Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the DistantJob Podcast. My guest today is John Lee, a remote work advocate and the CEO and co-founder of Work From Anywhere, the mobility platform that assesses risks and solutions of remote work requests and global hires in seconds, helping you solve tax complexity and other things that will go on. Welcome.
John Lee:
Great to be here, Luis. Thank you very much for having me. Looking forward to today.
Luis:
John, it’s a pleasure having you. Yeah, looking forward to having this conversation with you. I gave you a very brief introduction. Would you like to add anything? Did I miss something?
John Lee:
No, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I mean, I think we’ve never been at a more exciting time, Luis, where you see companies like this and jobs and what we’re doing. The future of work is really changing so fast. I’m looking forward to touching on this joint discussion.
Luis:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think it is, and obviously the COVID gave it a big push that… I personally have been doing this for over 10 years. For the longest time I was a writer in the video game industry. Obviously this is now the only show, so the listeners can’t see my man cave. You’ve probably guessed at that already. For many years I’ve accumulated many video game related trophies and guess what? Most video game writers, they write from home.
So I’ve been doing this for a lot longer before COVID, but definitely it was the big jump when people really got the taste of it and didn’t want to go back. Now, I don’t know how you feel about it because you interact with this every day as we do in DistantJob, there’s definitely resistance and it varies. I think that I’m a positive person, so I think that 2023 will be an up year for remote work. I feel that 2022, there was a lot of pushback, a lot of people talking about coming back to the office, office productivity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think that we’re set to have a good 2023. What do you think?
John Lee:
I do. I mean, for me the way I see it is that if you look at it, break remote work into two aspects, domestic remote work and international remote work. So I think when it comes to domestic remote work in a lot of countries the argument settles. You see, for example, Stanford professor Nick Bloom, he publishes really good data sets and you see that in the case of the US, all the data from transit, from office occupancy, from everything you could gather around where people are spending their time and working says about 30% on average work from home. That’s stabilized.
So despite all of the return to office mandates and different pushes from different levels of wide range of companies, we’re kind of reaching that settle state for domestic remote work. Where I think it gets very interesting is, okay, well what about international remote work? I think we’re only at the very early innings of that. We’ve been as a family, a digital family for six years. So we’ve had the benefit and the privilege to be able to do that, but I think there’s a lot of water under the bridge yet to fall in terms of really big opportunities and also major risks around that international remote work opportunity space.
Luis:
Yeah, I agree with you. In fact, the mission of DistantJob is to allow companies to hire outside their country. I mean we can, sure, we can find remote workers on the same country that our clients are, but the point is actually to do a bit of geo arbitrage and find people working from other countries and reach a settlement that’s good, that’s a win-win for both parties. So that’s definitely part of our strength and what we feel like we can do because the reality is that we always say, now what is the likelihood that the best person for your company is within a hundred miles or within 200 miles, in the same state or even in the same country? Talented isn’t distributed like that.
Sure. You might have some specifically on what we do, which is specifically software developers. You might have some places where the education is such that more software developers cluster around certain universities, certain colleges, but as we move to a learn from anywhere, self-taught world, that also becomes increasingly less common. I don’t know if we will… We’re going to talk about how you hire and how you manage your business online. I don’t know if you actually hire any developers or not, but when I look at developer CVs these days, I actually care more about the projects they’ve been into than necessarily where they got their degree.
John Lee:
Yeah, completely. I think one of the interesting things when you talk about international hiring as well is being the importance of cultural intelligence. So what I mean by that is that when you’re hiring domestically, when you’re hiring in that a hundred K radius, it is true that with migration around the world of the last 50 years, you will have a multicultural talent pool even within your local area, but it’s got to be many more times that when you hire internationally. I think that is a wonderful opportunity.
I think for us as society, as different countries around the world, we get to really deeply understand how people from different identities and different cultures think. I think looking at that, when you hire somebody, you often look at, okay, what is their cultural fit for the organization? So what’s my organizational culture? How do they fit in with it? What’s their individual personality?
A third part of that triangle is the intercultural aspect. So we all have our own unique identity, but for example, somebody who’s direct in the Netherlands versus somebody who’s direct in Japan will be typically speaking very, very different. So I’m fascinated to see where all that goes and how companies adjust the way they hire to take that into account.
