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Join our hosts, Tim and Mike, as they talk to startup engineering leaders Geoff Harcourt and Mitch Pirtle. Geoff is the CTO at CommonLit, a non-profit that distributes a literacy curriculum in English and Spanish to millions of students around the world. He currently leads an engineering team with zero C.S. majors. Mitch is the CTO at InsurTech startup, HOMEE, and comes from a career of starting companies and open-source projects. He has built the engineering departments at several high growth startups, including Morning Consult. In this episode we discuss hiring out of coding bootcamps versus more traditional academic backgrounds.
You’ll learn:
– The reasons coding bootcamp grads shouldn’t be overlooked.
– Practical tips on how to interview and onboard bootcamp grads.
– How startups can create an environment for bootcampers to succeed.
– Alternative academic options (beyond bootcamps and CS degrees)
Subscribe to the Pair Program from hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. Join host Tim Winkler (creator of hatchpad) alongside co-host Mike Gruen as they bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups, and career growth.
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Transcript
We’re back for another episode of The Pair Program. We’re your hosts, Tim Winkler, and sidekick, Mike Gruen. Mike, how’s it going?
It’s going great. Great weekend. Great week’s been going well. I’m doing good. I’m doing good.
I’m wanting to add explain a little bit of an experience I had yesterday. That kinda led me down my pairing of something here, which was trips to the dentist and inopportune conversations. This tends to happen more than more times than not. And I’m not the type of person that’s I hate being. Awkward or rude. I have to respond yet when there’s utensils in my mouth that are scraping, the roof of my mouth and like gums.
I don’t really feel like responding to the question that you’re going to ask me, but it’s funny cause led on for no joke led on. 10 minutes to where you ask a question. And then I would just sit there for about a minute or two, and then I’d respond to the question and then she’d go right back into another question.
So my mom would have that same problem with one of our hygienists growing up and she’d just take the stuff out of her mouth, like whatever was in there to answer the question and then put it back like that to basically show like how annoying it was. I just went to the dentist. Had a similar experience had the exact opposite experience.
My hygienist two times ago, didn’t say a word just went in there, did the job. It was great. Awesome. At the end of it, I even said, this is probably not going to sound like a compliment, but I super appreciate that you didn’t talk to me at all. And she laughed. And so I made sure to get her again and sure enough.
It was great. She just hummed and did our work and there was no awkward conversation. It was great. Yeah. It’s one of the few times where it’s I did not want a conversation with you, please do your job. What you got, what’s your my mine’s not quite as a hot take is a as that might have been, but I guess it’s just my Jewish nature, bagels and lox are always a good go-to favorite of mine from a food perspective.
That was mine. I guess gives the dental hygienist something to do. That’s right. What about what about our guests to Spiro? What’s what’s a couple of complimentary pairings that you think are to think about it a little bit. I think one is poodles and pandemic. Mostly because, we just stumbled upon a family.
Friend of ours had a farm and they had an extra poodle in January of 2020. And. Little did we know it would be like one of the better additions to the family, especially during lockdown. And it’s a really, it’s a really great pairing standard poodle or mini poodle, but she was the runt of the litter.
So she, she looks almost like a toy. We love her anyway. Poodle puppy. Yeah. Mike Grove, what you got? I’m inspired by Mike’s food one. So I will say a pairing that I like is peanut butter and raspberry combination, but you get the saltiness of the peanut butter with the Tang of the raspberry. It, I don’t know, it hits me right there. It also takes you back to go into friendlies as a kid. I remember going to a friend. But that was my thing. The recipes Sunday with raspberry ice cream chocolate and the peanut butter and raspberry altogether.
Are you a PBJ guy?
I really didn’t like PB and J’s flavor profile. Is it the texture?
It gets me every time. Wow. It was a good session. I actually enjoyed I enjoyed that.
Mike, the the locks situation are you, I’m like, you can have that at any time of day, morning breakfast, usually, it’s a nice Sunday brunch thing. But yeah I think it, it came up because as I was in my parents and over the break and that was served at actually in the evening as like an appetizer, a little.
Yeah. Cool. Let’s jump into the suffering at the heart of the discussion here. The reason that we’re all together here is to dissect a little bit of how startups scale there’s obviously a lot of different avenues here that startups will grow. It’s either bootstrapped, backed by a venture capital.
