[1]6nomads
* [2]Employers
* [3]Talents
* [4]Resources
* [5]Blog
Login
[6]6nomads
[7]Employers [8]Talents [9]Login [10]Blog
Vivek Nair: There Is Definitely a Stigma Around Remote Work That's Hard
to Change
[Pragli_tiny.png]
Our latest interviewee is Vivek Nair, one of Forbes 30 under 30 and the
creator of the remote tool [11]Pragli.
Vivek Nair and his cofounder Doug Safreno previously founded StacksWare
(acquired by Avi Networks) and after both graduated from Stanford in
2015 with Computer Science degrees. Vivek still teaches there for fun
sometimes and also writes articles for their [12]blog about working
remotely and building a product.
After two years of remote work, Vivek and Doug were inspired by the
flexibility of remote work, but frustrated with the loneliness and
communication overhead. They built Pragli to solve these problems.
We talked to Vivek about the stigma around remote work, about the
usefulness of eating lunch over video and how to move the remote
movement forward.
First, tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to remote
work.
Sounds great!
I grew up in a small agricultural town in California called Bakersfield
and then went to university at Stanford. At Stanford, I spent quite a
lot of my time in computer science classes. Of course, it wasn't the
most unique degree amongst the people who were there, but I absolutely
loved it. I loved the curriculum and loved the network that I built
there.
In my senior year at Stanford, a few friends and I decided to build a
company. After a couple of quarters, we started to get customer
interest in our product and decided to raise venture capital for the
business. One of our professors happened to invest in companies, so he
gave us a term sheet to build out our idea.
After raising $2M in venture capital and operating the business for two
years, we decided to sell it to a company in Santa Clara. The acquiring
company was based in Santa Clara and I was living in San Francisco at
the time, so the commute was soul-sucking. The one-way commute time was
an hour and a half minimum. After a certain set of months, we decided
to negotiate working remotely. That was my first experience with remote
work and I absolutely loved it.
So it was a nice balance where I could just work in my room and feel as
though I could get a ton of deep work and not have to necessarily be
subject to the office optics of having to be in the office from nine to
five. Two, on top of that, not to have to deal with the sort of ambient
distraction that happens inside of the office environment.
After working remotely, I noticed a large increase in my productivity.
Moreover, being able to work remotely allowed me a tremendous amount of
flexibility to travel wherever I needed to go. If I wanted to go hang
out with my parents down in my hometown of Bakersfield, I could do
that. If I wanted to work from a coffee shop, I could do that too.
But of course, there were a ton of challenges with working remotely and
that was the inspiration for the latest venture that my previous
co-founder and I recently made called [13]Pragli. The product is
designed to solve the two biggest problems for me while working
remotely: the social isolation and the friction of communication in a
remote setting. I think people really take for granted how valuable
social connection is when you're working inside of an office
environment. Impromptu synchronous conversations can foster a new
culture and team bonding. We really missed the deep synchronous
conversations that we enjoyed having in an office setting, whether the
topics were related to work or not.
The main question for us was: is there a product that we can build that
can feel more inclusive for remote workers? And that's how we built
Pragli, a virtual office for remote teams.
[3b.png]
Cool! So how exactly did you come up with the idea? I mean, there are
not a lot, but some decent instruments for remote communication. What
did you lack in them? Why did you decide that the remote world needed
Pragli?
Absolutely. It's a question that we get a lot.
If you look at the landscape today, the core primitives of
communication exist and work well. We have Slack, a pretty solid chat
application. We have Zoom, a great video conferencing tool with solid
reliability. But what was missing for us was the ability to dive into
rich conversations immediately in the same way that you could in an
office.
In an office, I can pick up my laptop, go over to your desk and ask you
"Are you available for a chat?" Unfortunately, in the existing
landscape right now, you still have to fiddle around with Zoom links or
have an awkward exchange where you're sending "You there?" messages on
Slack and then getting a response 15 minutes later.
Firstly, we wanted a product that was more immersive, that allowed
people to just dive into those conversations similar to how you would
behave inside an office setting. We replicated this with walkie-talkie
functionality.
Then secondly, we wanted to capture impromptu synchronous
conversations. We created audio channels in Pragli, which are the
audio/video equivalents of Slack channels. Essentially, anyone can see
and participate in the conversations that are happening throughout the
office.
If I'm inside of the audio channel, everybody can see the fact that I'm
inside. For example, if I'm present in the #water-cooler channel, I'm
sending a social signal to my team: "Anybody else who is on a break
right now or eating lunch can feel free to join me for a chat." Those
mechanics just don't exist in the current landscape, and that's the gap
that we're trying to fill.
