Why Founders Keep Hiring People Just Like Them

Sean Weisbrot: Simon is the founder and chief strategy officer of HandPrint, a platform designed to help companies manage their corporate social responsibility and, and environmental, social, and governance efforts.

Sean Weisbrot: They do this by connecting companies to fantastic causes that they curate with the help of a global impact board. They digitize these causes and once they establish a direct impact connection with an interested company, they automate, integrate, report, and visualize the positive impacts that their actions have.

Sean Weisbrot: So I came across you in an email sweep. I was working with a company that was helping me to find potential, interesting companies to interview. Because my efforts through helping reporters, while I do get some really interesting people, are not always enough. and so I got access to you. You're based in Singapore. My company's in Singapore. so there's some interesting similarities there. And one thing that we talked about when, we had our first call off our air was the fact that being, Westerners in Asia and having a team that is a little bit more globally focused, sometimes we hit upon an issue where, curiosity, may get in the way of hiring or lack of curiosity may get in the way of having a diverse team.

Sean Weisbrot: And so we thought that would be a really interesting conversation, especially as we're heading into 2023. This episode is being recorded several days before 2023 and will be published several weeks into 2023. And so, I thought it would be interesting for us to discuss really, the pros and cons of, diversity versus curiosity and what teams should be thinking about, into 2023 and, and their hiring.

Sean Weisbrot: So, thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Simon. I appreciate it. Why don't you tell everyone a little bit more about yourself and how you got over to Singapore and starting this company, and we'll go from there.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Hey Sean, thanks so much for having me. So, yeah, as you already said though, you gave a beautiful description of what hand print is all about.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So we, to get to me and my two co-founders, Mattas and Ryan, co-founded Handprint at the end of 2019 here in Singapore, just before. The circuit breaker started messing with our lives 'cause of COVID. Before I started this company, I was a hundred percent academic professor in a business school here in Singapore called Singapore Management University.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And my research interests were ready for the last seven, eight years, really on the intersection of digitization and sustainability, specifically environmental sustainability. And as part of that research had also found that back in 2018, a nonprofit organization called Global Mangrove Trust, that is also doing work on using digital technologies to improve access to international climate finance.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But at some point, my co-founder Ryan and I realized, under the impetus of our current CEO Mattias, that scaling a nonprofit organization was not the most suitable organizational type and that we should. Set up a new enterprise, which became hand print. And so it's about three years ago now on the dot.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And, we'vegrown to about 40 people in 12 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia, east Asia, but also we have people in the US and in Europe. So it's a pretty global team trying to work with companies all over the world to create a positive impact in the world and make it valuable for companies to do that.

Sean Weisbrot: The company's called hand print, but we all, we often talk about footprints, right? If you're going hiking somewhere, or if you're creating carbon through whatever activities, we use the word footprint. Why did you choose hand print

Simon Schillebeeckx: footprint is the sum of all the negative impact you or a company has on the world. And so it's a very commonly used term in, in business, in sustainability. And also, of course, of course we talk about footprints on the moon. And so it's like leaving an imprint, but the. The flip side of the footprint is hand print. There is a, it's a scientific term that is not so popular, but it basically captures all the positive impact you're creating in the world.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And there's an entire scientific methodology that mainly was designed by people at MIT that tries to help organizations figure out what is your positive impact in the world. And while business over the last 30, 40 years has done quite a lot of work in trying to optimize the measurement of their negative impact, this has often come at the expense of.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Measurement for the sake of measurement. And so what Handprint tried to do is really provide a counterfactual, an alternative perspective and alternative approach to how companies should think about their environmental responsibility. And our overarching thesis is that the environmental responsibility of an organization should not be limited to simply reducing its negative impact.

Simon Schillebeeckx: There's a much more aspirational goal to be found in working with companies to create a positive impact in the world. That appeals more to employees, that it appeals more to customers, and it has a much better alignment actually with the capitalist system, where the goal of profit seeking organizations is to maximize profit.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And that aligns much more with. Creating a very sizable or maximize hand print rather than having a goal that is just about limits and constraints, which is the footprint.

Sean Weisbrot: I like that a lot actually. I agree. I think a lot of people are focused on the negatives of how to prevent this thing or that thing, but, when you flip it around like that, yeah. You can think about, oh, there's so much potential that I can do, so much good that I can do. And, so I, I think I had mentioned to you, I had a friend in China that is doing a CSR company and they take money from the company. Basically they're given a budget and then they spend it for the company basically as they see fit.

Sean Weisbrot: And they do this in a way that makes the company look good. And also, they take like 10% of. the budget, like their fee. So they say, oh, you wanna spend 30 million this year? Alright, well it's, it's gonna cost us 3 million to make that happen. Probably like that's ours. How does your platform actually work in that regard? I mean, I, I know in my description, in the intro, I, I talked about how you guys do it, but, how does the finances of it all work?