We have we have Spiro here. Who’s got an interesting perspective coming from. Leading companies underneath a holding company. And so I thought the best way to kick things off would be, maybe Spiro, just starting with you a little bit of your background for context for the listeners is, where you’ve come from.
And then we can jump into. Riff a little bit more of what some of those pros and cons are from each angle. Cause you’ve been the one that’s primarily standing it from the holding side, Mike Grove, seeing things from, pure VC backing. So let’s start with you just maybe a little bit of your background and then we can jump into that.
Yeah, no, I’ve been with Graham holdings for, close to 10 years. I started there when it was actually called the Washington post company. It changes name when it’s sold the Washington post Jeff Bezos in 2013. But, I spent about a decade under the holding company.
And prior to that, I had worked about a decade, just in broad strokes for a VC funded financial startup. Any startups, hard and challenging regardless of who’s funding it it, it’s the same challenges, but is interesting, seeing. Both working in like a central innovation arm for the company, but also, incubating an existing startup.
And, with decile, we’ve spun out a new and there’s a lot just, starting from scratch and seeing all of that under the umbrella of, a holdings company, they basically bring, a bit of, I would say like patient capital, there’s still, aggressive things you need to take.
And meet the expectations on it’s just a little bit of a predictable cycle, instead of I’d say that BC funding cycle, you’re still held to the same aggressive timelines and the same aggressive milestones, the holding companies broadly divide into companies that are producing cash so that they can buy more companies or invest in more things and smaller companies and startups where the cash is being used to invest in like a thesis or investment prints.
So it’s a little bit, being in a startup, it’s a little bit being at the kids’ table while the cash companies are like, sitting at the adult table. You do have a bit of a different type of network of resources. VCs bring like a wealth of connections and different types of resources and you have your board and with the holding company, the same thing, there’s just an element of being able to see such a wide variety of companies at different stages, as opposed to being.
In my previous startup and the VC side, you’re just one of many in a portfolio knowing that maybe one or two are gonna make it. I think that’s also worth pointing is the sort of relationships between the portfolio companies versus the relationships probably between the whole, the companies underneath the holding company.
You guys are probably a little more, there’s probably look, I’m just guessing, but I’m guessing that there’s probably a little bit more comradery or whatever. There, whereas with portfolio companies, I like when I go to the board and they’re like, oh, you should talk to blah, blah, blah. It seems like it’s more of a, they’re doing me a favor.
I’m doing them a favor type of thing. And it usually goes well, but it’s not quite that same relationship. It would be. That’s a really good point. And it’s funny because you still have that challenge where, you know no, one’s like forcing anyone to do anything. Cause you’re. Independently held companies just happened to be owned by the same parent, but that, that, that connection’s a little bit stronger.
And, folks that, the different opportunities to work across those lines. And there’s a little bit, cause you’re all, we’re a public holding company everyone’s success contributes to the bottom line success of the company.
So there’s a little bit. A connection or a motivation that, isn’t quite the same to your point w with a portfolio and in a VC sense. And I like one of the companies I worked at, we our CEO had spun out. Companies. And so we had more come, like there were people that we felt a little closer to because we knew them.
Like they, they knew us, we had worked, some of us had even worked together. So I think that, and I imagine that’s the same at a holdings company. Like you guys would probably know a number of people and continue to run into the same people. So your network just gets stronger. And there’s a lot of cross pollinating too.
Like if some of the, some of my former colleagues. Heads of some of the other companies that the portfolio and, other people have taken different career paths. So it’s a little bit interesting cause that’s like a simple transition in some ways. So you have some network connections that run pretty deep.
Mike Grove, I guess you want to like chime in on your cut a little bit of your con for context, for the listeners of what your history and where you came through. I came out of university of Maryland. I went to Fujitsu research labs working on we, at the time we’re calling pervasive computing.
We now know as IOT. So the idea is making the smart office environment of the future. We’re thinking about Palm pilots instead of iPhones. But there’s the seeds of that technology. And it was all built around what I ended up building my entire career around this idea of grass and semantics and AI.
I was there for about a year realized I actually had to start up bug my first startup. We were angel pre-seed funded in a video game industry launched. We made like $7. Went back to Maryland, back to doing research in kind of the area that I was doing at Fujitsu ended up meeting the two people with whom I co-founded start off a few years later.
And still around the central thesis of semantics, AI kind of graph technology all coming together. And, know, we spent a lot of time. We’re a little different from a startup because we had a lot of years where we said, we’re just going to be practical applicators of this technology. So before we built the product that the company was built around, we built a lot of stuff, trying to figure out the way to build the.