Luis:
Yeah. It also varies. There’s always a certain degree of cultural assimilation when you move to a country. Yeah, there’s that old saying, I mean I’m probably going to maul it, I don’t remember it exactly, but it’s something along the lines of when in Rome act like a Roman. Definitely we see that. We definitely see that in some countries. I’m from Portugal and I see that a lot of Portuguese when they go to France or when they go to Switzerland, common immigration places for Portugal, they adapt a lot to the culture there. Whilst they’re there, they lean a lot into that culture.
So obviously diversity really is maximized when you hire someone working from their own country, directly in their own culture. That has some challenges. Sometimes there is, when you’re working with people across the world, you see that specifically the unspoken, the unsaid communication. That is always a barrier that needs to be worked around, but I do think that the benefits far outweigh the costs. It’s nice to have people who think differently.
Even from a logistic point of view, I mean, I personally enjoy setting off an assignment before I finish my day and seeing that someone did it when I arrive on the other day. That’s simple. It feels a very obvious thing, but I like the idea that that work is happening while I’m sleeping, if synced properly. If not synced properly, it’s a disaster because suddenly you’ll be waiting 24 hours for something that you should have gotten in an hour. If you coordinate and sync properly, then it’s actually much better because work is happening around the clock just by virtue of every person being in their own time zone.
John Lee:
Yeah, completely agree. I think that’s where people like Chase Warrington, Darren Murph and many others who’ve been great advocates. Tyler Southern as well. Many others who have been great advocates for the likes of working asynchronously and how you build up your tool and communication stack around that and your culture around making sure that the meetings you do have that are synchronous, that they’re really impactful and that you make the most of the Async tools and communication style you can before it. I’m fascinated to see where it goes.
Luis:
Yeah. So tell me a bit about how you apply this in your own business. Tell me a bit about the structure, about the structure of work from anywhere. Give me a bird’s eye overview of your management style and how you work with your business.
John Lee:
Yeah, great question. I mean for me, I suppose to understand that my previous startup was an intercultural startup company called Culture Me. So I’m acutely sensitive to treating everyone as individuals and being as acutely aware as you can be of what their strengths are and how to handle them from an intercultural and individual personality, emotional intelligence perspective.
For me, I’ve been lucky in my career I’ve got to work with some fantastic bosses and I’ve got to find out what really works, but also what works for me and my style. So for me, my style is very much empowering. I try and as a team come up together with what we all think are the key priorities and have a really good discussion on where we need to go as a business.
Once we decide that, we all row behind that. I mean I’ve had plenty of decisions over the last couple years whereas a team maybe I had one view and the rest of the team had a different view, but we have a good open, robust discussion. There’ve been many cases where the team has decided something different to what I felt, but we end up listening to each other and going in a different direction.
I think that’s the beauty about it, I think having a real open culture that you can… Everyone feels empowered to be able to really challenge each of us. So for me, I think that’s the key thing, having an open culture, you can be open, you can be honest, you can challenge everyone. You can do it in an empathetic way, leverage your active listing, but also be robust. When you’re a startup, you need to get to the key decision, get to the outcome quickly.
I think that for us, it’s important that everyone can feel and say as open as they can when we’re coming to all that decision-making process. Then a lot of it is all about action orientation as well, isn’t it? I think you need to be able to move fast because that’s one of the big advantages. We’re a speedboat, we’re not an oil tanker, so we’ve got to leverage the strengths that the speedboats have.
Luis:
Yeah. Absolutely. So to me there’s a bit of tension in that because democracy is great, but democracy takes time because you need, like you said, to hear other people’s point of view, to digest them, to think about them, to debate, et cetera. As you said, you need to move fast. So can I ask you to walk me a bit through that decision-making process? How do you expedite that? What kind of tools, either real tools or just mental frameworks do you use to allow for that collaboration to exist but eventually reaching a decision in the time that it needs to be reached?
John Lee:
Yeah. I think what we do is at the start of every month we have a good discussion, what are our top three priorities as a business, and what’s our North Star that we’re going to be going after? It doesn’t change a huge amount from month to month, but maybe the execution of it will. I think the most important thing is that everyone agrees on what the priorities are. So everyone understands big picture, what are we trying to achieve here?