[Frame-1--4-.png]
I like the part about the immersiveness of this tool. Please say a few
words about how you actually built Pragli? How did you assemble the
team?
Doug (my Pragli co-founder) and I are engineers by trade and sales and
marketing people by necessity. We only have two people on a team, and
that's by design.
In the remote space where companies are getting funded left and right,
we wanted to be very purposeful about raising money. We want to make
sure that the core mechanics of the product feel right and we have
plenty of cash right now to make sure that we get it right.
When we started building Pragli, we holed up for 4 months building out
the initial version of the product with a few alpha teams. Especially
with video conference products, you have to make sure that the audio
and video quality are great.
We use a variety of modern tooling such as Firebase, React, and Agora
as our video conferencing service provider. To minimize how much
backend infrastructure we have to manage, we heavily use Firebase Cloud
Functions from Google Cloud. They're cheap and developer-friendly.
Well, that's very sustainable. I know that you like to dispel the myth
about asynchronous communication. Can you tell us a little bit about
it? The trends are now saying a lot about the positive side, but could
you talk about the other side?
I wrote a [14]blog post about asynchronous communication, and my
thought process in that post really reveals why we built this product.
There's a lot of discourse in the community (and rightfully so) about
the necessity of asynchronous communication. You need to be able to
document things, especially if you're working across time zones. If I'm
working with somebody in India and the time difference is literally
twelve hours, you probably get an hour overlap (if you're lucky) unless
you're making dramatic changes to your lifestyle to "time zone match"
your team.
I understand the value of asynchronous communication for documenting
everything and creating artifacts that can persist. I think right now
many companies, especially in the early days of this movement, are not
documenting enough.
What I would push back against is that there's a degree of dogmatism
that really pushes this idea that asynchronous is the solution to
everything, and I personally don't think that's the case. You need to
have a strong synchronous connection with your teammates if you're
going to build a deep, meaningful conversation with them.
A lot of companies are addressing this by building in the mechanics for
scheduled happy hours or use Slack bots like Donut to help facilitate
those meetings - and those are great! But what's really missing and
where the core mechanics of culture are really built is impromptu
synchronous conversations.
If you think of a physical office space, most bonding experiences
happen over lunch conversation or via serendipitous encounters at the
water cooler.
One very eye-opening statistic was that most remote workers only have
one unscheduled audio/video conversation with their teammates per week.
This is especially interesting if you think about how many times you're
actually communicating with people in an office setting.
The number one and two issues plaguing remote work right now are social
isolation and communication. It will only get worse if we keep
over-emphasizing asynchronous communication and not giving very mindful
thought about how we can incorporate impromptu synchronous conversation
into the work life.
[2nd-post-cover-4.png]
Speaking of bonding during lunch, you even practice remote video
lunches! How do they go? What do they look like?
Doug and I have been playing around with a lot of different ways of
feeling more bonded while working remotely. And one of those is eating
lunch over video.
We're figuring out exactly it felt to do that. It's an idea that a lot
of remote teams don't do but could actually lead to a lot of
interesting discussion and bonding. At first, I was a bit skeptical,
but it was great!
Some of the downsides are that there's still a stigma about eating on
camera. There's just something off-putting and gross about the
experience at first. But when you realize that people don't feel gross
about eating in front of each other in-person, the stigma seems silly.
[Screen-Shot-2019-10-.png]
I don't know if there's a video recording of your remote lunch, but I
would love to take a look at it!
When we published that blog post, many people were definitely curious
about the experience. Some people even asked if they could join in!
I think it'd be interesting to have other remote employees or founders
all get together and have lunch virtually. That's one use case of
Pragli that we don't talk about as much - it's not just for work. You
can use this product for all sorts of communication dynamics. You can
use it for communities or even their friend groups.
I get it.
You know, a lot of people when they hear about remote workers, they
think about freelancers lying on the couch, in sweatpants, too lazy to
go to the office. And I know that you say that you generally avoid
wearing house clothes and trying to be very serious about how you look
when you work. Just tell me why and how.
I personally like to dress up because it puts me in the right
psychological headspace, where there's a strong barrier between what is
personal and what is professional. I don't think that necessarily
everybody has to adopt that.
I think that's a personality element of mine. It also makes it easier
for me to unplug from work at the end of the day. If it's 9:00 AM or
it's 6:00 PM and I switch into a different set of clothes, I'm saying
to myself, "I'm ready for the day" or "that's all for today."
Especially since my workspace is located directly inside of my bedroom,
it's even more difficult to psychologically distance myself from the
end of the work day.
Addressing your other part of the question, there definitely is a
stigma around remote work that's hard to change. People have to
acknowledge that remote work is not about laziness or inability to
socialize with other people. There's also this stigma that it's only
for reclusive introverts who don't like socializing with people.