It took us six years to see the silhouette. I was like, okay, that’s the thing that we need to go build. And that was kinda my transition point to bring it back to the conversation about the prototypes. I built, the first version I worked on, it was my baby. And then it became time to, okay, now how do I scale this?
I get to build the thing. That’s going to go build the thing. So that’s where I’ve been at. Post-funding it start off. I was never part of our engineering team per se. I didn’t help build it until someone else was building it. That’s kinda where I got to today. And so I think it’s it’s led me along a little different path.
It’s interesting. I think the different paths, even within VC world I was, doing some consulting and just surprised at the various ways. There’s the you go out there and you’re. Prove it a little bit and you get some sort of traction in the market and then you can, and you and I think a lot of at least myself, that’s what I always think of is like the more traditional route is you get a little bit and then you and then you can go and say look here’s the seed of my idea.
Obviously if I could just put some fuel on this fire we’ll take. And then as I was doing more consulting, especially with California companies, I was surprised at how many of them were able to get, I would say VC funding, even though they had nothing, but. Documents, like there was nothing other than like some marketing stuff and maybe a little bit to indicate, like here’s our business plan and this is why we think it’s going to be successful.
And we’re still able to get that sort of funding. And I think it’s, there’s all these different ways that you can go about getting that money. Me personally, I think it’s better to have a little bit more of a proven track record. I think you, the earlier your take on investment, the riskier it is and the.
The title of the timeline, if you will, for the investors are always anxious to get their money back. And you don’t necessarily want to go through all the growing pains with an investor at the same time. No, I wish I knew what I knew. You know what I know now, six years ago when we started this journey, it is not like the books make it seem, it’s not like what the movies or TV shows.
It’s not a weird thing to have to deal with. And you’re right. There’s a lot of different ways even getting off the ground. It was surprising when we walked in with customers, we started fundraising. We had customers, we had revenue worse than guys having revenue. Like we’ve got a product we’re selling it.
Why don’t you make it more?
And and we’re first timers. So we didn’t know that there was a favorite dancer we were supposed to get. So it took some time. Yeah, I think that’s what are some of the other things that like maybe some lessons that you’ve learned or things that you wish your, you knew six years ago or whatever?
The one thing I got a lot of advice from people and it usually gives me like a list of 50 things. I can remember one,
like the one thing that I think I wish someone would have told me first was. Engineers are scared of process, right? Like you hear process. Do you think guys in suits, asking for you to change the icon color, you have flashbacks to office space. That guy that was like the lumbar that you remember from your old job process does suck, but at least write everything down.
You don’t have to be so rigid that you got a form to do the TPS report in triplicate, but it’s a lot easier. And then it didn’t get hub. I wrote it down. Just go follow. All the instructions are there. Yeah. I think the I think that when it comes to funding to having gone through it a few times, the documentation I had put together, had to rush to put together for a funding round, very different.
Like when. They’re asking for it. And you’re like, oh crap. I didn’t know that I’d have to put this together. And then the second and third times I was like, oh, we should just start doing this now, because what’s going to happen is we’re going to go through diligence and they’re going to ask us for all of these things.
And wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t rushing around for them and sure enough know, stuff like that. What’s your open source licensing policy? That’s something, like maybe you don’t really have to care about it too much in the early days, but when you go to get funding, that’s something that frequently gets asked and they want, and they want to make sure that.
I can speak to so we actually used to support Spiros, one of the, one of the companies underneath the Graham holdings umbrella as he was building out the engineering team from a recruiting perspective, I felt what was unique about their situation was, startups are always going to be a little bit more.
Risky right. To pursue pitching this underneath the Graham holdings umbrella or underneath a holdings company, it’s almost like you are able to pitch a startup within the comfort of a large company that has. A ton of money and backing. And so it was almost a little bit of the best of both worlds.
So I thought it catered well to those types of candidates that maybe, wanted to explore or experiment what a startup environment might be like. Without the risk of the benefits, it might not be as appealing or they could already come in with aggressive or competitive compensations because.
It was coming through a holdings company on their check. So that was something that I thought was unique. Mike, I don’t know if you’re, from a recruiting perspective that the different levels that you graduated through from, angel investment to series a, to series B, were there certain milestones where you felt there was a little bit more of an ease of attracting.