Simon Schillebeeckx: The example of your friend in China is pretty interesting. So the way that hand print works is. At its essence, what we do is we work with companies to enable them to link their strategic KPIs, KPIs that have nothing to do with sustainability, but we try to link those KPIs, the achievement of those KPIs.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And they could be at a very high strategic level. They could be at a much more tactical level or even at a product level. So, but once we have a KPI that a company identifies as, this is something that we really want to accomplish, if you then create some simple automation by, by using digital tools, APIs and whatever, and you link that automation to something good in the world, then achieving your strategic APIs has the positive externality of creating a positive impact in the world as well.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so this is. By and large how our system works. So we have built tools that enable companies to integrate, online and offline sales with the creation of a positive impact or integrate the creation of attention in the form of advertising eyeballs to link that to positive impact or the volume of transactions or the number of unique website visitors, or the number of times that you move in like a prospect in a CRM system from prospect to leads or from leads to client.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So any kind of action that has a digital fingerprint can be turned into a hand print. Now on the financial side, how does that work for us? So we. We work as commercial agents for nonprofit organizations that we bring into our ecosystem. That means that we are responsible for selling their impact products.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so we kind of move away from fundraising. We work with NGOs to turn them, to kind of help them evolve from a donation paradigm where they receive money and then do something towards an impact productization paradigm where they define a discrete unit of impact, such as one tree planted and monitored for a period of time, or, one hour of education provided, or one meal provided, or a thousand liters of drinkable water provided via a filter.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So we create this discrete unit of impact. We price that together with the NGO, and then, that becomes purchasable on our platform. So as part of that is a commission that the NGO pays us, but the largest part of our revenue. as our business model is evolving, it is coming from subscriptions.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So we are trying to develop the platform like a SaaS so that a company, depending on its size and depending on the level of verification of impact that it requires, will pay a monthly fee, and then most, if not all of the money. Hopefully at some point in the future, all of the money that the company sends to us will be transferred to impact partners all over the world.

Sean Weisbrot: It's an interesting model for sure. I love SaaS because you keep companies paying you month after month after month, and a good number of them actually forget that they're paying. And so you get to continue collecting revenue despite the service not actually being used. Although in your situation, you probably want them to use your service as much as possible because you're hoping that they'll have these positive outcomes where they can help people. And, yeah, very, very different from, I guess, the way Chinese companies think about it, which mostly is like, we've got a ton of cash, let's throw it around and, and make ourselves look good. And there's no KPIs behind it.

Simon Schillebeeckx: The big difference between how many organizations do C as R or kind of non-strategic philanthropic giving, and what Handprint does is that we really focused on how we turn the creation of public value, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: Which is really everything that aligns with what we call social and environmental regeneration. So any kind of imaginable activity that creates this positive impact. So doing so from a company's perspective is a hard sell, right? Why would a company do this? Except like in countries like India, you have a regulatory obligation to do some kind of philanthropic giving from the moment that you become profitable.

Simon Schillebeeckx: In the US it's very common that there's a lot of corporate philanthropy, mainly because there's very little. Tax rates are a lot of ways of using philanthropy to avoid paying tax. In Europe, it's much less common to do this kind of strategic philanthropy because of the high taxation and the fact that the welfare state really takes care of most of the things that in the US many companies kind of take care of, like education and so, so, but when we look at this kind of approach, then companies very often end up doing things that are either totally non-strategic, either very much driven by, oh, we need to do this to maintain our organizational legitimacy within our country, form of national service as it's commonly called in Singapore.

Simon Schillebeeckx: or they do this as a consequence of some kind of pet projects of executives. Right. So a CEO or another person in power in the organization that has some kind of discretionary budget and wants to support something privately but uses their corporation to do this, right? And so if you're doing these kinds of things, then it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to appropriate significant value from that kind of philanthropic giving.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So, and as a consequence, doing that is not very resistant to changes in the environment, negative environmental effects, shocks, and all of those kinds of things that we've experienced since COVID. So it becomes much more interesting if you look at your budget that you have to do well, as an engine of growth.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so this is really what Handprint is trying to do, is by telling companies like, look, because customers and because employees and increasingly also. Suppliers and buyers. And so because more and more actors in the world are interested in this kind of positive impact, if you can connect it to your organizational goals, your wider organizational goals, and you embed it in your interactions with your key stakeholders, it becomes a very interesting story that you have to tell every single person or every single company that you engage with, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: So every time that you make a sale, you tell your customer, by the way, buying this product, I dunno, removes a kilo of plastic from the ocean. Or every time you use your mobile phone to make a payment, you show your customer, okay, 1% of this payment is actually gonna be rerouted to support a project that you choose.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so there's a lot of ways in which embedding a. Impact in transactions or in interactions really changes the way the relationship that you're building with a customer or a stakeholder or an employee evolves over time. And this is where the big value is coming from.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's say I wanted to go to Nike's website and buy a pair of shoes, for example, which I, Nike isn't supporting us, and I don't buy Nike. So this is just an example. Are you saying at checkout I can say, oh, I would like to add 1% on top, or I would like you to take 1% of my payment and put it towards X, Y, or Z. Like, how does that work? Because like, at least in America, I don't know about other countries. I haven't really seen them. There'll be like, save the Children Foundation or UNICEF and these other kinds of things. And, and when you get to check out, they'll go, oh, would you like to add a dollar for this thing? My answer is always no, because I don't know where the hell it's going. And why should I have to pay for it? The company should pay for it.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So you're pinpointing the two critical barriers to success in the impact space from a corporate perspective. One is who's paying for it, right? The reality is it should be the company that at least ostensibly makes the contribution, right? So if you're asking a customer like, Hey, do you wanna pay $5 extra? The customer doesn't have a very interesting experience. 'cause if they wanna do this, they might as well do private donations, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: They can just give to an NGO directly. So that's not very interesting. Secondly, if you're doing it in a way that doesn't give the customer end-to-end transparency on what is happening, then you are really asking them, please have faith in me. I'm gonna do something good with this money that you throw in a black box and trust us. Something good is gonna happen.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And that's also not a very appealing value proposition because more often than not, customers are quite skeptical and rightly so because they've been deceived many a time by companies making a variety of false claims, or at least claims that are not entirely true. So the way this would work from our perspective at hand print is that one, we encourage all our customers, our corporate clients, that they should embed impact in the price.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Does that mean that they're not going to increase the price? Well, that is something that's hard to figure out in advance, but the recommendation is it should be embedded in the price. It should not move. it should not force the customer to make an additional payment because this is unlikely to work.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And actually it's more likely to backfire. It might create a negative impact. And secondly, I. the closing of the loop is very important so that if the customer sees that, okay, a tree's gonna be planted, or $5 is going to go to UNICEF or save the children if I, if I'm buying this product, you need to get information about when that money is going there, what is happening with that money, what the positive impact is that is being created.