I think there’s a big problem if people have a different interpretation of where we’re looking to row towards what our vision is. As a team, we should be able to collectively decide pretty easily what our vision is. If we don’t, then we have a challenge. I think the beauty about it is once everyone understands, okay, this is where we’re looking to go, you can have a pretty robust discussion on the execution of that and the choices, but that has to be supported by data.
So again, for us when we’re talking about our decision-making, we’ll find that we really try and if there is a really critical decision that we need to make, and if we’re not a hundred percent sure, if we have a discussion and we use the existing data and we say we’re not a hundred percent sure of it. Or if we feel very, very strongly in it, we’ll usually give each other a bit more time, maybe a week or two to gather some more data points. Especially speaking to customers in the market, for example, if it’s anything around product or customer aspect for example, and then we move on pretty quickly.
I mean, again, the beauty about being in a startup is that you can move quickly. I think the big thing for us in our decision-making style is never be the perfect enemy of the good. Once you can get the decision that’s good enough to allow you to move forward, you can always as a start rollback or tweak your decision-making pretty quickly if you have. The worst thing is to be indecisive and passive. For us, it’s about make a decision quickly, especially if it’s something that is important. I think again, the action orientation is really, really important. So speed, you got to leverage the advantage we have, which is being a speedboat. So that for us is key.
Luis:
Got it. Well, I actually have a question for you. Again, this is more specifically when I was looking at your startup Work From Anywhere, looking at the website and the LinkedIn and doing my research before the interview, the mandate that I found, maybe this changed in the meantime, but the byline that I found is that your mission is to help solve tax complexity. The company is fairly new but old enough that we know that it’s working for you somewhat because it’s two years old, two years and one month.
So a startup doesn’t last that long if they’re not doing something right. It’s a respectable amount of time. It’s not an experiment anymore, it’s a real business. Tax complexity just feels like the toughest minefield to go into. So what possessed you to… What was the story of the day that you thought that this might be a good idea that this is where you wanted to make a difference?
John Lee:
It started with home swapping. That’s where it all began. It was in COVID lockdown. My co-founder Donald, was in lockdown in Sydney for two weeks, bored off his complete tree, knocking his head off the walls, stuck in a hotel room with the strictest lockdown the world has ever known, at least that I’m aware of. Maybe China might give it a run for his money. Essentially going off his head.
I said to him, “Look,” I’d just come through my own journey of a failed startup that COVID had wiped in business travel industry. I’d licked my wounds, I had gotten my self-confidence back up, learned the lessons. I said, “Why don’t we think of an idea that I feel like there’s a big shift going on in society that there will be some big opportunities and where could it be?”
So what it was, the two of us decided there’d be this work from anywhere market. Of course, it didn’t exist then, but both of us had been digital nomads for a couple years and we felt there could be an opportunity of this work from anywhere market where it’ll be in between experts and business travel where people would want to go for a couple of weeks or months. Not just that, people will also look to hire from anywhere as well. That we felt those two trends would be massively accelerated.
So then we said, “Okay, what ideas could we do around that?” So my co-founder said to me, “Oh, what about a long-term house swapping platform?” I said, “That sounds interesting, but tax residency is going to be a problem there for the employer and for the individual.” So as soon as I said it, I kind of said to myself, of course, that’s the outlet, that’s the biggest pain point. So that’s what we did.
So more or less spent, I would say two years speaking to 300 companies, iterating different products, building an algorithm over two years and more or less, launched our full product about two weeks ago basically. So we’ve gotten a great reaction to it. Companies I’ve been speaking to have been blown away. We’re absolutely over the moon. Then these next couple of months are going to be really important couple of months for us. That’s what inspired us.
The inspiration behind it was we felt tax was going to be a big pain point. We felt if we could build a technology platform to help solve these challenges, to help companies decide for themselves what are the risks, and what are the solutions? We felt A, that could allow a lot more people to work from anywhere around the world, and B, allow a lot more companies to hire from anywhere as well. So we felt we could expand that market but also do it in the way that the people in those companies could sleep easy at night knowing they’re not taking on incredibly high risks, which can happen if you do it the wrong way.