Remote work is so much more than that. It's about avoiding commutes and
taking care of your kids when they're sick and having the flexibility
to live in a way that doesn't disrupt your professional life. I think
that message has to be evangelized over and over again if we're going
to make a serious dent and change those perceptions.
[social-signals-post-.png]
That's what we're trying to do! In general, do you really think that
remote work is suitable for everyone?
I actually created [15]this interactive application that shows remote
trends by different U.S. cities. Unsurprisingly if you look at the
agricultural cities with tons of blue-collar labor, there are physical
constraints that prevent people in those areas from going remote. But,
as more and more professions become digital, remote will continue to
grow.
But at the same time, so long as the problems of social isolation and
communication are not being addressed, it's going to be a slow push.
Also for many people who work in the office and don't have to deal with
a long commute, they will likely push back against the remote movement.
They love the office conversation they have, and the physical community
that they fostered at their office. They simply enjoy being immersed in
that setup.
But I hope that even if you decide to work in a physical office space,
you will have the mechanics of communication set up such that you can
work remotely if you need to. That will be the hardest to bridge,
because the natural inclination for people inside of physical offices
is to tap someone on the shoulder. But that immediately excludes anyone
who might be part of your team who isn't physically located there. So
we need to figure out how to combat that communication asymmetry.
Even though everybody will not necessarily go remote, I hope that there
is more thoughtfulness about including remote workers, even if there is
a physical office.
So the hardest thing about remote work is unplugging yourself, changing
clothes or something. Me, personally, I can not get out of the house
for several days. How do you handle that? I know that you meditate,
play basketball...
I've had this conversation many times with remote workers who say the
exact same thing. I think that the best way to deal with this is to
keep scheduling a consistent cadence of activities throughout the week.
I personally like to have three or four instances throughout the week
of me attending an event or playing basketball — something that's
completely disconnected from work.
More tactically, I try to add three calendar events past 6:00 PM,
somewhere between Monday and Thursday. The most important part is to be
very diligent and purposeful about scheduling that time at the start of
the week.
Do you plan to scale your product by hiring remotely in the future?
I definitely want to hire remotely.
Firstly, I want to increase the space of options for excellent talent,
because it's so difficult to find great talent that's actually
available on the market in the Bay Area.
Secondly, even if you can recruit these talented engineers in the Bay
Area away from the FAANG companies, you have to pay them an absurd
amount to retain them because the cost of living is so high. If you're
in the Bay Area and especially if you're trying to be a
capital-efficient business, the most rational decision to make is to
hire remotely.
Moreover, I believe in remote work and I want to practice what I
preach. I want to do whatever I can to move this movement forward.
Especially since I've spent so much time into understanding what makes
a remote team successful, I think I have a really good playbook for how
to create an excellent remote team.
As I said, I'm pretty sure that you are going to make it work with the
magic of remote teams!
Yeah, the ball's in our court. I think we'll find a great strategy for
hiring the best talent in the remote space!
We can talk endlessly about remote work because we practice it
ourselves and believe in it. But, the words of СEO's and СТО's of other
startups with teams distributed around the world will sound much more
convincing. Go ahead and check out the recording of Vivek's
"Communication in remote teams" presentation at our Remote-First
Conference [16]here.
And in the end, three steps not to postpone, but to act:
1. [17]Create an account
2. Start trial
3. Hire remote with [18]6nomads.com
Did you like this article?
[Thumbs_Up_Sign_Emoji.png]
[Heart_Eyes_Emoji_2.png]
[Thumbs_Down_Sign_Emo.png]
3 February / 2020
Made on
[tildacopy.png]
Tilda
[tr?id=234777607219060&ev=PageView&agent=pltilda&noscript=1]
References
Visible links
1.
http://blog.6nomads.com/
2.
https://6nomads.com/employers
3.
https://6nomads.com/
4.
https://6nomads.com/resources/remote_en
5.
http://blog.6nomads.com/
6.
http://blog.6nomads.com/
7.
http://blog.6nomads.com/employers
8.
http://blog.6nomads.com/
9.
https://app.6nomads.com/
10.
http://blog.6nomads.com/blog
11.
https://pragli.com/
12.
http://pragli.com/blog/
13.
https://pragli.com/
14.
https://pragli.com/blog/why-we-are-frustrated-with-asynchronous-communication/
15.
https://pragli.com/remote-trends/
16.
https://6nomads.com/remote-conf
17.
https://app.6nomads.com/register/corporate
18.
https://6nomads.com/employers
Hidden links:
20.
https://app.6nomads.com/
21.
https://tilda.cc/?upm=1947380