Simon Schillebeeckx: What is really the outcome of this? And ideally, you as the customer, you should own that impact, right? So you should have a digital proof that this is your impact that you've created through your purchasing behavior. And if you can get all of those things right, then I do believe that there will be a significant advantage in creating impact as part of your interactions with customers.

Sean Weisbrot: If you wanna know more about diversity versus creativity and curiosity, we will get to that soon. but I. Am still curious about some of these things. So I'm just going through those questions before we get there. So, if you are wondering when that's gonna happen, don't leave us yet. We're getting there.

Sean Weisbrot: So, you're talking about closing the loop and transparency, and whenever those two words come together in the last few years, the word blockchain is mentioned. Do you think it's necessary to implement a blockchain without tokens? You can actually do blockchains without tokens. Is it something that you've thought about or do you think it's not necessary or do you not know enough about it to comment?

Simon Schillebeeckx: I do know something about it. I've been writing about blockchain for a few years and we've built a blockchain prototype with my nonprofit in the past. I'm definitely not an expert at a technical level, but it's definitely something that we're really interested in specifically for specific solutions that are very hard to do without a blockchain.

Simon Schillebeeckx: The tokenization of impact itself is not necessarily something you want to do on a blockchain, because it's going to create quite a lot of friction, especially in terms of corporate adoption, right? So unless you can make it really opaque so that companies don't even know it exists on a blockchain and they don't need to worry, worry about private keys and all of that, then yes, it can work.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But what is something that's really. Really important in our space, and that's very hard to address without a blockchain, is the idea of how do we prove that the impact that an organization creates through its financial contributions is unique and is uniquely theirs. So if I'm an intermediary, if I'm selling a forest, let's say a hundred thousand trees in Indonesia to a company in the US, how is that company going to know that I'm not selling the same a hundred thousand trees to a company in Europe?

Simon Schillebeeckx: This is a fundamental challenge in the impact space, right? And it's not only for trees. 'cause trees are actually quite simple because they're visible and there is some kind of accountability. But for social impact, this becomes extremely challenging, right? So how do you know that? It's my money that provided these five hours of education, not someone else's money.

Simon Schillebeeckx: There's no. Tangible assets that kind of remain that you can track over time. Right. And as a consequence, solving that requires a solution that enables every organization to have complete transparency on financial flows of an organization, of an intermediary like ours. that enables every nonprofit, in our case, our vendors, our suppliers, to define project size in a public way, such that our corporate clients know that we haven't altered this project size on our own platform. And, and then as these financial flows are coming in the project size, the remaining number of impacts that can still be financed needs to be automatically reduced until the project is fully funded. Doing this in a centralized system is possible. But it's extremely hard to build the level of trust that you could create by having a blockchain, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: If our NGOs can create a smart contract in a very, very simple way that enables them to say, here is a plot of land, here is a gist file that says this is the area, these are the number of trees we're gonna plant per hectare. And as finances come in to support the specific projects, the remaining number of trees to be planted is going down. It becomes much easier for everyone to see on this public ledger that we are not artificially increasing or decreasing the project size to cash more money, or that we are not double selling the same impact to multiple entities. And so for this specific part of our system, which we call the proof of uniqueness, a blockchain solution is absolutely. The way to go, whether we're going to go there right away or in one or two years, we'll, we'll see. But we have completely conceptualized it. We've had conversations with lots of different public blockchains about building this system, but it's at the moment not the key priority. There are more urgent things to do, but it's definitely something that is in the pipeline.

Sean Weisbrot: You mentioned things that sound very similar to what e-commerce brands have to go through. Inventory management, stock management, making sure the supply chain is working so that you always have what you need and crowdfunding as well to make sure that you don't run out of, the, the, gifts that you're gonna be giving people if they're, investing in you or, or whatever.

Sean Weisbrot: So. It sounds like a bunch of different systems tied together, so definitely not a simple thing to put together. Absolutely. I can understand why you're not trying to push that forward. right now,

Simon Schillebeeckx: The big difference with e-commerce is that if I'm the buyer, I know my transaction was successful the moment that I received a good, right. If the only thing you receive is a digital proof that the good, which is not a physical product then, but an actual good, a public good, has been created, that level of trust that you have in your own experience is significantly lower. So we need to be held to a higher standard,

Sean Weisbrot: hence a blockchain solution. So I want to take this opportunity to move into the next part of our conversation because you're talking about trust and transparency. Some, some more. When you're trying to put together a team and you're working in this field, how do you pitch to them the idea that? We are different from other people. We actually make sure that this thing is done rather than, so, how do you get people to buy into this fact that like, you're trying to be different, you're trying to change the way these things get done. How do you prove it to them?

Simon Schillebeeckx: I don't think there's any real proof that is kind of a hundred percent watertight, right? So the way we exemplify this to our corporate clients has a lot to do, I think with building trust and reputation. My own reputation as an academic, my, my co-founder's reputation as also a reformed academic. We've done a lot of work in this space, so we have quite a lot of knowledge. We've written about this, we worked for the un.

