Luis Magalhaes: Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the DistantJob podcast. I am your host Luis and this is your podcast about building and leading remote teams, huwen. And today I have with me Victor Fredung. Victor is the CEO of Shufti Pro, but hey I guess, hi Victor. Please, I just introduced you but tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and what you do.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. And hi Luis, it’s very nice to meet you. As Luis said, I’m the CEO of the company called Shufti Pro. We basically do identity verification online, so we basically verified identity of customers from anywhere in the world in record time of 30 seconds on average.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So what’s the thing in your industry that excites you the most right now?
Victor Fredung: I think it’s like a huge need for our services at the moment. Like for the basically like KYC and AML, it’s been exploding especially now in 2019 where basically governments have demanded banks or dollar companies, should start using new and innovative tools. So it’s very interesting market to be in at the moment.
Luis Magalhaes: Well, how did you first get into this market? Tell me about today where you figured out that this was something that you needed to be a part of.
Victor Fredung: Sure. It was actually a couple of years ago when we … because I myself I was spending this all fintech field for past … it’s close to 10 years now. And we basically owned and operated as several high risk payment gateways where we had some tremendous amounts of frauds and chargebacks.
Victor Fredung: So we did in the past was we tried to find solutions which could potentially help us lower our fraud rates. So we have actually tested some of our competitors in the past as well. But what we found out the Chase B was that it … it was not really the best user experience. And customers don’t really want to wait for 10 minutes time or even days to become verified.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: It’s like in today’s society you would like to do things immediately for charm. So that’s when the whole idea about our company came to exist because we wanted to be the quickest and the most seamless reputation year on year, as possible and this is basically what we have accomplished so far as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, I can definitely feel that. Whenever, I signed up for a service online. It’s nothing as complex as what you guys do. It’s just … you’re not usually … usually when you sign up for an account online you need to get the verification email just to verify your signup. It’s like I input my email, I press enter and then I grabbed my phone, where the hell is that verification email? Come on. I just-
Victor Fredung: Exactly.
Luis Magalhaes: … I just started it 10 seconds ago. This is so inefficient.
Victor Fredung: Yeah, exactly. And then that’s usually what annoys people as well, from what we have seen with our researchers as well. If the customer culturally become accepted or start using your services immediately, they might even abandon the services completely. And shows different services instead.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, definitely. So tell me, what have you changed your mind the most about in the last two to three years, let’s say?
Victor Fredung: Changed a mind about most?
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: In specifics like category or in my soul-like space.
Luis Magalhaes: Whatever makes most sense for you.
Victor Fredung: When we started, I didn’t really think there was a too big of a need for a service like ourselves. But I feel like the more I’ve actually got involved in the source of myself, as I mentioned I worked in a completely different sector in the past it’s all even though we touched sort of the same subjects as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: I think, learning more and more about the services in especially when the needs and requirements are actually increasing, especially for regulation suspects as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: I think the need for the quickness of the system, guess we discussed becoming instantly verified. This is stuff with change my mind for understanding, what the customer actually would like to have and how it should actually work.
Luis Magalhaes: So your company, tell me if I’m mistaken, but you have offices across three countries, right? It’s the United Kingdom, Sweden and Latvia. Is that correct?
Victor Fredung: Yeah, correct. So we are currently exploring options in the U.S. as well and also in Asia.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So tell me a bit about how remote work made your business possible or helped you make it better?
Victor Fredung: Sure. Well first of all I’ve always worked with remote workers, depending on whatever services I’ve actually been in because myself … I think this is also part of the innovative technologies study. You can basically sit anywhere when you’re operating online. So I don’t really feel a need to have all of my developers located around me at the same time. Because I usually work from home a bunch of times, especially now since we had our daughter few weeks ago.
Victor Fredung: Having remote workers have definitely impacted our business completely, myself and especially with the ease of [inaudible 00:05:10] technology used to actually communicate with the developers or whatever the remote workers might be. It’s definitely something which have helped our business achieve success. That’s definitely improved our business as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Well maybe break down how people in the company are distributed between those three countries? First start [inaudible 00:05:28].
