to become your competitive advantage, right? You've got customers and data and stuff, but the fact that it has LLM Gen.AI features is not gonna be your competitive advantage long-term, unless you're very, very fast and very, very good at what you're doing in that. I'm sure they're definitely our examples of that. But that's super, super interesting, I think. I...

I do also think there's gonna be an interesting impact on jobs. Um, you know, people always say, Oh, well, people find the next people will find other jobs, you know, it was, it's always happened, right? You get rid of one industry and they move to people find work in another industry. I'm actually not so sure whether that, I know the theory, right. And I've studied some of the theory. It, when I was at school, um, but, but does that hold true today? I'm, I don't know. I struggled to believe it does because.

I'm seeing, you know, our teams are doing stuff they were doing before way faster now without needing the same number of people on it. We haven't fired people, but we probably have not hired people because we have those capabilities now. And I'm sure this is happening everywhere. So like, what's going to happen? Like in the legal space, for example, are lawyers going to stop hiring the junior lawyers in the paralegals because AIs can do the work? I think so.

Is the same thing gonna happen in accountancy? I think so. Is it gonna happen in coding? Most people are talking about that, right? They're talking about the fact that even in coding, if you're not senior, as in specialized or a standout person, software is gonna do some of that coding for people. It might not happen in two years, but if you look at a 10-year horizon, I do think it's a 10-year horizon. It's not a 100-year, right?

The world is gonna be different and the capabilities we're gonna have for products is gonna be amazing, but the number of people, the people you're gonna, your customer base is gonna be different. They're gonna use different things. Yeah, I find it fascinating and scary.

Maulik Sailor (43:52.487)
Yeah. You know, that's interesting because we are also like, you know, I'm offering opinion that I don't want to add too many people to our team and instead have the current people be more productive using some of these AI tools, uh, including programming, like the, the GitHub co-pilot, uh, and some other technologies, our marketing team definitely is using a lot of AI tools in, in our marketing, uh, you know, whatever tasks we need to get done.

Nick Holzherr (44:15.608)
Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (44:21.495)
And interestingly, last year I attended this conference in Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, and Sandeep Khosla, one of the big tech investors out there, was talking. And something interesting he mentioned, he said that if I was a lawyer, if I was a doctor, if I was a programmer today, then I'll be really, really scared about my future.

because in five years time, all these three professions are going to be replaced by AI. So any task which is like rule-based, can easily be programmed using a rule or state-based systems will be replaced by AI, no doubt about that. Any jobs where there is a lot of variability, a lot of room for creativity, maybe those stops will stay at least for a while.

But yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, maybe I'm also a little bit worried, okay, you know, being always work intact, you know, what is the future, you know, what's next for me, you know, where should I be putting more of my brain power on, you know? I just coming, you know what, I have a wild theory. Everybody needs to eat food. So maybe just focus on something to do with food, you know, which is also your...

Nick Holzherr (45:36.6)
Do you know, do you know where? Have you figured that out?

Maulik Sailor (45:50.677)
topic that you are fascinated about. So just wanted to ask one more question.

Nick Holzherr (45:53.28)
There are, there are robots now that cook as well, right? Like

Maulik Sailor (45:57.623)
Yeah, but you know, growing your own food, you know, land, you know, the quality of food you can get. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know.

Nick Holzherr (46:01.697)
be a farmer?

Yeah, but there's going to be robots that do farming too.

Maulik Sailor (46:07.423)
Yeah, but at least you know you can grow your own food and eat. Maybe you don't need any other luxuries.

Nick Holzherr (46:12.072)
Oh, I see. You're thinking like small, like family unit size thing. Like how can we not, yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, and land and ownership of capital has always been something interesting. And I think it's Bill Gates owns percentage. It's quite small relative to the total, but it's a large, in absolute terms, amount of land, right, he's invested. It's been quite interesting to, uh, kind of strategy of his way, where they put his capital, but yeah, I think every job.

Maulik Sailor (46:15.632)
Yes.

Nick Holzherr (46:39.796)
is gonna basically, unless you stand out and you're like, you know, the top 5% of people or 10 or 20% or whatever, but like, there's gonna be like a huge, what's gonna happen when 50%, when the bottom performing 50%, I'm not saying they're bad performing, but the bottom performing 50% don't have a job anymore. What's gonna happen? Like, that doesn't, the top 50% are not gonna have a happy life here, right? That's not good for the top 50%. There's gonna be anarchy, like,

Maulik Sailor (47:00.467)
I know.