Luis:
Of course, of course, of course. Yeah. So tell me a bit about that product that you just launched two weeks ago.
John Lee:
So what you find is that a lot of people in the bigger companies, not such an issue for the small startups, but for the bigger companies they typically have a function called global mobility. These functions, what they do is people that do requests to be an expert or also sometimes business travel. Also people doing remote work requests to work remotely overseas for a period of time. Or if they look into higher a developer in India for example, how do you do it?
These requests come typically to global mobility teams. Right now up before the pandemic, how these teams typically dealt with this is in a lot of cases, they basically rang up a local tax advisor and said, “Okay, what are the risks? What can we do?” For example. Because the problem is that those companies in the places in the countries where they already have a legal entity, they knew how to handle things, but it was when they were going to a new country that it became an issue.
Of course, as we know with the international hire from anywhere evolution, with people looking to work remotely for example, in a beach in Barbados or Spain for example, for a couple weeks or months, or even just to go back with the family for a small period of time, these requests have skyrocketed. The challenge is that companies don’t have the infrastructure to be able to handle it. The answer to each of these solutions, sometimes it’s an employer of records, sometimes it’s a digital visa, sometimes it’s a open legal entity, sometimes it’s to hire somebody as a contractor.
It depends on the country, depends on the country combinations, depends on the role, the activities they’re doing. So that was the inspiration behind it was basically to have an algorithm and a platform that in a couple of seconds you could get to the answer, it would save you thousands in tax advice and it would save you a lot of time and research. If you end up requesting a report from an advisor could take you easily a week or two or three weeks or more even to get the answer back. At that stage the company’s lost the talent they were looking to hire.
Luis:
Exactly. So you actually streamlined this, it’s like a software, an app, a database. How does it work?
John Lee:
So what happens is that somebody goes in, they log in and in the space for a couple of seconds if they want, they can overlay their company policy, what’s the maximum number of days work from anywhere, what countries that they allow, hire from anywhere for example, that doesn’t take long. Then straight away they go into a search. The search is literally 10 or 12 questions. Again, doesn’t take more than 30 seconds to fill in.
What it does is then it then spits out two things, the risks of this scenario for like corporation tax, payroll tax or security, employment law, contractor or classification. So it tells you the risks, but much more importantly it tells you what is the solution. Is the solution an employer of record? An employer of record’s a bad solution if you have a high corporation tax risk, if somebody’s in sales or senior, let’s say senior role. Or is it a legal entity?
Legal entities are not necessarily attractive, they cost a lot of money to set up. Maybe if you have a legal entity in that country, you could do a short-term secondment. Contractor can be a great option, but not if you’re in, for example, the UK where IR35 is very, very strict for example. So if you look at for example, a digital nomad visa, their Barbados welcome stamp, they’ve generated over $100 million since they launched that digital nomad visa over a year ago.
So the answers really depend on the country and the activities and what’s going on. So that’s essentially if they get the risks, the solutions and explain as to why we’re recommending one or the other. We can recommend them to excellent providers to execute a solution if they want.
Luis:
Yeah, okay. So that is definitely very interesting and the fact that it is something that you can do in minutes, is definitely very, very powerful. Would you say, how do people usually approach that product? Is this something that the employees who want to do a check for themselves and then forward the things to their respective HR departments? Or is this something that you’re pitching to the HR departments when they need to deal with people like that?
John Lee:
Yeah, it’s typically the in-house HR, global mobility tax and finance legal departments, they’re the sweet spot because they’re the ones that have to assess the risks. The employees less not so. The employees find this interesting because if they get their companies to implement this, they might have more opportunities to be able to work from anywhere. So they use it maybe sometimes to try and get the companies feeling more comfortable with the risks for example, because that’s part of the solution.
The employees aren’t really necessarily the users. They’re the beneficiaries of it, but they’re not the users. The main users are typically the in-house HR, global mobility tax and those kind of functions who are typically the ones paying the existing tax and appoint law advisors right now. They’re the ones that are doing, spending the hours on each of these requests for example. They’re the ones that are responsible if these risks go wrong for example. So they’re typically the functions that we deal with.