Victor Fredung: When we started at a company, myself we’re located at Sweden, the rest of the firms were actually located in the United Kingdom. So when we … It was like United Kingdom was our headquarters had made most sense because that’s where the rest of the co-founders were. Our CTO was also located there as well with the rest of the development team.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: So now, I would say we have most of our sales guys here in Sweden, of course have some in the United Kingdom as well. But usually the sales guys and the business open guys, we’ll look at here in Sweden where, how our development team and some of the other sales guys in the UK and then as part of our technologies we use Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. We mostly have our human experts, it’s located in Latvia.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. How do you handle communication between these three bodies? Take me through, so that … I guess that … take me through the start of your work day.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. First of all we use bumps of different for communications tools. Like internally we have used Slack in the past where we have recently switched to Mattermost instead, which is sort of like the same thing. If I understand it completely accepted. Mattermost is actually located in our service instead of using Slack’s remote servers.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay.
Victor Fredung: The main communication between our team actually happens on Mattermost, if we need to like quick chatting or if we need to have a specific. Groups structure, if I need to or a new design for a website. Then we have specific groups, which I can talk to directly on Mattermost. Then we also use Skype for communicating internally as well. So if myself and some of the other guys from the business development team needs to communicate, then we can simply just jump on a quick Skype call.
Victor Fredung: And then we’ll also have for … We of course you assume as well, this is mainly used for our meetings, simple like Google hangouts, Webex, et cetera. So we use a bunch of different combinations of services.
Luis Magalhaes: Can you go into a bit more detail on that experience versus Slack?
Victor Fredung: Yeah, sure. To be honest, I didn’t do it to take the decision on my feet switching to Mattermost, I actually liked Slack as well, but it … to most I think it’s exactly the same sort of experience. Even the design is almost 100% similar to Slacks, the sign-in so. They actually, the difference in which I’ve seen is that the Mattermost, you sort of download a client to a computer instead of using like Slack where you have everything in the cloud instead of[inaudible 00:07:55]-
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: … shutting for your browser and status. So use downloaded client and then it’s the same process. You can see all the different employees who are like the person’s in your team and then you can just simply select whatever you would like and then they will start chatting to them immediately.
Luis Magalhaes: So we have people across three countries, and do you have any offices at all? Does everyone work from home? How is that distributed?
Victor Fredung: We actually have a three different officers. We have offices in all those countries where we currently have our team located in [inaudible 00:08:25].
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: The size of the office I should depends very much about the size of the actually guys working there. So like in Latvia we have one of our laundering offices. We have our treatment intelligence team in the United Kingdom. We also have a laundering large office. And in Sweden we actually have this smallest office where I myself am located most of the time.
Luis Magalhaes: Do you have any kind of work routine? Meaning, how do you usually start your day and go about … where do you go first? What do you do first? Who do you talk first? How do the teams from those three different countries synchronize? I guess it’s why … how I’m … what I’m more interested in knowing.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. We of course know and this is also depending on, because we are a global company, we offer our services every different country. So the terms on to you should be like a huge difference for ourselves. Especially if we deal with let’s say U.S. clients for example, which basically don’t really come online until the afternoon hour-time.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: We have actually done is that usually like just explain that on my own experienced and on my own work diary is that, for the first part of the day I tried to talk as much as I can to the guys which have started earlier than myself in the morning. My work days usually started eight or nine because I usually have to stay up late because we have clients with U.S. which need to have calls eight or nine or even eleven in the night, hour-time.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: So I tried to start in, talk to the guys which are located and working against other time zones, to try to stay in touch with them first and then when the U.S. guys come online were like the other guys. Which this morning, hour after noon I tried to talk to them as much as possible as well. So it’s a bit depending on which time zone our guys are actually working against. You just simply need to find out and how to structure work days to speak to all of them.
Luis Magalhaes: There is some overlap between the three teams? Correct. What did you say that overlap looks like?
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. Usually we tried to find a suitable time during the day. It’s usually around lunchtime-
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: … that’s where we try to keep the whole team meeting and in the same direction.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay.