Talent because of a little bit more stability or how did that play out for you? It definitely was getting easier from the spirit stability perspective. Just like something about having gone through multiple funding rounds, even if people had never heard of us it, okay. It’s a startup, but they’ve been around for a while.
Now, the pandemic then. Really turn it around for us. Cause what was our big strength? There were fully remote work. We were showing them, you gotta be scrappy as a startup, hire the best people wherever they are be remote. That was weird. So that we, we lost that. So we see a lot more competitiveness now from that people have more freedom to move.
People can freely move. We’re seeing a lot more job hopping, a lot of short stints on resumes over the last 18 months with people just trying to find the thing that works for them. So it’s gotten harder, but it’s gotten harder in a good way because it’s made my job. More focused around what’s going to be the best thing for me and the employee and building a lasting relationship that works for them and works for me.
Just helping company ship units. No I’m willing to jump in. Cause it was a point that I was making spirit was about how, from a recruiting perspective, supporting in the past, like social code is the example underneath the. The whole, the holdings company is a little bit easier to attract folks that maybe weren’t as, risk prone because they had the chance to, as you spend it as they have the ability to work for a startup environment within the confines of a stable back.
Large organization from benefits from compensation and things like that. Maybe your take on that as you’ve seen it from, maybe just pure VC versus, the recruiting side within a holdings company environment. Definitely. We tried to sell it as easy kind of get like the best of both worlds.
Like you’re going to get like a mature. Like the things that you want from a mature company, which is you want good health insurance and a benefits package and some robust programs, so lean on, but you also get to operate in like an early stage startup context and the sense that you’re going to be working on, stuff that goes straight to production, you’re going to be making an impact on the mission and the business.
So it was like something that, is very attractive in the context of, startup in, in a holding company. And I think that’s one thing that was definitely like a positive recruiting for it, for certain types of folks, but, I think the other side of it is if somebody is really focused on equity, you’re just not going to be able to offer that as a benefit.
Even though. For those of us, who’ve had a lot of experience with, like startups and, the equity attraction is, both, both good and bad, and so I think there’s a little bit of a more cash focus, I would say both in terms of how the holding company runs its business and how positions to startups.
It means there’s a little bit more maybe like more patient capital, still aggressive, patient capital, but you get that like feeling of, the excitement of a startup, you know that you’re going to get some good resources behind. Yeah. I guess the connections as well is another benefit.
So I’m curious on the equity side, because I think back to the nineties when I got started, and that was like the, like every like equity, was it right? Because that’s where all the fortunes were being made. My first company I worked at, actually, I was lucky. It’s probably the best exit I’ve ever had.
I was a junior engineer and they went public and and then we got to learn about tax. Anyway. But I, I wonder as the years have gone on and we’ve got the sort of.com bubble burst and we’ve moved on. And I do think that at least when I’m recruiting, I think equity for most engineers are most people coming into a company. Unless they’re really at those upper levels, the equity piece isn’t even as.
Top of mind for them. I think they are, I think most people, these days are thinking more cash. I’m curious if you guys are seeing that Mike and Spiro. Yeah. From our side, I’d say that, for a lot of the folks that we’re recruiting and guess this is true, BC or not. You really want them souls on the mission.
You want them sold that you’re in the space. That is exciting. I have seen, like we’ve never run into an issue with somebody not taking the offer because, we don’t have an equity component. And I think, a lot of the other exciting parts about it. And, if you actually think about it in a mature way that, in terms of, your own career and financial growth, like some of the same outcomes are there.
And at the, at the end of the day, you need to build a company that is. Running a really good business. And, and the ends to that is, is a little bit more, you’re putting a little bit more faith in the company, if you will that they’re going to do right. Versus the what I would say being attracted to the option, but I think there’s probably a little bit of a selection bias in terms of the people that you’re even seeing get to that offer stage.
They wouldn’t be, if they were really interested in equity, they probably wouldn’t be. Talking to you. I’m curious, Mike what’s your experience on the equity side? Yeah, it definitely feels like it carries a little more weight or people are at least more openly saying. Yeah, it’s a lot of tickets.
I know I can sell it. You can give me more of it. Are you gonna let me work from home again? Let me set my hours. Do I get to work on the cool project or are you going to stick me on bug duty detail and about, am I going to be take off time for COVID shots for my kids whenever I want, like last minute, like those are the things that the conversation orients around now and dash I that’s my experience as well.