Luis:
Of course. So yeah, it’s super important. So at DistantJob we do provide some of those solutions, but it’s actually very, very cool that sometimes the people, sometimes the company comes to us and doesn’t know what’s the best solution for them and we have to help them hire out. I think that we might actually become your clients. Let’s see.
John Lee:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, happy to.
Luis:
Let’s see. I’ll forward you to the proper department after the conversation is done. Tell me a little bit about how you manage your own. I mean I know that you have a lot of kids in the house. We were talking before, I’m dealing with my first, being a parent experiment. Let me tell you, I don’t know how people are parents without remote work. I don’t know how it’s possible. I don’t know how it’s physically possible. How can people manage this while having to go to an office?
John Lee:
Well this is the beauty about remote work. It leads to the hyper-personalization of work. We’re no longer, most of us now live to work. Instead, we work to live. We build work around what we want, our own time schedules and our values and what we’re looking for. I mean for me, I’ve been doing it for years. My oldest daughter Rosa, she’s six now, she’s already been to 25 countries, so that’s including with COVID. So that’ll tell you how much we travel around the world working remotely over these last couple of years. So she was born in Netherlands. We spent a number of months living in Thailand. Then we come back to Ireland and we moved to Portugal for example. So she’s had four home bases and 25 countries. So for us that’s hugely empowering for people that love to experience different cultures, love exploring the world, that are deeply curious about the world.
Even if you’re not, I mean for me when I’m working at home here in Portugal, for me the ability to be able to, I can be listening in a meeting and I can have the kids come in. My little one-year-old he’ll knock on the door and he’ll come in looking for a snuggle. I wouldn’t trade that for the world. You could offer me all the money in the world. Nothing is going to compare with that. So for me and for us as parents, it’s something that is so deep within our DNA, it’s not something any of us are going to give up. I will say at the same time there are also people that just thrive on that in-office experience and that’s the great thing. We can all mix and match and personalize our work according to what we want.
Luis:
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely felt if I had a job, because obviously I’ve had non remote jobs in the past, and if I still held those positions I would just be missing so much of my kids’ childhood really. So it really was, I always appreciate the ability to work from home just because to my own personality, the way that I am. It’s better for me to work from home. I appreciate it on a whole different level since having the kid.
So I wanted to ask you for the listeners who also, most of the listeners of this podcast are in positions similar to your own. Either leadership or managerial positions. A lot of founders also listen to this podcast. What have you found that works for you? What is your remote work routine, if you have any? What does the typical day in your work life look like?
John Lee:
Well, you’ve got to remember in terms of the team, they’re dispersed around the world. My co-founder is based in Sydney, who I’ve only met twice since the start of the company. Then we’ve a team in London, in India and then a few other countries. Essentially for us, what works well for me is I heavily rely on Async. Of course, we do have a number of meetings with customers, they need to be synchronous. We do have, in terms of our cadence, we usually have a, as a team, a weekly operations meeting once week, and maybe a strategy meeting once every two weeks as well. That will be synchronous because when there’s so much fast moving in a startup, it is important to get that time as a team just to touch base.
What we do, do is we really leverage Async. So we record like Loom videos, we do a lot of preparation stuff, for example Microsoft Word or Excel. We use a lot of notes. For example, Fellow is a great note-taking app for example. We really use a lot of the automation around, for example a HubSpot. So we do put obviously Slack as well. For Slack, we’re very careful not to turn on notifications. For me, I’ll try and be very careful and encourage anyone who comes just don’t ever turn on notifications. The business will survive and don’t need a response time straight away. That’s very, very important.
Luis:
Yeah, I’m a big fan of people setting hours. Just tell me what’s your availability for chatting back and forth? When can I expect you will reply to my message as more or less in real time? Obviously maybe you’ll take 10, 15 minutes, but what is it now? What is Slack hours? Then have two or three Slack hours a day and then just don’t for the rest of the day, be productive.
John Lee:
A thousand percent. So for me, I think what’s really important is that in the mornings I’m there as much as I can be around with the kids, for example, unless I have been working late the night before where I like to get involved with the kids in the morning. If I can help out with the dropping the off at the school, I enjoy doing that as well. Then for me, I typically have maybe meetings in the morning, but I always make sure one day a week Fridays with no meetings, done some time gone off with a bit of a day coffee with my wife or I’m going to go for a walk on the beach or play tennis for example. I do a lot of activities in the mornings, workouts or playing tennis, that for me is really important to set my day up. Then get into the work in the afternoon.