Victor Fredung: So we do provide continual updates this has happened today, this is something which we need to discuss, et cetera. Depending on the nature of what we need to discuss either we simply just jump on a call or we tried to solve it in writing form of the stratum.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. Do you have any kind of cadence of calls? Is there any time in the week where all the team or most of the team gets together for a call? How do you keep the team connected?
Victor Fredung: It’s almost like when it comes to the business moments, so questions and also when somebody comes to discussing his particular clients because each client has their unique requests.
Luis Magalhaes: Of course.
Victor Fredung: Myself and the rest of the founders who usually speak at least once per day to see how we can solve these solid issues.
Luis Magalhaes: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: And then we’ll also have, so managers for maintain the development team for example. What we haven’t done is that we’re actually split the toss for myself on handling more like the business development side and then we of course have some our CTO which handles more of the development side of things. So as long as in the management board are very connected to each other, keep on communicating on a daily basis. Then we have specific responsibilities to actually allude the rest of the tossed to the team or the appropriate team for this.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So tell me about the challenge that you … what has been your biggest challenge in trying to juggle people across three different offices? Three different times zones?
Victor Fredung: Yes, sure. I just, some of the problems which I can definitely relate to more in advance especially for all the business which I’ve run previously.
Luis Magalhaes: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: And that is more in the sense of, if you have developers who are completely remote working, you need to stay on top of them every minute of the day almost just to understand, excited what is going on, what are they currently doing, et cetera. For the Shufti Pro side of things, I think we have covered these issues when relatively good demand. So I mentioned the rest of the congruent actually located in our UK office, our CTO connection system, if it comes to an development issues.
Victor Fredung: Of course there will always be some time differences, as I mentioned, like myself, since I work from Sweden and you should stay up late at nights if we need to discuss with any U.S. clients for example.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: [inaudible 00:12:52] call them with the rest of the team when it’s available. And since we try to provide our clients with super quick response time, et cetera, there might be some sort of issues when it comes to the timing. We need to wait like a few hours so we can just discuss this internally ourselves before we actually make the final decision. So, that’s the only problem which I see at the moment.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. Have you bounced around any ideas of how to make that work better or is it just still a challenge?
Victor Fredung: I would say it’s still a challenge. To be honest I don’t really think it matters that much in our experience because usually the clients, which we deal with too, they’re actually running big sites like banking clients, financial exchange, just cryptic clients, et cetera. So, I think the average response time to this companies from our competitors it’s at least a couple of days and usually as we all know banks usually or don’t really act on such a quick matter as well.
Victor Fredung: I think still if we can provide our announce with them, within like 12 hours of time. I still think this works in their favor as well. So, I don’t really see a too big of a problem as from now. The only thing which we could do to slightly increase this as if everyone lowers their sleeping time to the night, but then they’re productive day might not be as good as it is as of today.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, well that definitely makes sense. And it brings me to a question that I usually like to ask because I also like to talk a bit about hiring.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: If you are looking for someone specifically for remote position, meaning that you knew that this person was going to work from home or from a coworking space.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: What kind of characteristics would you look for when trying to hire this person?
Victor Fredung: I would definitely try to look for someone who is independent in their work and this is something which I had very much trouble with in the past as well. Especially when you try to find a suitable person and you think like okay this could maybe be a good fit for our business.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: But on often they’ve actually started, it’s almost like a complete waste of time to even bother with this particular person. So we usually prefer for these type of workers is that, I would personally like to meet them face to face, to sort of I’d like get a better understanding. Also if they have done any select similar work in the past themselves.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: I usually like it because this is actually a lot of big issue because if you’re a guy who actually working remotely … well one could of course assume that yes, this would of course be convenient, you can stay at home, you can do it at work, you don’t even have to dress fancy when you were working from home. You have to sit, wear your slippers from your bathroom or whatever you are actually using.