Simon Schillebeeckx: and so I think that helps in appeasing the minds of, especially people in large corporations that are not very used to working with smaller organizations, that they can have faith that this is a credible organization with credible people. It's equally challenging, I would say, to communicate those realities well, I hope they're realities, inside our team, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: So, because a lot of people that apply to come and work for hand print and there's heaps and heaps don't necessarily understand what we do or think they have a very rudimentary understanding, but are actually incorrect in their perceptions. And that has potentially a lot to do with the fact that we need to be better at communicating on our website.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so what exactly it is that we do, or we need to put out even more materials in terms of thought leadership. Like we've done like a regeneration first manifesto. We've recently done a paper on the nature tech ecosystem that helps us establish that credibility. But internally, there is also the need to continuously. Remind people and kind of educate people and not only our employees, also ourselves, that hey, we, we work like this. And so for instance, to give you a very simple example of this, we very recently had to do a massive sweep through our website, all of our sales materials. And so to make sure that the word fundraising does not appear in that, in that, in that documentation, because it's very easy to explain to people that this is, we, we work a little bit like, like we fundraise, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: We are actually fundraising for these NGOs, but from a legal perspective, that's a very different beast and it exposes us to very different liabilities if we would be recognized by lawmakers here in Singapore or abroad as fundraising organizations, we are not. So we are having an impact. We are an intermediary that sells impact products in the same way that an e-commerce sells whatever physical products, but. It requires continuous attention from the executives and from other people in the company to just make sure that these things are well communicated. That we have a very, very large internal FAQ that is instrumental to every new hire. They go through this, they read through all of these questions.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Then they might not understand in the beginning why they're all important, but as they stay longer with the company, they'll realize, okay, that's why these things are very important. So we need to be very cautious in how we explain every little step of the equation and why we deliberately make a, or why we deliberately develop a narrative that deviates from what 90 to 95% of our competitors are doing.

Simon Schillebeeckx: 'cause most of our competitors are focusing on carbon offsetting and reducing your footprint. And this is a narrative that we don't embrace. So. But it's the narrative that people know. So it requires continuous attention in order to make sure that especially all the client facing people are very in tune with this new narrative and can speak about it expertly, which is not easy because most high quality salespeople have, don't have five or 10 years of sales experience working in an organization like ours because there aren't too many organizations like ours.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So it takes a lot of effort, but it's, yeah, I dunno. I think it's just, we're doing and obviously very important to make sure you maintain your brand identity.

Sean Weisbrot: I think it's really interesting how you said the word competitor. I feel like any company that exists to do this kind of good isn't really a competitor because you're all working towards the same thing. Assuming everyone has the same level of honesty and morality and what it is that they're doing. putting those two things aside, I, I guess the word competitor comes from this point of view, that like, you're probably looking for investors at some point if, if you haven't already raised, and, you're trying to attract attention, away from someone else in order to get that attention on yourself, which is kind of a, a sad notion of, of just what capitalism is that you have to compete with other companies when you're, you all should be working together to be trying to help the world, which I know everyone is, but they're doing it within their own, bubbles, their own little pools of existence.

Simon Schillebeeckx: That word obviously has multiple connotations, right? So if you take it back to the. old kind of, Latin and Greek, the origin, the epistemology of the word, re means to get fit together. and it's just been kind of bastardized into this kind of survival of the fittest or competition to the death.

Simon Schillebeeckx: I think especially in this space, all of our competitors are competitors because they operate in the same market and try to appeal to the same types of organizations, it doesn't mean that we need to compete in a zero sum game with them. I think the competition that exists between organizations like ours and the many other impact integration companies that have sprung up in the last couple of years, is, is benevolent competition by and large.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So far we haven't really stopped to the lows of trying to poach key personnel from specific competitors or, or these kinds of activities, which you might see more in, I dunno, in the co competition between Coca-Cola and Pepsi or between Nike and Adidas. And so I think for us it's much more, I think it's a competition that is a, that's not zero right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: So where if we do better, it's probably tantamount to the reality that many of the other good ones we'll also do better. And if we somehow find a specific approach that really works, not necessarily going to tell all our competitors, Hey, this is the way to do it guys, this is really successful. But we are in active conversation with quite a few of our competitors between, in order to figure out.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Not necessarily can we help you achieve your goals at our expense, but how, how do we become stronger together?Are there things that we are really good at that you guys are less good at? And, and if so, can we collaborate on that front and vice versa? And I think this is the way competition, at least right now in this space works.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to go a little bit back into the internal side, dealing with the employees and all of that. So you had mentioned that you had an issue where some of you, the people that you've hired may not have been as curious as you and the executive team, but you also wanted to hire a diverse team. So what were some of those original conversations with your co-founders? Like

Simon Schillebeeckx: For us, the real struggle has been to avoid the trap of homophily. Maybe more than curiosity. And so homophily, I'm using that word in the kind of academic sense of the tendency of people to prefer similar people, right? Not in any kind of L-G-B-T-Q context, but S3 wide founders, me from BelgiMattias from France, and Ryan from the US, three white male founders in our mid to late thirties going on to 40 right now.