I think the other there’s so much that people now have a better understanding of when it comes to what equity actually means. That it’s very hard to actually get paid out, especially if, depending on what level in the organization you’re coming in that. And there’s all these different at two, right?
The seed stage is going to be much more appealing and probing at that equity stake versus the series Acer is B you’re a little bit more. And then also the terms of whatever deal we got put, the term sheet that was given. And there’s so many. Structures for that, it can get pretty complicated to try and figure out like, is this ever, am I ever even gonna get paid out?
I, give me the cash up front. I think that probably helps with a certain extent when you’re talking about competitive advantages between startup and, traditional VC back versus say the holdings company similarly being able to offer benefits packages, I think.
I’ve seen the exact, that’s the opposite trend, which is HR. Platforms are so easy to do these days. They’ve really applied some technology there that I think smaller companies, when I think back to the first company I worked at, where we had one woman who was like the office manager, HR doing payroll and all the rest of it, like she was spending so much time just dealing with that stuff that like the idea of offering a 401k wasn’t even an option. And now you have all of these different platforms out there that just make, I think it much easier for smaller businesses to offer these types of those types of more mature, those types of things, programs that you would see at a more mature company. I think that there’s being, there’s less and less differentiation between those two.
I’m curious if you guys are seeing the same thing, sorry. I was just preaching there for a little bit, but leading the witness, if you will. It’s an interesting point. And, I, I guess there’s a little bit to also what you’re alluded once that feels a little bit more commoditized than some of those things just become expected.
And some of the advantages of an older company, like you almost have to remind folks of some of the benefits and they just don’t necessarily register, even though there may be like the cash component for awhile, anyone joining the holding company would be part of a pension program.
It’s who’s getting a pension these days. And, Graham holdings has a unique they had a bit of an overfunded pension, if you will. Given the guidance that Warren buffet gave them, over decades. And so they were in a unique position to do certain things and takes her actions.
But, I would often have to remind folks that, Hey, you have this money sitting in an account that you can take, now, or, continue on. So it’s funny along those right. Those lines. But yeah, the, even as a startup in a holding company, you’re still responsible for, How you’re dealing with everything, but it’s becoming a lot easier.
So I think there’s just expectations. Those just becoming the norm. Yeah. Now Mike, I’m curious like the expectations, obviously you have a 401k, the question is how much do you match? And we didn’t for a little while, as a small company, because it was at our higher people. Yeah, those are the trade-offs that we’re making and loud and clear in voice kept saying we assume this is part of status quo now.
Unfortunately, Mike, you’re exactly right. We had the one person who manages all of that and that’s the only way we can do it all because the software has advanced too much. A single person manages the 401k and the health plan, which is competitive. Like my wife has healthcare. She’s got new job. My plan is just as good as hers or just
a whole different podcast
that we can meet everyone else. Where the expectations are. Yeah, we actually just rolled out or first 401k officially goes active next year. We’re at 22 employees prior to that, we had a reverse, like a simple IRA and just winging it. But like a lot of it is there’s just so much paperwork and you have to do educate yourself.
So one of the things that I’ve recommended to like earlier stage startups that are just piecemealing things together from an HR and benefits perspective is there’s these brokers out there now I’ll shamelessly plug. The one that we just signed up with called Benny. They they do a lot of the legwork for you in terms of explaining, not just like 401k and matching and what it means and what your, what you’re on the hook for and the different regulations cause there’s all sorts of, safe Harbor this and so helping to just break it down and simplify it for you, they do the same thing for.
Insurance plans and I should walking through, this is what your deductible actually means. A lot of people don’t really understand it. They’re just like signing up for things. I think there’s like a lot of value now since startups are so popular, these brokers that are catering to the startups and small businesses.
To help you have a little bit more of a feel of a more established company and be able to offer a bit more than you probably could. Yeah. I think they’re capitalizing on a moment to we had people like all over the country, and when you’re in that situation luckily, we had a lot of central support cause you have to pay attention to every state law.
And every random situation that occurs in an HR context, There’s something different either by state or by, whatever the gets, it gets more fine grain than state. I San Francisco and New York have their own. Anyway, don’t get me started on a compliant HR guidelines, but yeah, it is funny.
Cause those platforms I think really offer, you effectively can do a lot and offer a lot as a smaller company now. Yeah, man, I think it’s sorta the way technology. If you think about how companies, how technology companies use small technology blocks to build and build them, we’re able to offer more and build and create more interesting products and platforms the same as also happening at a, like a macro scale with businesses, right?