Victor Fredung: But there’s actually a lot of likes or like mine is actually coming into the space because you really need to dedicate enough time and it’s easy to get distracted when you’re actually working from a remote place instead of an office stratum. So, we definitely try to find the right individuals who are actually independent as I mentioned.
Victor Fredung: They can definitely focus if they’re working from a remote space instead of an office. And also to try to get a better feel of the individual, which we’re doing business with.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So you … Spoiler alerts but, the audience now knows that we are in our bathrooms. So the cat’s out of the back on that one.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: All right. So, this is actually something that I was very interested in asking you specifically because you’ve mentioned that it’s interesting to have access to their history. Knowing if they have experience working remotely.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: And this is actually something that DistantJob [inaudible 00:16:37] because DistantJob is a recruitment company and, we go to pains to verify the experience of all our candidates.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: Because it’s very easy to just write something in your online portfolio and suddenly it’s true. So we actually do the work of getting in touch with the references and with their previous companies and et cetera, just to check the stories.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: But I wanted to ask you if ID verification technology like the one that you an expert on, what does it mean you know for hiring and prospecting potential job candidates? Is there we’ll in an not too distant future foolproof, CV’s, verified fit CV’s and portfolios, be something that is possible.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. I definitely think this might or I think it will be partly possible of course as much as yourself, you would need to select conduct guard references as well to see that it actually matches against the customer. This is something which is a bit hard like you just talking about your own experience. When we tried to verify, let’s say an ID document for example, if you have your passport nearby, what our system does is that it analyzes the security features on the document.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: And this is something which the machine readings and collection does. But when it comes to different documents, if you mentioned a resume or CV for example, then it’s harder for the system to actually understand because as you mentioned yourself, you can’t really conduct references where the machine can actually do this. So we can of course take a look at the documents and make sure it looks like really documentable.
Victor Fredung: We don’t really have sufficient enough proof to actually know that, the reference that the person I should put down or the history of the workings that it actually matches. I’m not really sure if that might be possible in the future then it would be a huge database, where we can basically upload like experiences that you need to have the company director of that combination accepted or something like this. So maybe with some part of that internally might be possibly in the future.
Luis Magalhaes: Well, I mean, I know from your writing that you … Besides obviously now you’re in the ID verification business, which is a different business altogether, but I know that you have interest in blockchain.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: And I was wondering if there is a possible future in which we can just have CV’s and portfolios, on the blockchain. And so with all the security and verification that the blockchain allows. I mean, I’m not by any stretch of imagination an expert in blockchain. I try to educate myself on it, but I find it that, the information that I find online is really not properly tuned to my knowledge.
Luis Magalhaes: So I find it, hard to learn about blockchain but, it feels that this is something that is in the cards for the future. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but if your portfolio lives in the blockchain-
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: … that it can be falsified? Am I wrong?
Victor Fredung: No, you’re not wrong absolutely. And it’s definitely like an interesting use case as well [inaudible 00:19:53] describing. But we do actually have lots of clients even though it’s not our primary focus to focus on the blockchain and be different limitations for this. We do have lots of clients are actually building technologies based on our technology up on the blockchain. So just to give you an example, which is so similar, it comes to very [inaudible 00:20:11] all dealers and specific like art galleries, et cetera.
Victor Fredung: So they are using the blockchain to some extent to verify this person’s actually done this piece of work. Same for when it comes to, I think it was commercials or something like this. They are simply having different commercials and then the author of this commercial can actually verify that it’s them that actually done this. And then the rest of the guys can actually confirm that it’s true. If at all something unique use cases, when it comes to the blockchain combined with eye-verification technology.
Luis Magalhaes: All right. So, do you think it can also be used in the future for verifying education? I mean meaning I can know for sure that the developer that I hire has done this courses and these specializations and then study these subjects. Is that something that is feasible?
Victor Fredung: I believe so. It’s almost like … I haven’t actually put in too much time to actually think about that particular sort of thing, but combining the technology with blockchain could potentially build something like this. So I’m guessing, yes.