Then typically again between half four and seven, I try and not to make sure that’s completely clear so I’m here with the kids. I like to cook for example. So make sure I’m there with the kids, help get involved in cooking, play with them, help with the bedtime for example. Then usually log back on between seven and 11. So for me, again, a bit of a night owl. I tend to get some of that quiet time where I’m not getting bombarded with emails or anything like that for example, that I can just focus on that quiet time to do what I need to do. So for me, that’s my style that works for me.
Luis:
Yeah, I agree. I always say to… Unless a client is having an emergency, in which case it really is an emergency and it needs to be dealt with immediately. For our internal stuff, I have a hard time thinking about something that can’t be done in a 24 hour window.
John Lee:
Exactly. I always give my team my WhatsApp number so that if there is something really emergency, I’m always available. Generally speaking it’s never used. It’s really never used.
Luis:
Exactly. So okay, so Async is a big part of your strategy. You talked about Loom. Tell me what was the decision process for figuring out that you wanted to use that video, Async video as a tool instead of keeping it, well, in written form.
John Lee:
Well yeah, it’s a good one. So it depends on the messaging that we need to do. So typically we’ll default to either a Google Doc or a Google Sheet for example, or notes on Fellow. So we’ll do a lot of that very often or might do Slack messages, but we’d be careful. Slack is fine for maybe communicating, but it’s not good for archiving important information. So for me, we try and if there is any key documentation or whatever to be prepared or read, we’ll try and if we can put it on a Google Drive or Google Docs or whatnot and read it there.
What I will say is sometimes, for example, maybe after a customer call, maybe it’s good to try and do a debrief. Somebody might share a three, four, five minutes, “Listen, this is what we learned, this is something that came up, this is something we need to consider as a team.” Doing that, you can of course write it down, but sometimes it’s better to communicate that in the richness of a Loom for example.
So again, we’re careful. We don’t use Loom for everything, but we do find that it definitely helps us choosing the right communication stack. Again, not defaulting to Slack on everything, it’s being careful and conscious about what you use. I think where there’s rich context required. So sometimes the eyes speak as much as the mouth. So you can really communicate something where that tone, that richer, wider, more holistic communication is required. Obviously face-to-face is always going to be the best for that. Sometimes doing it through Loom can be good.
Also, for example, if you need to show your face but also share a screen for example, and you’re going through, for example, a demo or a product or whatever or some sort of a rich analysis. You might say, “Listen, we’ve done prepared a very interesting analysis report here. Here’s where it is. Here’s the context as to how we’ve prepared it. Here’s the key things you need to focus on, love your feedback, here you go.” Then you can share the Word document or let’s say the Google Doc and you can share the Loom video and it gives a bit of context.
So for anything that’s high importance and high context required, it needs a rich context. They’re the ones who use Loom. But again, we’re careful and conscious of when we do that, we don’t want to be sending Loom videos everywhere. Again, if we can communicate something shortly and sharply just through a simpl], we do that as well. I mean that’s also fine. So again, it’s being deliberate about when we do it.
Yeah. So for us heavily rely on Google, the setup from Google Meets, Gmail, from Google Sheets, Google Docs. We find that is one of our primary tools that we use. It’s obviously basic enough, it’s not too sophisticated. The beauty about it is that I think, that’s fine for the size, as we get bigger, we will need more intentionality. Looking at things like for example, platforms. There’s also and a few others.
We have found, for example, as a team, HubSpot being absolutely brilliant, is a tool we brought in the last couple of weeks, which has been really helpful for, again, when you’re a small team with a small number of leads, you can manage it through Google Sheet. As you get to building an infrastructure, building repeatability, building a process, that’s where having those automation tools work great. That’s really important. It’s been an important distinction. As a small startup, you need to be doing everything manual so you can get your hands into everything and really deeply understand the intricacies of each process. Then as you then build in solidity and stability in a process for repeatability, that’s where you move up the automation layer.