Nick Holzherr (47:08.624)
what happens in that world. But this is going way off tech, isn't it? I think short-term opportunity for tech products is super interesting. And I don't think it's just... I don't think the opportunity is just about what things you can build anew. I think it's also about what things you can build to defend things. Obviously, cyber is interesting for that.

Maulik Sailor (47:15.3)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (47:36.812)
but also, I was thinking about this last week when I keep getting all these emails, spam messages, not spam, sales messages, right? People trying to sell me stuff, services, marketing, videos, all sorts of things, right? Loads of them. And you can tell that they're spam because some of them have got unsubscribed links, so it's definitely a drip, it's a drip campaign. On the other ones, some of these same words even, like you can...

between different companies, they use the same structure and the same words and you're like, okay, either that individual's copied a template or more likely the same program has written it, all the stuff. So what about defense against spam? Like you could build a great defender, an AI defender or like an automatic answering bot for all your emails that will kind of like only escalate when it's something truly needs your attention. Like there's so many opportunities in almost every field. And I think that is...

Maulik Sailor (48:33.025)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (48:35.252)
really exciting. It's gonna be a really fun five, ten years of building. I'll definitely do lots and lots more startups. So yeah, I'm finding this super exciting. I also find it hard to the idea of leaving my team. I've been there for four years now after the acquisition. It's a long time, right? In fact, it's actually probably almost my four-year anniversary. I'm like

Maulik Sailor (48:39.915)
Yeah. Are you thinking of doing another startup?

Nick Holzherr (49:04.736)
day or two. And I would have thought that I've left earlier. The problem is, for me, problem is kind of a good thing, I guess, is that I really like the team. I've built that team myself for like 12 years, right? I like that team. And I like the product. Like I like what it does. I like the vision and the mission of like helping people cook and be healthy and eat. And Samsung has got, you know, is basically supporting it financially and the distribution.

on their hardware. So that's also hard to leave, right? A team that you like, you can get to scale, you can work at scale, you can work on a problem you like. But I do know that I need to, for myself, at some point, build more startups, right? Because that's kind of where I think I get real energy. The energy and the adventure, although it's not all fun, a lot of it sucks. Building new companies.

I would say, you know, 70% of it sucks, but 30% of it is like the high adrenaline and adventure and like, you know, joy. And I guess I want, I'm, you know, I want that adrenaline. I want that fun. I want to do it again. And I love smaller teams too, actually. You talked about not wanting to scale your team. How many people have you got in your team right now?

Maulik Sailor (50:32.115)
I think we are just about 30, I think 30 or 31.

Nick Holzherr (50:34.608)
Yeah. I think 30 is kind of the max you want to get to. Like, you know, as I was looking at, I was talking about this with a friend who used to be in the army and he was like, yeah, the way the army, the army organizes its people is into these like groups, which I think, I can't, I don't know what, I can't wonder what, how many people are in a squad or what they're all called. Right. But there's, there's science behind keeping teams small and close knit. And the bigger you make it, the more you don't feel part of the team and you feel

Maulik Sailor (50:38.424)
Mm.

Nick Holzherr (51:05.38)
uh, not, you know, you don't feel part of the identity, right? And like, I think there's really the most exciting times for me were. You know, 10 to 30 people like that size. Those size teams is just like super fun. And then when you get larger into corporate, different opportunities, right? You get resources, you get distribution opportunities. You can build things that scale, which is super exciting to get. Wow. I can build something and it goes to like millions of people. That's exciting. But.

team feeling that with larger teams is different. It is different. So yeah, savor, savor those 30 people and use AI to keep it small as long as you possibly can would be my.

Maulik Sailor (51:44.295)
Yeah, no, that's exactly what we are doing. We just trying to identify more tools, more technologies that we can leverage. Uh, we are always open to like, you know, purchasing more product, you know, implementing them in our core workflows and all, um, you know, we always try a lot of tools and in every part of the business, not every tool is good, you know, some of the tools are all right. You know, some of the tools are actually pretty good. Um, we always try, we always give it a try.

and see how it works, right? Anyways, I think I had one related question for you. You know, you said you may want to do a startup again. If you were to do it, or if you end up doing one, would you go back onto VIAGate, either given your prior experience?