Luis Magalhaes: Hey there. It’s Luis. Welcome to the intermission after DistantJob podcasts. If you’re listening to this podcast, there’s a very big chance that you’re interested in building a great remote team and to build a great remote team, you need great remote employees. That’s why DistantJob comes in. So here’s how it works. You tell us the kind of position that you need to fill. We talk to you. We try to figure out not only what are the exact requirements that that person should have, but also we try to figure out who would be a perfect fit for your company culture because we really believe that that matters.
Luis Magalhaes: Then once we have an exact picture of what we’re looking for, we’re off to the races. Our recruiters tap into their global network and, we filter people very well so that you don’t waste your time interviewing people that are never going to be of interest to you. We make sure, because we are techies and our recruiters are techies as well, so when people get to you they are already pre-selected and, you just have to decide between the cream of the crop.
Luis Magalhaes: And once you make your selection, we handle all the paperwork, we handle HR for you, we handled payments, and you get a full time remote employee that’s among the best of the on the world and managed entirely by you, by your processes and following your culture. If this sounds good visit us at www.distantjob.com and without further ado, let’s get back with the show. Thank you for listening.
Luis Magalhaes: All right, that’s pretty cool. So let’s jump a bit around because … so you were talking about Mattermost, which is more or less I see a version of Slack.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: How do you view, privacy and security in the remote workspace? By this I mean, one objection that I get to remote work all the time.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: Is that companies work with sensitive information, sensitive customer data and they’re afraid that if their developer is working, let’s say from a cafe that, we just … for some reason his laptop might be stolen or while his, walking up to the bathroom, someone will log into the computer and, just still information. There’s, there are definitely a lot of different security concerns.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely.
Luis Magalhaes: Now there are ways to get around this, like obviously, you can have an actual physical USB key to lock your computer, stuff like this. But, there is certainly some doubts about, security when working remotely. Are there any solutions that you would offer for this? How do you envision the way to improve the security of having someone work with sensitive data out of the office?
Victor Fredung: Yeah. First of all, this question would be like more appropriate for a CTO, which he really likes when it comes to old secured aspects of all the things like encrypting all the information et cetera. I think especially when it comes to the privacy and the security of the data as well. I think this very much depends on whatever the information is actually handling.
Victor Fredung: So to give you an example from our company, if we’re having sensitive customer details, then this is not something which we would do on a remote basis since this needs to be done in a protected environment.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: But apart from the that when it comes to the sales process or reaching out to customers, this is something, which we are more open to doing actually remotely than instead of an office [inaudible 00:24:56]. And then we’ll of course have some applications on our computers, if we’re working remotely, which tries to encrypt information and make it harder for any perpetrator to actually make use of the information, which we are storing.
Victor Fredung: I can’t really go into too much detail. It’s about us as satellite geeks, our CTO are expertise. But I would say that depending on the nature of the subject which its handling when it comes to privacy and security reasons, they would need to be specific [inaudible 00:25:27] as [inaudible 00:25:29] in case privacy information and of course this should be handled more carefully whilst the comes simple development costs, this could maybe be done on our remotely basis instead.
Luis Magalhaes: So do you think that it’s possible at all to have the technology, I mean every laptop and every iPad and every iPhone has the camera pointing at your face the whole time. In fact, I have a good friend that likes to keep a pause tent over it just to make sure no one is lying.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: But is it possible that there will come a time in the near future again where you don’t have to worry about those things because your computer will recognize your face at all times and if your face disappear it will just not allow anyone else to mess with it.
Victor Fredung: I’m not entirely sure of it to be honest, I still use also some kind of … I don’t really use a paused pod, but I have this, cam protect sort of things. So it’s completely hidden from my camera unless I would actually like to turn it on.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: I have no idea if this would be possible in the future to try to avoid the cam turning on automatically, but I rather be safe than sorry.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, I guess I so, but my talk was more like you can safely have your computer and be working at the cafe and as soon as you … I mean the camera would be always on and as soon as you get up and, go to the bathroom or go grab a coffee or something like that. The computer would just not work, until I see your face, I am not letting anything touch this.