Simon Schillebeeckx: I think the tendency that you have as an executive or as a founding team is early on that you're, you have to kind of figure out who do you wanna bring onto the team, in, especially in the beginning, right? So the very first hire, and the easiest thing to do is bring people that you know are very similar to you.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Because you know you're gonna get along with them. You have a similar kind of cultural background that facilitates shared knowledge development, similar ways of working, and you probably find it easier to develop that super important sense of psychological safety and the willing, the ability to fail, together and to kind of not be afraid of what you are going to, be held accountable to your mistakes or something, with people that are similar.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Right? But the downside of that mentality, of course, is that it creates the risk that you are not really enabling your organization to be curious in very diverse ways, because. If you have very strong homophilic team with very similar backgrounds, let's say the first five people that we hire are also white males in their mid to late thirties, that have also somehow maybe moved to Asia, then you're really hiring very similar people and the likelihood that you're going to explore in much more diverse directions as a consequence is gonna be severely limited.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so that's been something that really, that's been challenging, but also something we were quickly aware of that we kind of try to prevent ending up with that kind of team. But we realize that as you grow, it is hard and you're bringing on people anyway that are somewhat similar, maybe from a different country.

Simon Schillebeeckx: We brought on a guy from the Netherlands and a guy from Portugal and and then we brought on some women, but also with kinda similar backgrounds and, and many times that didn't work out. and so it's been an interesting evolution to see how our team is. It's kind of grown from, yeah, initially three founders and then now, yeah, 40 people in 12 different countries, many of whom we've never met face to face.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Right. And so I think it's a continuous, yeah, a continuous challenge that you face as a founding team to figure out what is more important in the short run in order to achieve a specific set of goals. Is it to ensure that there is harmony? And harmony often requires some form of similarity in the team, or is it to expose yourself to more diverse opinions and work with more dissimilar people, which might create a reduction in kind of conversational efficiency, but made the long term actually be beneficial because your.

Simon Schillebeeckx: You have more eyes that are looking in different directions.

Sean Weisbrot: So the first person I hired was from the Philippines, from my last company, and I had hired him to be the lead developer and architect, right? So he was designing the backend system and documentation and all of those things. And we clashed a lot.

Sean Weisbrot: And even after four and a half years of working together, we continued to clash a lot. And my COO, so he eventually became our CTO. The COO was a white guy from Minnesota, a close friend of mine for 20 plus years. But he and I both had lived in Asia for a very long time. He still lives in Asia. He's based in Kuala Lumpur, and he's the only person that's able to help us communicate smoothly with each other.

Sean Weisbrot: Because he's in the middle as a technical person who's not doing a technical position where I thought that we would get along better over time or that we'd be able to communicate better over time. But no, I think one of the reasons was because when I would communicate with him, I would say kind of like, this is my vision for something.

Sean Weisbrot: But I would give him the full vision and he would assume that that's what I want right now. And he would get frustrated and, and freaked out and have anxiety about, and, but, then, and then he would complain to my COO and then my CO would be like, what are you talking about with him? And, then I'd have to explain to him.

Sean Weisbrot: And then he'd go back and be like, no, no, no, no. Like, everything's good. He's talking about like the next five years, man, chill. And like, obviously that's oversimplifying it. But, essentially without him, I couldn't get the best out of the CTO. And, and that was really important. 'cause I mean, obviously as a COO right? The job is to make sure that your vision is executed upon. but if I had been able to communicate with him more smoothly, we could have gotten a lot more done, a lot faster.

Sean Weisbrot: What I was going for wasn't diversity or harmony. Who are the best people to get the job done right now? And if those are not the right people to get the job done in the future, I'll deal with that in the future. And it kind of worked, but it also didn't. So I'm curious to hear, 'cause you, you, you said that it didn't always work or it often didn't work. So I'm, I'm curious, some specific instances like I've shared and of how it didn't work out and how it did.

Simon Schillebeeckx: There's been instances for us that we've hired people and that we actually. Kind of early on. So something like the delivery is not just there, right? It's just not at the level that we want. And there's a variety of explanations for this. It doesn't mean that it's the person's failure, it just might be that we're not ready to have a person with that kind of background on the team.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But that we kind of kept that person on for too long, I think because of this kind of thing. It's like, oh, but he's so similar to us. We get along really well. Super nice person. whereas in other like, and I think in other instances we may have done the opposite where we said, very, very quickly said like, no, this isn't working.

Simon Schillebeeckx: and we didn't give the same, that person the same number of weeks or, or months to kind of get going because maybe that was also in part inspired by, by Hom awfully. But I wonder what's. Like getting back to your example also of the CTO and the CEO and, and like hiring the right person for, for right now.

Simon Schillebeeckx: I think the risk with that approach is that if you don't set the culture for the organization early on, it becomes a thing that inevitably forms itself, right? It's, or an organizational culture kind of emerges in a very organic way. And if you don't have a plan or a vision of how you want the company to be and how it is, how you want it to be perceived by employees and by external stakeholders, you very quickly lose control of that.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So I think we probably didn't do this in the first year, but then started spending more time thinking about this, and what was very important for us, I think we, in the first year, probably, I don't know exactly when she joined, we hired a general manager's chief of staff who. Has, like who's French and Vietnamese?