Nick Holzherr (52:31.572)
Would I go back on TV? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. If I had the opportunity to. Like, in terms of, you know, it up-leveled my access to capital, my access to sales, my access to marketing, my... I was... It's short, right? The Apprentice is short-term. It's maybe six months of mini-fame. But...

Maulik Sailor (52:33.071)
Yeah, like apprentice or something. Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (52:58.804)
You'd be amazed. It was a very highly rated show at that time, or highly watched show. I think it was like eight or 12 million or something, viewers or something. It was big. I'm not sure how big it is now. I haven't watched much of it since. But the number of people that got in touch afterwards to want to invest or to want to buy the product or get involved in a partnership or whatever, it was significant, like really significant. We got partnerships with so many people.

just from being on the show. And then afterwards, when you wanted to go and do a sales pitch into a big company, huge global company, the people, if you wanna go and pitch, usually say yes, not because they are necessarily interested in your product, that's a problem too, but just because they wanna meet the person who's on the TV show. So you can get into most doors you wanna get into, not forever, but for a year or two years or something like that. So...

And then media coverage, I was covered by all the tabloids, kind of crappy newspaper press, magazines, all that. I was on some front covers of radio times. I've got the front cover actually on my wall over here. I was, the opportunities are huge. You get so much opportunities from being, even mini celebrity status, Zed List for six months. It's amazing.

how the cult, how our society kind of like rewards.

Maulik Sailor (54:28.712)
Yeah, I think like they say, any PR is a good PR.

Nick Holzherr (54:32.708)
Yeah, and it's not even just, it's not bad PR, it's kind of, it's okay PR, right? But it was amazing. And the process was really fun. It's super fun being on a TV show, like The Apprentice, you know, that huge budget, going around recording, like working with some really, really big, weird projects, things you'd never get to do, you know, it's super fun. It like, it really was fun and I loved it. And it was very high ROI on my time in terms of like, without it.

Maulik Sailor (54:36.758)
Yes.

Nick Holzherr (55:01.748)
I wouldn't be where I am today. I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't have the apprentice, if I hadn't done distributed work, if I hadn't chosen a business where people are interested in the mission and vision, so they buy into it and they support it, like food, it's very easy. So all those things have definitely helped me get to where I am. And if I hadn't done distributed work and hadn't done the apprentice, there's no way I would have been successful, I don't think. So.

Maulik Sailor (55:26.211)
Cool. Thanks a lot, Nick. I think it's about time that we wrap this. But before we end, there are a few standardized questions that we want to ask every single guest on our show, but slightly off topic, right? So if you don't mind, can you tell us who is the one individual that you have always been motivated by, you know, living or death, doesn't matter, but someone you really look up high up to?

Nick Holzherr (55:59.)
That's such a hard question to answer. I don't have anybody that jumps to my mind that's a celebrity, but I would say that one person is actually my wife. She encourages me when times are dark and celebrates with me when times are good. And she's also a stable income, you know, she's an eye surgeon, so she's a stable income person who's like, gives me some security when times are not looking so great. So again, I find her

That is truly motivating for me to have something to fall back on and someone who supports me and supports me no matter whether I'm successful or not. Because I think the fear of failure as a founder is real and causes lots of negative behavior. And my fear of failure is less because of how she is. So I think that would be the person, that's the only person I can think of immediately as you ask me that question.

Maulik Sailor (56:58.403)
It's all right. And who is one person living or not alive that you would like to meet?

Nick Holzherr (57:11.368)
Um, Steve Jobs, I, I mean, I've watched a lot of his content. I'm hugely impressed by Steve Jobs. Um, I think he's, you know, his ability to foresee the market and simplify and, um, what he achieved. Um,

Maulik Sailor (57:15.585)
Yeah.

Nick Holzherr (57:35.66)
you know, and you hear negative stories about him as well of how he treated people. Like I think he's a fascinating person. And I think Steve Jobs.

Maulik Sailor (57:47.235)
Okay, good, wonderful. And the last one, who do you think we should invite next on this podcast?