Victor Fredung: Okay. So you mean like a facial recognition technique to actually like activated computer? I do definitely believe that this might be available in the future. I think gender … Please correct me if I’m wrong with this one, I think Microsoft was … sorry that Apple was working on some sort of face recognition to think actually unlock the computer like they have a similar with the phones on iPhone x.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: So this could potentially be something which could be available in the near future.
Luis Magalhaes: Well fingerprint scanner is also good. I mean I’m not actually educated if face scanning is better than fingerprint scanning, I have no idea what’s the variation between one and the other. It seems to me that it should be very hard to duplicate your fingerprint. But what do I know? I’m not a security expert.
Victor Fredung: No [inaudible 00:27:55] myself so. But I actually have the fingerprint scanning on my computer and it’s similar like the phone as well. It’s most likely … when I do it on a phone sometimes especially if I’m sweating, like if I’m at gym or something then it might be a little bit hard to open it, so-
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: … maybe the face recognition or maybe like a combination of the biometric verification method could be something in the future as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah, possibly. Okay, so I know that you’ve written about the importance of using this kind of verification, technologies on social networks. So I really wanted to talk with you a bit about the problem of online ID. It’s impossible to argue, that people being anonymous on the Internet is always a good thing. It feels that when someone is anonymous on the social network it brings the worst out of them.
Victor Fredung: Yes.
Luis Magalhaes: But I mean at the same time, I would be wary of making verification absolutely essential, for using social networks. Just because I think of the case where on countries where free speech is more limited.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: And social networks and not everybody used anonymously are actually, an important part of the lives of people that are oppressed and use it as a means of communication that’s a bit more loose. How do you think about this? What is a good balance, between stricter controls on social network while enabling people that might not have freedom of communication if they’re not anonymous?
Victor Fredung: Yeah, it’s stuff that interesting forward, should bring us up. To be honest, I myself wouldn’t really like to become very fighting for using a social media platform myself. I can definitely understand, persons coming from those countries where the freedom of speech is actually [inaudible 00:29:48] limited. That they wouldn’t simply like to do an item verification either.
Victor Fredung: It depends. I think you need to look at the submit of where you actually doing verification. If you’re opening like a bank accounts, there’s actually a requirement to do an ID verification because they need to understand that you are the same individual as this on ID document and that you will actually be the person on this account. For the social media part, I can’t really give you any too much of comments on it, since is of course the interesting faults.
Victor Fredung: I personally wouldn’t like to be very fight on using a social media platform myself, since I prefer to remain anonymous whenever I would like to. And as you said yourself, the use brings out the worst in people when they stay anonymous. Still, I don’t really think it should be requirements from using social media platforms.
Luis Magalhaes: So how do you feel about the system? I mean, obviously Twitter verification is not a foolproof verification, but you do tend to give a bit more credence to the people that have the blue mark, next to their name.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: But at the same time it feels like it creates an upper class and an underclass, right? Because you tend not to respect … you tend to give more respect to the people who have that mark. But not having that mark doesn’t necessarily mean that your opinion shouldn’t be heard or shouldn’t be valuable or aren’t reasonable. So how do you think verification influences the social dynamic there?
Victor Fredung: First of all, for the Twitter verification is that an ID verification is that simply as the phone number verification?
Luis Magalhaes: I think that is an ID verification. I mean, I’m not verified on Twitter myself.
Victor Fredung: Okay.
Luis Magalhaes: It’s sometimes it feels like you need to be famous. Basically it feels … sometimes it feels like it’s more of celebrity stages. I’m pretty sure it’s not phone verification. I think it must be ID, but I’m not sure on the dynamics.
Victor Fredung: Yeah, and it’s smells like personally I don’t really take too much notice if a person is verified on Twitter or not. I can also say that I don’t really use Twitter too much nowadays. I simply don’t have time to browse for all the things. When it comes to the verification on different social media platforms as we discuss, I think you need to look at whatever the platform might be.
Victor Fredung: So let’s say on Twitter, if you do a verification that might be more sort of accepted for individuals as opposed to let’s say if it’s a completely new social media platform where you don’t really have too much information about a company.For a company like that actually demand or require an ID verification or any other type of verification from the customers that might be more in the gray zone because then you not really sure, will they asked to protect my information and can I actually trust this company, so?