Like we no longer need these large departments because we can actually find a platform, a company that does that, and that’s all they do. And we can really rely on them to provide that great service. At that’s something that’s cost effective for us. It’s just this evolution that’s just happening.
It’s that same sort of paradigm that’s just being applied again and again. Yeah. It’s like that previous episode we recorded with bill versus buy, it’s there’s so many things out there from an engineer perspective, you could just buy this now. You don’t need to hire up three engineers to, to build this, add on piece of your software.
Cool. Any closing remarks, anything else that that you wanted to hit on before we transition to the next segment?
Good. All right. Let’s just assume spirit frozen again.
Sorry. Sorry. Now for the guests, anything micro or spare or anything else you wanted to add in?
I feel anything I would say.
I got a lot better at it. Just speaking from personal experience. Once I realized I was still in engineering, I was building a thing to build the thing. And once I stopped thinking about meetings and grooming and all that stuff is oh, that’s Vicky overhead. It’s management BS. It’s just part of a different system.
That’s building another system and I build stuff. I am a builder. That’s what I do. That really made it work for me. And that made me more effective in my job. That was part of that, getting over that engineering bias of thinking of that stuff picky and like the loaded background is that a lot of the stuff comes with I want to have that insight, which I’m sure you had to, Mike, I’m sure you as well.
It works better for me. I was better at my job. I was happier doing it. I didn’t miss the days of being in the trenches. Yeah. There’s there’s like another piece to that I’m reminded of, which is, as you’re scaling and I think you’re alluding to it. There’s a bit of it sticking with the labels, come and go.
Like whether you’re calling it first principles or, staying close to, the actual domain you’re building in and thinking about it. Outside of, whether you’re building a microservice or shared library or writing it in Python or some language, but, having that team that can really think about the problems in that context.
That’s like where, as you’re scaling out, those types of skills become really valuable and those are like the fun problems to work on too. You obviously need all the other stuff too, but That’s such an important trait. And and I often find myself, that’s what my happiest place too is being, in the crown jewels of the company the part, your IP isn’t, whether you written it re written it in a particular framework or language, but it’s, really thinking through the specific problem, your company solving and like how you’re doing it and its own, special way.
And cool. Yeah, I think it’s a good ending point. Yeah. Why don’t we segue into the the next piece here, which is round out my career, and this is an area where we’ve crowdsourced some topics and questions from our community. That you hit on specific areas of like career progression.
So I’m going to spin this wheel here. See what we landed on and riff on a couple of questions.
Drum roll, please. Benefits socially appropriate.
This is a fun one. So what would be, what would you say is the most unique company benefits that you’ve ever received from an employer?
We’ll probably go back to the one that was most surprised about it. Like just the whole pension benefit, which is antiquated, it’s the holding company’s been around since the twenties and thirties. And so it’s just funny, but it’s also just funny thinking about how, people just used to approach their relationship to a company.
And even though the stats are counterintuitive today, like people actually are staying at certain jobs longer, even though, all the press around the great resignation and everything else going on. But it is funny thinking about that just as far as a benefit that is a little durable they’ve shifted just in the last two years, right?
Since the pandemic, it’s a. There’s some off the wall benefits that are being, we’re seeing benefits need to be more personalized. It’s not one size fits all anymore. A good example is like they used to get like a gym benefit, a gym membership. Cause everybody’s coming to the office, the gyms, downstairs. Now, maybe 75% of the team is no longer coming in to the office. So did they just not get anything? So we’re seeing a little bit more of almost like buffet style. Hey, if you think. Personal wellbeing or mental health or nutritional counseling is something of interest to you.
We have that option instead of going physically to a gym micro, what have you seen. Maybe exactly benefits have gotten a lot more generic. Just what’s the point of the community benefit we used to do that. I took advantage of it. It was nice, but I don’t commute, no one else in my office commute sitting empty.
So now it’s just a generic, little bit of stipend that everyone gets. So it’s gone from more exciting to less exciting, but I think more universal. So we, we’ve been trying to find other ways to. Provide some of the same culture building parks that benefits can provide like the gym membership but doing it in this digital age, we’ve had a lot of success in something like goofy trivia and digital escape rooms.
You’re not benefit, but it got people excited and kindled the same sort of thing that maybe you hope for from. Other perks that you offer? The digital escape room is intriguing to me because I had somebody explain this, that they offered this to their team as well. Is it literally, somebody putting a webcam on their head and trying to navigate while everybody’s telling them what to do.