Simon Schillebeeckx: and so I think that was very helpful for us in terms of bringing a senior woman on board who has a lot of very different talents than the founding team has, but who also has that kind of cultural ambiguity. They can manage that very well. And then I think what's been a very good fortune for us is that my co-founder Ryan, who basically works as the Chief impact officer because that's really where his passion is, but he's got a background in, in finance and with the NGO that we also founded together, he's also developed a very strong skill in terms of product delivery.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So in terms of how you manage a product development team decentralized in different countries, and so developed quite some technical expertise as well, and that that guy is a. Massive empathy, right? So he's an extremely empathetic person, which is an extremely rare combination of characteristics, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: Someone who's kind of a product manager with a deep knowledge of finance that is very empathetic, like this is a very, this is, this is a unicorn. as an individual, you don't find many of those around. And I think, having him on the team, on the founding team has been really helpful for both Mattias and I who are both very big personalities with very big opinions.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And we're both loud and we're both very confident. And it's good to have someone that kind of can sit down, sit, kinda fade away in the background, and then tell us how we mess up, from a sense of not pride, but just from like, look, this is my observation. This is where I think you guys messed up and this is how you could communicate better. I think that's been, yeah, extremely helpful. Definitely for me. I think also for Mattias. To just have that sounding board that, like someone who can kind of navigate to the two biggest egos in the firm in a way that creates that harmony. Even if opinions are very diverse at times.

Sean Weisbrot: I love being that person when I'm an advisor for other companies, but my COO is that person for me in everything else that I do. and, and to be fair, when we were talking about the CTO and all that, don't get me wrong, he was phenomenal. Like we would not have technology without this guy and I wouldn't have wanted anyone else to do that for the company. It's just that he and I had a personality clash and so I. Tried to temper that by communicating with him less and allowing my CO to do more of the communication.

Simon Schillebeeckx: I think that's really wise, right? So at some point, even if you're the CEO or if you're, I mean, if you're one of the founders, there's obviously expectations on you to be present, but it's important that you take yourself out of the equation when there are company decisions to be made or, when there are specific interactions to be had where, this is not a place where I excel.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so for me personally, it's become very obvious that I'm not very good at hiring people or necessarily firing people, but I'm not very good at that decision making based on very incomplete and rudimentary information about someone. And as a consequence, I've said like, look. Just take me out of this.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Like, I don't wanna be involved in hiring. Like I will be involved, like when everyone agrees that this is a good person and then they still need to meet with another founder, and I just have to assess kind of cultural fit and whether or not I would, would like to work with this person, then I'll happily be involved, but don't involve me at any of the other stages because I'm just not good at making this the decision. Is this person gonna go through to the next round? Yes or no? I think yeah, that's also something you learn as an, yeah. When you're in a team, you just think, look, these are not my, this is not my strong suit, so just don't keep me involved in this. In the same way with like, oh, if I have to do, 360 reviews of people, like, I can do it directly, but it's gonna be very direct and as a consequence, it's better to have a.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Buffer and say, okay, I'm gonna shout or share my opinions about something, and then communicate this with somebody else who can package them better and then communicate those in a way that they are more likely to be understood.

Sean Weisbrot: In the very beginning, I was running the hiring process, the, the whole hiring process. And then my, when I hired my COO, he was like, yeah, your hiring process is crap. We need to redo it. So then he took me out of it mostly, and then I felt like the people we were hiring after that weren't the most like, excited and it wasn't his fault. It was the fact that I wasn't there to share who we are and why we are.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I insisted on reinserting myself into the hiring process. I wasn't there to make the final decision. I was there in the very beginning. I was the first person that everyone met so that I could disseminate culture in a 30 minute period where I could assess their potential for culture fit and their excitability. And if, based on their CV, they have experience doing what we need them to do, and they fit this culture and they can, ba basically I ask them a few questions, what, something like, why are you leaving your job? When are you gonna be able to come over to us? How much are you looking for?

Sean Weisbrot: Like, these kinds of basic things to see do they fit our needs? But then also to spend time sharing why we started the company and, and all that. And if they pass those things, I would hand them off to the next person, which would be their hiring manager who's gonna be managing them directly. They have to run the hardware or not the hardware test, the hard skills test.

Sean Weisbrot: Right. So we developed a process where they meet multiple people along the way, over like three or four meetings. But I'm the one that says this person has the potential to be a cultural fit or not. So some people would say, oh, like you said, oh, I only wanna know if like they're, they pass everybody else. But I wanted to make sure that they passed me before they could pass everybody else. Because if they pass everybody else and then they fail me, I've wasted the team's time. I would rather waste a little bit of my time first and not the team's time. 'cause I think their time is more valuable than mine.

Simon Schillebeeckx: It's super interesting. Right. So I was just telling you before about, I think that it took us a year before we really started to define our culture and then, like how we wanted to, what we wanted the organization to be perceived as, and. But it's true that if you explain this to me in the way you do, then in our hiring process, we don't put culture first.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And, and maybe this is just a mistake that we're still making that's very possible. and of course there are time constraints and as you, as you well know as an entrepreneur, that you never have enough time in the day. And so, maybe we feel that it's more valuable to get through. I know the hiring manager and the chief of staff and before some one of the founders needed to spend time with that person.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But I guess you are right, that if you really wanna put culture first, then the first interview they should have is with someone that evangelizes that culture and evangelizes the company and, and why we do what we do and then makes a decision. To a certain extent, I think we have a lot of online content available, especially my face and, and voice appears in lots of videos, and so, so people can have a taste of what that is. But it's obviously not the same as a one-on-one sitting together with one of the founders. But I do think that the downside of your approach is that it becomes very hard to scale if you are really growing fast.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And of course, that's not yet the case for us, but I feel that we're trying to put processes in place that will still work when we're 500 people rather than when we're, as we are now, 40.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that's your mistake because you have to assume that whatever you're building right now at 40 will break by one 50. So whatever process you have now, it won't exist. It, it just, it can't, it will break multiple times over, probably 10 times over before you hit 500 and, sure. You're at 40. I can understand how you think it might be difficult at that point to be able to do that, but from the way I see the CEO's job, I see there's a few things the CEO has to do.