Luis Magalhaes: No. Interesting.
Victor Fredung: Yeah. And actually for Twitter, I think … I’m not sure if I mentioned, I haven’t used Twitter in a long time. I think they only do a phone verification. So just to confirm your phone number, at least you sign up a new account.
Luis Magalhaes: So it’s a similar words for very different things because, just because your account is verified by a phone doesn’t automatically get to the check mark. The check mark is something that is decided by Twitter and I’m not quite sure what their criteria are. But again celebrity status being a public … I guess it’s being a public figure.
Victor Fredung: Yeah. And for them it might be like a special important as well. So they don’t really get their identity stolen.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: You can create multiple different accounts with different celebrities and try to just put up some random information about them.
Luis Magalhaes: So throughout your years working in tech companies, what would you say is the best lesson that you’ve learned so far?
Victor Fredung: The best lesson working in technology is definitely to do the time required to actually understand the business, understand your good strengths, your weaknesses, try to develop your weaknesses. To me it’s like, there’s always plenary information touch to bid. So if you do the work too, if you dedicated time then, most of you will actually be successful in your space.
Luis Magalhaes: So what would your advice be for people trying to work on their weaknesses?
Victor Fredung: Basically try to analyze your weaknesses to see if this is something which you could improve. By most cases there’s always something which you can improve [inaudible 00:34:19] of your technology. No technology is one or some perfect, there’s always room for improvements. So try to find weaknesses, try to find what solutions might actually, limit those weaknesses or actually make them a lot better. And then your singular try to execute those select changes which you need to do.
Luis Magalhaes: Well, let’s say that you have … All right, you’re based in Sweden and I don’t remember the rate of the Swedish kroner, but let’s say you have 100 euros.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: You probably familiar with the euro since you work with people all over the world. So 100 euros, if you have 100 euros to buy something for each person that works with you, that works remotely for you, what would you give them?
Victor Fredung: You mean like in terms of like something which can help them improve the business or you’re just like us a gift?
Luis Magalhaes: I mean, something that would enable them to work better off or to have more work life quality.
Victor Fredung: It’s rather a tough question. I think it would be something which would help their daylight transaction to become better. So, if it’s part of like the sales programs, I think we’d probably buy them, might be really good headset so that they can communicate on good basis to the customer. Something which makes it easy for them to use. I’m not sure, AirPods are a good headset nowadays.
Victor Fredung: If it’s for marketing team. Yeah to be honest, so in the same space something which will help them go for a better work day.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. So turning this on yourself.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: What’s the most helpful purchase that you have made you know for yourself that has improved your work or your work life balance in the last couple of years?
Victor Fredung: Switching to Mac computers to be honest.
Luis Magalhaes: Oh yeah, that’s … yeah, same here.
Victor Fredung: [inaudible 00:36:23], yeah. It’s probably the best switch I ever a did, changing from traditional computers to Apple products and stuff. Especially when it comes to some computer that especially, since I spend a long, like 12 to 14 hours per day in front of my computer, having a Mac Pro. My aim like to work from status stuff, that will help me improve my business.
Luis Magalhaes: How would you say, I mean how would you explain that to people? Because I have a hard time. I mean I did that myself and I have a hard time convincing people because it’s so much more expensive.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: But it’s also a huge difference and I have a hard time, convincing people of how just what the difference it makes.
Victor Fredung: That’s absolutely true on that. This is so like the same problems which I have as well.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah.
Victor Fredung: Usually what I tell them is that if since am working, I’ve done a few development toss myself in the process frolic. If you need to work on different projects which are very so like … It’s processing a lot of power from your computer. I personally believe it’s for more convenient actually use an Apple product instead of a standard computer.
Victor Fredung: Yes in terms of if the person is simply interested in the design aspects or they seem to just like to have the brand of Apple, then I wouldn’t really to recommend it too much to them because as you said, it’s quite expensive compared to a normal computer instead.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. What are the book or books that you have gifted the most?