The other thing we find great, I mentioned it before was that, let’s say Google Calendar, it’s got an integration called Fellow, Fellow app. Really good. Any kind of meetings we have, we know there are notes, we put down our action points or to-do lists on that for example. We find that is something that works well. Then if you got the communication side, then Slack, Loom, obviously we use email for external communication for the most part. They would be probably the main ones that we use. Of course there’s more sophistication that we can go down the line with, which we will do in due course. For those, they’re the main ones that we use.
Luis:
Well, and I do think that sophistication is somewhat overrated. I find that whenever I try to use a tool that’s more sophisticated than like you said, Google Docs or Google Sheets, at some point I end up resenting it a bit. I have marketing colleagues that are all about Notion. I just keep resisting moving to Notion with all my strength. Look, I’ve been burned before.
I remember when Evernote changed their plans, or there’s been software that I’ve used in my work systems that then has died, something like that. Obviously Notion just the example that I gave here today is a huge thing. I don’t foresee them dying anytime soon, but I don’t know. I like my Docs. I think that a word processor will never fail you. When it fails you, guess what? It’s a universal format. You can just pick another one and go.
John Lee:
A thousand percent. One of the ones we have been using as a team, which has been quite interesting is ChatGPT. We have noticed for personal life and work life, you have to be very careful how you use it. You can’t necessarily rely on it. Certainly not for professional, really important tax or anything like that. In terms of communication, asking simple search queries, stuff like that, there’s being use cases that can be a real amplifier. So that’s one of the ones that we’ve been looking at.
Luis:
Look, it’s much more useful than Google already for just asking questions. Just the other day, I was looking for a very simple technical term. So I was writing just fiction writing, nothing to do with marketing, but I was wondering, okay, those columns in a cavern when a stalactite and a stalagmite meet and they form a column, is that actually called a column or is there another name for it? So I just asked, “Hey ChatGPT, what is the name of the structure that forms when a stalagmite meets with a stalactite?” If I type that into Google, I would have to spend five minutes going through a list of articles while ChatGPT just let me know immediately. Yes, it’s a column. There you go. There you go.
John Lee:
Yeah, a thousand percent, a thousand percent. That’s just the start of it. So think of how that’s going to shift over the next couple of years.
Luis:
Yeah, exactly. I think that is very important. There are even more, I think of ChatGPT as basically an unpaid or maybe when it’s a cheap intern, that you don’t need to train. That’s the beauty of it. When you get an intern, the assumption, and I try to make good on that promise, the unspoken promise is that you’re getting this cheap labor, but you’re committed to teaching them, to making them level up as a professional so they can command a higher price point in their professional life to come.
ChatGPT, I actually don’t need to fill for the unfeeling robot. I don’t need to fill the need. It’s learning possibly. I think it’s learning, but it’s learning without me having to teach it. So I can just ask him, I can tell him, “Okay, I need 10 marketing landing pages generated. Go.” It’s not going to be as good as something that I could write, but it would take me a day to do that. It does it in five minutes.
So then instead of spending one day writing them myself or giving it to a human to spend one day writing them themselves, I can just get a pretty good first draft in five minutes and then I can spend one hour tweaking them. So for that kind of bulk work I found that is really good.
John Lee:
Yeah, no, completely agree with you. Completely agree with you. So that bit of it is exciting, but they’re the main tools that we use that we find quite helpful as a team. Yeah.
Luis:
Okay. So let’s move a bit because I want to be respectful of your time and we’re nearing the end of the interview. I wanted to ask you a couple of rapid fire questions, but the answers don’t need to be rapid fire. You can take as long you like. So let’s talk about gifts. If you could give one thing, just one thing in bulk to everyone working with you, what would it be? You can’t give cash or a cash equivalent like a gift card. You need to choose something.
John Lee:
I would give a one week, all expenses paid trip to Bali, particularly to Ubud and get to visit some places like the Pyramids of Chi and few of the amazing places that were there. That left a real deep spiritual impact on me at the time that I spent there. I know it’s pretty well known, but I have great memories of my time there. Yeah.
Luis:
Nice. That’s a great suggestion. Now let’s set a budget. I like the limitless budget option. That’s why I asked this first. Now the twist on the question is, what if you only add 100 bucks per person?