Nick Holzherr (57:55.252)
Well, I mean...

Nick Holzherr (57:59.436)
Distributed work is a good topic, I think, or kind of an interesting topic.

Maulik Sailor (58:12.739)
It can be any topic, you know, maybe we might invite Dylan Mosk.

Nick Holzherr (58:14.876)
Yeah. We'd obviously someone like, you know, Musk, but like, do you want it to be realistic or do you want it to be aspirational?

Maulik Sailor (58:21.891)
It can be anything, you know. We'll try, you know. Hopefully we'll get to a state where we might be able to invite him.

Nick Holzherr (58:31.492)
Who's that person that runs that fund that did loads of Bitcoin stuff?

Maulik Sailor (58:35.987)
Oh, suppose he...

Nick Holzherr (58:39.18)
No, as a lady, Kath, is it? Kath, Kathie Wood. So she did the, Kathie Wood did that fund where they ARK invest, ARK invest. She basically did a bunch, investing in like, really cutting edge stuff that she thought was gonna go like, you know, and they were like, they were all the rage.

Maulik Sailor (58:44.161)
Uh-huh.

Maulik Sailor (58:48.055)
Catch you soon.

Nick Holzherr (59:04.848)
two years ago, when the market was going well, they were doing so well. And then obviously the market crashed Bitcoin crap. It's obviously recovered Bitcoin crashed all that stuff, right? Everyone's like, ah, is all crap. But she's like, she's been so I am and I'm not an investor in arc. And I, I am not an investor in crypto. I'm not, I'm not crypto fanatic or fan. Yeah.

But she is like, her views are interesting. She's like so super bullish on self-driving cars, on crypto, on like the new things that are coming like in science and technology. She's so bullish on it. And I do think there is something to be said about, you know, there's something in that about...

going all in on what you believe. And I think she has some really interesting views. I don't agree with all of them, but I think she'd be an interesting guest.

Maulik Sailor (01:00:01.735)
Interesting, interesting, you know, talking of Bitcoin, you know, I think it's an all-time high yesterday, if I read the news correctly.

Nick Holzherr (01:00:07.048)
I know, like crazy how it's got up again. It's just fascinating, right? We should have all bought it when it was 5K and we should have all bought it when it went back down to 22, whatever it was. Now it's back up again. Oh, you did?

Maulik Sailor (01:00:11.635)
Yes, yes, that's good.

Maulik Sailor (01:00:19.179)
You know, I did actually. I did. I did last year. I had some spare cash and I said, okay, what do I do? So I bought some, some few tokens, you know, Bitcoin and a few others. Not every, everything is doing well, but you know, Bitcoin and Solana at this moment are like doing crazy. They're doing really crazy. I don't know. I might guess I might stay in. I haven't decided, but I think I'll just stay in. You know, it was, it's not a big investment. It's a small investment. So, you know.

Maybe a good dinner out someday.

Nick Holzherr (01:00:50.772)
Well, this is what, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I think, I can't remember who it was, but there were some people who were predicting the Bitcoin price to be, I can't remember what it was, but very, very high. So yeah, good luck, dude. I'm staying out of that game. I'm focusing on my energy on building stuff, but I am excited for you from the sidelines.

Maulik Sailor (01:01:01.343)
And that's it. Yeah.

Maulik Sailor (01:01:13.187)
Cool, cool, thank you. Thank you, thanks a lot, Nate. So anyways, I think let's wrap this one. So thanks a lot today for your time. Some really interesting discussion. I think your experience is amazing on TV, off TV, running this 24-7 distributed team, taking a startup to all the way to acquisition and staying with that team for a long time. I think that's an unusual founder trait. Most founder would want to live.

after a year or two, once that, you know, whatever acquisition terms are completed. Uh, but yeah, great job, Nick. And, uh, we see all the best with your team, with your next endeavor, uh, whatever you want to do. And, you know, always, always happy, uh, to meet you and stay in touch, uh, wherever you are free. Right. Uh, cool. That's it folks. Uh, have a good day. Thank you. I think that's really the end of the podcast. I think we'll cut it over there. Um,

Nick Holzherr (01:02:01.452)
Thank you very much. Have a good day.

Maulik Sailor (01:02:09.751)
All right, let me just stop if I can.

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