Victor Fredung: The books that are gifted most? To be honest, I haven’t actually done too much of a reading as of late. We do spend a lot of time trying to train our staff with difference, exercises or video materials instead. I don’t try a little really having a specific names of those individuals with specific books and stuff like this. But that’s usually how the process looks like.
Luis Magalhaes: How do you feel about, learning by video? I mean its something that’s very recent. I mean, but there’s a lot more video material these days.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: I find that for me it’s a lot easier to just take notes and underline on books and, I find myself with … having a bit more trouble, learning from video just because it’s not as easy to go back and review it and all of that. How effective do you feel that you’re learning in video? As in do you have any specific deep tips to take the most out of the material?
Victor Fredung: I think out of my own personal experience, I actually prefer videos instead. Usually nowadays it’s simply because I can do some work i the meantime while actually have the video in the background. While actually myself trying to learn from it. Taking notes from the videos, I’m guessing it’s a bit depending on the video, if it’s a live stream that it might be hard to actually go back. But if it’s recorded a video and then you can of course just jump back to whatever things you didn’t really catch at that time.
Victor Fredung: But I think it’s all I need to be a little basis, is just if you’re a guy that learns actually better from reading books and taking notes or if I’m a guy, which learns better from just listening onto videos or trying to see the video, getting the visuals. Presentation of a guy, I should be presenting something or simply us learning directly from whatever finger actually trying to learn.
Luis Magalhaes: So I know that you need to be on another call soon and I wanted to be respectful of your time. So I have one final question for you, which is … let’s say that you are hosting a dinner at the Chinese restaurant for the top Execs of tech companies, the CTOs and CEOs of big Silicon Valley companies.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: And you are the host. You get to decide what message comes inside the fortune cookies. So what message would that be?
Victor Fredung: Switch to Shufti Pro for identity verification.
Luis Magalhaes: Okay. That’s fair enough.
Victor Fredung: Yeah, if it’s in a fortune cookie, they need to do it, otherwise it’s bad luck for them, so.
Luis Magalhaes: Yeah. Well, okay. Great marketing advice. Is there any advice regarding remote teams that you would like to also throw out there?
Victor Fredung: No, not unless, like what we have discussed. I think what are your company’s actually doing. You’re actually taking a look at their reference to the clients. I think this is something which you should actually do. If you’re actually hiring mode work, especially learning from their previous experience, and as we discussed it’s very hard if you actually hiring from let’s say a site like Upwork or oDesk or is Upwork is their new name actually.
Luis Magalhaes: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Victor Fredung: It’s actually validate the references, in previous work history, but if you tried to get them on a call and you tried to look for the references then, that’s a good start to actually do. And then just you learn from the whatever the individual might be.
Luis Magalhaes: All Right. Well, that’s totally the advice and I agree with, I agree with all of that.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: Victor it has been a pleasure. Before you go, if people want to learn more about yourself, to continue the conversation with you.
Victor Fredung: Yup.
Luis Magalhaes: Where can they find you?
Victor Fredung: If they go to our website, www.shuftipro.com under their about section, they will find my contact details. You can visit my Linkedin profile as well to try and get in touch with me and I would be happy to set up a call with them.
Luis Magalhaes: All right, so thank you so much for your time. It was … this was a lovely conversation and I guess we will see each other on the LinkedIn then.
Victor Fredung: Absolutely. Thank you too Luis, was a pleasure speaking with you.
Luis Magalhaes: Same here.
Luis Magalhaes: And so we close another episode of the DistantJob podcast and 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 convinced to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me and I hope it’s a joy for you to listen to as well.
Luis Magalhaes: 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 gets to have more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to distant job.com/blog/podcast click on your favorite episode then any episode really and subscribe.
Luis Magalhaes: By subscribing, you will get a notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episodes up so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form. And of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team as 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.
Luis Magalhaes: Look around the whole world, because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. And 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. And with that, I bid you a gift. See you next week on the next episode, this is a Job podcast.