Sean Weisbrot: One is to disseminate culture. Two is disseminate vision. Threeis to make sure that the best people are there, and four is to make sure there's enough money so that you can feed those people, right? And so if a quarter of my time is spent interviewing people, then that's one of the four things that's my responsibility.

Sean Weisbrot: I, I definitely understand at some point. That will break too. Maybe at a hundred, maybe, maybe when you're hiring the hundredth person, it's no longer possible to spend your time doing that. But if you end up with 500 people for which you know the names and faces of the first hundred, and you've disseminated the culture to them, hopefully you did a good enough job that they can do the rest and continue disseminating the culture to the rest of the team that, that gets hired.

Sean Weisbrot: But, even when I only had, at, at the, at the most members of, of people on the team, we had 17. And when I would arrange a one-on-one call with any of the team members, they were, to my liking, a delightful surprise. They were shocked that I would come and spend an hour with them. Like I would do, like once every two or three months I would get on the phone with them.

Sean Weisbrot: I would ask them how they're doing, what's their life like, what's their family like, you know? I wasn't doing a performance review, I just wanted to get to the human side. how are you, are, are, am I doing my job as a CEO? Are you enjoying your position? Is there something that you want from your career that you're not getting that we can help you to get?

Sean Weisbrot: Right? What can we do? And again, at, at 15, at 20, it's a lot easier to do than, than at 40 or a hundred, whatever. But I felt like that was a part of my job. And it's something that I love to do, is to communicate and, and like, what I found funny was when I would ask them these personal questions, they'd be like, well, if I said, oh, how are you doing? Well, the job is this and this. We've been working on this. Nah, I don't care about that. I just want to know how you are doing. Like, any of that stuff. You talk about that with your manager, right? I'm not concerned about your performance. I'm concerned about what's in here. And they were like blown away by the fact that I was taking the time.

Sean Weisbrot: let's say it's. 15 hours every three months, right? Some people go, Ugh, 15 hours, that's so much time, you could be doing something better for me. That's the best use of my time. At least at that size. You're probably

Simon Schillebeeckx: correct. Again, I'm not the CEO, so maybe that's my excuse, but I also genuinely think I wouldn't be very good at that.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so, there are, yeah, there are specific kinda soft skills that are not necessarily within my, my arsenal of, of, of strengths. And so having these kinds of informal conversations, especially if they need to happen via a computer, right? So if you can do this face to face, like this happens, of course with the people in Singapore, or when I go to Bali and I see the team there, then we go for drinks and we, we have a random chat, but it's harder to do with, let's say some of our team in India that are.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Developers, except for one, they're all developers. And I'm, I may be wrong, but I'm, I'm not sure to what extent that they would think this is a good way for them to spend an hour of their time. I think they would just feel like, what? I have to spend an hour of my time. That just means I need to spend an hour extra working later in order to kind of compensate for the fact that I haven't been doing my tasks.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And so, and, and maybe I'm completely wrong about this, but I think that there are, the, the risk in this kind of approach is that, it's like this idea that it comes from the Bible, right? So you should treat people the way you wanna be treated. It's like biblical narrative bullshit, because it assumes that people are the same as you.

Simon Schillebeeckx: You should treat people the way they want to be treated. And that may be very, very different. I think so, and it's really important that I think about the risk of saying things like, oh, I think it's a good idea to have this kind of informal chat with lots of my employees and I personally, I agree. I think it's a good idea.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But imposing that or, or doing that may also mean that you are kind of imposing a specific cultural approach to employee relationships that might really clash with their perception of what is appropriate and might make them feel very uncomfortable. and so, and maybe that's just an excuse that I'm using now.

Simon Schillebeeckx: It's possible, but I do kind of worry about this notion that like, I would like that, like I remember when I had my mentor back at university, we, he looked, he took a lot of time to have this kinda social interaction with me and I thought that was really, really. Useful and productive, but it doesn't mean that everyone likes that.

Simon Schillebeeckx: 'cause if I look at, again, I go back to the university context where I've been longer than an entrepreneur. If I look at many of my Asian colleagues, they would never do this. And if they would, and I think they would, they would find it very, very strange to try to kind of personalize this, this relationship in a way.

Sean Weisbrot: And that's exactly why I found they like it. So for example, one of the guys was from Pakistan. And when I had the conversation with him, he was like, I've never even spoken to the CEOs of my past companies. Like I didn't even know their names or faces. I knew nothing about them. I was just a guy doing a job.

Sean Weisbrot: And so it's awesome that you would be willing to spend the time to talk to me and get to know me, right? So I think. And, and other ones from the Philippines, they would say something similar. Like, I'm not used to having a relationship with the person above my boss. I'm not used to being asked how I feel about anything. Like, these things aren't part of our culture to do. And I think that that difference in how an American, or specifically myself, approaches it is interesting to them because they've never experienced it. And so they like it, they enjoy it. I think they see it like that. At least they, that's how they've expressed it to me.

Simon Schillebeeckx: I mean, the way that we are doing this internally much more is that there's a lot of meetings, like team meetings that are, obviously, they're mostly work focused, although we have kinda social hours where everyone can drop in and just have a random chat. And so I think we do this more at a group level.