What Nate did. It was more like a hackathon. So you don’t like hacking like code around the puzzle and like unlocked things. So for engineers, very engineering a company where it was company-wide and it was it was solving puzzles, whatever we broke up, the company just broke up into teams and it was solving puzzles.
And there wasn’t really hacking as much as just thinking some things through and thinking logically and watching the dynamic. Different team members who think differently, try to work together to solve.
This was literally a GoPro on some, somebody on someone’s head and the entire team, just watching this live and directing them where to go through different rooms. I have not been that, that wild, like escape room telepresence. I it’s funny cause something. Everybody’s transitioning those things to virtual and some things make the leap.
Okay. And, we have a trivia night and that was plenty fun, but then we tried doing. And I like these drawing things and some other things and they just got way too complicated. Everyone’s just drew over each other’s drawing. I think one of the biggest challenges is doing a virtual happy hours that has not like for large groups like groups, there’s not a good way to be like, I don’t want to hear that conversation. I want to participate in that conference, and But usually it’s just dominated by one or two voices unless you set up the whole bunch of breakout rooms and get that set up at centrally virtual conference. But I do think the trend in back to what Mike was saying, I think being able to repurpose some of that money that maybe was being used towards benefit, like some of these benefits, like a gym membership and just taking a step back and trying to reuse that money for other things which might have.
More benefit whether it’s mental health or connectedness or whatever it is, just those types of programs, I think. It’s nice to see, I think there’s also, I remember I worked at a job where we got free lunch. It wasn’t catered. It was like at a restaurant, it was a place, it was always at the same place we always had to eat at California tortilla.
That was his free as long as we ate there. But that, what that created was a, like a lunch group that would go and do that. And then a different company there was a salad club and that got a little, I think that got a little bit of sponsorship from at least the CEO who participated occasionally.
Those types of things, which kind of created. Comradery or whatever. I don’t think they are considered traditional benefits, but it’s nice to see those types of things. Works for a startup based out of San Francisco and they are, it’s like a food tech startup and their employees receive $15 a day and grub hub to use or lose.
And you’d be shocked and people go crazy over that stuff and yeah, we’re over here. We’re like, Hey, we haven’t used it yet today. Let’s go ahead and hit up a seven 11 and grab some red bulls and honesty. It’s the type of thing where, it’s a valuable ad. You talked about going to the launch, the lunch, a perk, and that could be just an alternative solution.
Now that things are virtual. It’s okay how much are we spending per day? Let’s just put that into a bundle. Yeah, grub hub dollars per day per employee, and be surprised how many people really cherish that, that benefit. It’s interesting. I remember at that company, we ended up, went through some tough times in the.com bubble has that burst and we’ve retained that benefit even as we were laying people off.
And there were, there are, people are like, I don’t understand. You’re going to continue to pay Freeland. You’re not going to like, can’t we just save some people’s jobs. They’re like, let’s let me show you the math on this, because we could pay that engineer one more day or we could give you guys lunch.
It’s not unexpensive benefit.
That’s right. One other thing that I’ve noticed too, which, some of these things don’t cost that much money, everyone’s cameras into each other’s homes, so to speak and, We have a pretty diverse teams. It just, even some of the things where, we had different people share, the way they celebrate different holidays and what it’s funny it’s just something so simple, but in many ways, some of our, virtual happy hours, weren’t as engaging as just somebody being able to like really authentically talk about, how they, celebrated with their family, like a particular event, if somebody.
Dave, the dead stuff and, someone else suffering anyway, the, those types of things recasting that lens because I think Mike made the point there’s these things that are like, so commoditized. Like I remember us having like remote work as like a basic that was like an awful thing.
Go back like five, 10 years. It was like, wow, that’s that’s something incredible, that’s not a novelty anymore. Now, you have to come up with something more creative than that. And we’re seeing that as something that we have to advise a lot of startups that are, they think that their remote policy is competitive, but it’s, hundred percent is.
Yeah. Almost the norm now. So anything outside of that, you have to compensate in different ways. So it’s completely flip-flopped from what it once was. Cool. I think I think that’s good to go guys. Want to be mindful of everyone’s time and yeah, I appreciate you guys join in. Yeah. Putting your 2 cents in, I think this is really valuable stuff for, startups, engineers, technologists anybody that’s considering something, an opportunity with a startup.