John Lee:
Okay. So if I only had a hundred bucks per person, I would treat them to a one-on-one experience with either a Buddhist master or a spiritual master in again somewhere… I’d give them a choice of either a Buddhist master, to have a chat with some of them online or Zoom, for example, or do something like to painting, for example, or to do a painting session, some experience. I’m big into experiences. Experiences leave a mark on you, whereas a gift, a material gift is great, but don’t me wrong, but I think experiences leave more of a mark on you.
Luis:
That makes a lot of sense. So let’s talk about yourself, gifts to yourself for a minute. This with no price limit, but let’s put a time limit. Let’s say in the past year, what have you bought that had a meaningful impact in your work life?
John Lee:
For me, getting to go to Lisbon with my wife for my 40th birthday and have one of our friends mind the kids and get a really special night with my wife. Worth the weight in gold. I can’t get off time with her. We’re eight years married now at this stage. That for me feeds my soul, as well as time with my kids clearly.
Luis:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely understand that now finally having kids of my own. I definitely understand that it’s a pleasure to spend time with the kids, and it’s a pleasure to spend time with the kids and the wife, but it’s a challenge to spend time with just the wife.
John Lee:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s not easy and not be completely tired as well. Tired trying to manage everything. Of course. Yeah.
Luis:
Exactly. Exactly. So that is definitely an interesting thing. So still on the line of gifting, but let’s be specific to books. What books have you gifted to people who are interested in work or business or started up? What are your most gifted books? If you don’t have the habit of gifting books, what books would you gift if someone asked you?
John Lee:
For me, one that I got gifted and I gifted to others is a book called The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, which is a really thought provoking book on how you can manage different cultures in work. Another one that for me, I found very powerful is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Also, The Social Animal by Eliot Aronson was a very good one. The New Leaders, by, one second, The New Leaders by Daniel Goleman was a book I read 20 years ago that left probably the biggest impact on me of all.
Luis:
All right. Okay. Those are very good recommendations. Thank you for that. So I guess the final question, the final question is the dinner question. So let’s say that you’re organizing a dinner for the movers and shakers of the remote work world, of the entrepreneurial world. The dinner happens to happen in a Chinese restaurant. So you as the host get to pick the message that goes inside the Chinese fortune cookies. What is your fortune cookie message?
John Lee:
There is a wonderful, it’s actually one word, it’s a poem called Desiderata, and it’s a poem that I read quite often. If any listeners take a look at it, probably some of them might already know it, but it’s a beautiful poem, thought provoking, and for me it’s inspired me about how to live my life. That’s kind of like being a bit of . Desiderata. Yeah, Desiderata and actually who it’s by, it’s by Max Ehrmann.
Luis:
There you go. There you go. I am positive that I have read that many time ago. I definitely remember the name, but the content, I need to look it up again.
John Lee:
Super, super. Well, I really enjoyed the chat, Luis. Thanks so much. Really relaxed conversation.
Luis:
It was absolutely. Yeah, it was lovely. Before you go, please tell people where can they find you, where can they continue the conversation, and where they can learn more about your company and what you can do for them?
John Lee:
They visit the website a wfa.team, so WFA dot T-E-A-M. There you’ll get everything you need, including free trial to the platform. You get a free seven-day trial so they can play around and see what it’s like. Also, on our blog, for example. Follow us on social media, particularly on LinkedIn where we’ve got a lot of content there, including our Work from Anywhere series that we do every couple of weeks. So yeah, they’re probably the best places and again, they can feel free to email me at [email protected] if they have any questions.
Luis:
All right, well this was a really nice conversation. If you come to Portugal again, let me know because I definitely would like to hang out a bit, maybe have a glass of wine or two.
John Lee:
Would be great. For sure.
Luis:
Yeah, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
John Lee:
Thank you.
Luis:
De nada. See you around. So we close another episode of the DistantJob podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners and the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me, and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well.
You can also help a lot leaving reviews on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distantjob.com/blog/podcast, click on your favorite episode and any episode really, and subscribe. By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form.
Of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. To help you with that, again, distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tell us who we need and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate, 40% faster than the industry standard. With that, I bid you adieu. See you next week on the next episode of DistantJob podcast.