Simon Schillebeeckx: within the different teams, like in the product team, the growth team, the sales team, the strategy, the hr, the marketing, like, so we have all, and there's a lot of overlap in those teams as well. 'cause we're still quite small. So there are these moments where you have much more kinda spontaneous conversations and, but I, I find personally that of course with bigger groups there's always more room for silence for people.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But I find it most effective when these types of conversations are not instigated by the leaders in the organization. so we have a few, let's say, I mean we don't have that structure, but I would say like middle managers, like early hires, that are very good at this. And I think because they work. On a more day-to-day basis with specific people, it's much easier for them to say things like, oh, by the way, yesterday I watched this movie.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Have you seen it? And have that kind of little social engagement even though everyone's there. 'cause maybe it's just also my own kind of perception of hierarchy that, I feel like if, if I'm asking this question that people are not necessarily going to communicate as honestly, or maybe just not communicate at all, which may also be a cultural thing either on their side or on my side that I, that I just have this erroneous expectation. I don't know,

Sean Weisbrot: But I can, we'll try it. As an American, we thrive on honesty. We almost demand it, where a lot of Asians feel uncomfortable. About being asked their opinions by their superiors because it's generally not something that happens. So what I did from the very beginning was I made it very clear to them, if I mess up, tell me to my face immediately, you will not be fired.

Sean Weisbrot: Because if I mess up, I need to know. It's an opportunity for me to get better. And sometimes I don't see that I mess up. And so the only way I know is if you tell me. Right? So, and, and then there were instances where, let's say for example, my CTO would say something to my face in front of other people about how I messed up.

Sean Weisbrot: And honestly, it was a little difficult to process because it looked like. To other people. He was being disrespectful because he's Asian and I'm not. And they're Asian, right? So for them it's super disrespectful for that to happen. And I took it right? There were times where I made a bad decision and I owned up to it in front of everybody. I apologized, I explained, right?

Sean Weisbrot: and I think it's those examples of vulnerability that give people the courage. To be honest with you,

Simon Schillebeeckx: We've instigated this practice. We've only done it I think twice, but it's normally gonna be like every two months that we hold a company wide session about my biggest fop. And, and so yeah, Mattias has done it. Our CEO has done it. I think the next one is gonna be Ryan, to the three founders first, where we, yeah, basically talk about, this is something we did, a decision we made in the company that. Turned out really badly, or that clearly was a mistake, and talked about it openly and tried to kind of instigate that, that conversation and also that culture, right?

Simon Schillebeeckx: So that failure is okay. And that we, that we're not gonna punish people for trying and failing, right? So we recently had this urgent kind of very last minute project delivery that we needed to do for a client. And we got it done 24 hours late, which by and large was a massive success. 'cause the deadline was pretty much impossible.

Simon Schillebeeckx: But then what I realized, 'cause still the client was expecting it the day early, created some friction that then I, as I was a project manager, needed to handle. But in the end, all, all good. But culturally it was interesting to, to, to see that. From my perspective, there was a need to do a postmortem to get everyone together to kind of get the different opinions learned.

Simon Schillebeeckx: It's like, how come we couldn't do this? Like we tried to do it. Yes, you guys had to work over the weekend already. It was challenging, but the deadline was there and in the morning that we were supposed to deliver it, like nothing worked. It was completely a disaster. And then we had another 16 hours of super hard work to get it functioning, which it did, which is great.

Simon Schillebeeckx: but so we need to talk about this. And there were other people in the team that were like, well, all is good at events as well, which is interesting. It's like, well, yeah, it's good. We got it done, but we didn't get it done on time and we didn't get it done in the way we were supposed to get it done. So we need to figure out where we made mistakes.

Simon Schillebeeckx: And, and so I think that. That learning culture and that willingness to own up to mistakes is still something that's, it takes a lot of time to develop, in an organization, especially a multicultural organization that's decentralized, where you have people in very different backgrounds, very different countries, that are pretty much only communicating through Zoom and Telegram and and workplace and, and these kind of calls.

Simon Schillebeeckx: but we never really have the opportunity to sit together and kind of have a drink or do a kind of a social event together. So there's still, I think a lot of, there's just cultural differences that you're never really gonna iron out, but that as a leader in the organization, you have to say, well, no, we need to have a conversation about this.

Simon Schillebeeckx: 'cause yes, it's good that we manage to deliver, but. Still stuff went wrong. We need to figure out what went wrong. And it's not about firing people. This is not about assigning blame. This is about learning where processes broke down, where communication broke down, where messages weren't very clearly conveyed, and how we can do this better in the next time so that the next time we have to do a sprint like this, we are not gonna have the same issues.

Sean Weisbrot: And that's where curiosity comes in, because if you're not curious, then you won't think to ask those questions. And you may not make those le, you may not learn and you may not improve.

Simon Schillebeeckx: Yeah, totally agree. It's, it's curiosity. But also, yeah, I think the audacity to take ownership and maybe the kind of perfectionism, right? So you need to want to recognize where things went wrong, and that's the only way it can really make progress. So. Yeah. And that's, yeah, as the team grows, there's always gonna be issues like that that we need to fix and try to get more people to see it the same way. But, it's not gonna be an easy thing.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there anything we haven't talked about that you'd like to add?

Simon Schillebeeckx: I mean, nobody has a blue plate or, or a blueprint of, what makes your company successful? I think a lot of it is still gut feeling and getting advice from the right people. That's maybe one thing we haven't really touched on. I think that we've been extremely lucky with a lot of friends and family and business angels that have invested early on that continuously work with us on specific aspects of the business, which has proven to be very, very useful in many different areas.

Simon Schillebeeckx: So that would be maybe the one other thing to, yeah, to remember that it's not only the employees and the comp and the, the clients, like a lot of the, the best advice comes from the network of people that you built, as an organization. And just as friends. And yeah, we've definitely benefited from that a lot.