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Jamie Diamond went on a rant about remote work and and zoom uh in a town hall and uh here's a snippet a lot of
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you were on the zoom and you were doing the following okay you know looking at your mail sending text to each other ask
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the other person is okay not paying attention not reading your stuff you know and if you don't think that slows
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down efficiency creativity creates rudeness and Stu it does okay and when I found out that people are doing that you
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do that my goddamn meetings you go to meeting with me you got my attention you got my focus I don't bring my goddamn
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phone I'm not sending text to people okay it simply doesn't work the Young Generation is being damaged by this that
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may they may or may not be on your particular staff but they are being left behind they're being left behind
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socially ideas meeting people in fact my guess is most you live in communities a
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hell of a lot less diverse than this room that's not how you run a great company we didn't build this great
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company by doing that by doing the same semi disease that everybody else does Colson Brothers tell us about how you
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run stripe are you remote does this resonate with you four years after we've come out of the
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pandemic I love listening to Jamie Diamond rants like I feel like that's business ASMR um business ASMR that
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itself to be a great podcast I was about to say I'm subscribing that's an instant
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$10 a month subscription what do you think John yeah I don't know people just said a lot of
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during the the pandemic like you remember it's like oh handshakes are going to be over business travel is
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going to be over every company is going to be fully remote I would say stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot to
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where it was beforehand which is most people go into an office like most people are you know uh part of our San
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Francisco office or New York or Dublin or or Singapore wherever and then we have a bunch of people also who work
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remotely I think kind of obviously you know Jimmy is right on some points I think also
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working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies like
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stripe and there's a lot of people you know you see uh kind of the two- body problem where it allows a lot of couples
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where you know maybe one partner is assigned to some Hospital in Idaho and like they don't get to choose what
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hospital necessarily they got assign to and the other person gets to work a a high-paying Tech job and so I don't know
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I think when like like one of the theories for declining dynamism in the US and declining tfp is there allocative
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efficiency uh of of you know people deine as women enter the workforce because now you have you know what John
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describes this two body problem where you know both people have to make coordinated
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switches and uh rem remote works out actually yeah freeberg you're running a company now you're the CEO of ohalo tell
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us uh does this resonate with you what do you think especially about younger people his point and like being rude or
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being focused being in the meeting and then like maybe there's too many meetings where people are partially
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paying attention maybe there should be half as many meetings and people should be paying attention what do you think
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well there's always room for optimization there we we deal with this too too many meetings too many people I
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think what was most striking for me about the Jamie Diamond rant and the resonance it seems to be having
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particularly in Silicon Valley and particularly with folks that are in leadership positions or on boards is
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that this is another example of what I think is kind of a different tenor for leaders in business right now relative
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to where we were a few years ago leaders are starting to step up and speak their
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mind and speak more directly and lead from the front rather than lead from the back I think the last couple of years
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and I would say that the whole kind of transition a away from wokeism and coddled employee workforces which is
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something that a lot of folks talk about I'm I'm not trying to just characterize
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it I'm just saying that's the characterization that's been placed on it is that the employees made the
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decisions and then the leaders kind of said okay I'm subjugated to the employees whims and needs and look at
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what's gone on with Zuck he said you're with me you're me here's a buyout option
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Elon obviously was an Exemplar of this at Twitter uh We've now seen this become coinbase Brian and his letter and we've
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now seen this become I think a bit more of a standard in the kind of emergence in the postco era that leaders can lead
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from the front speak directly and say this is the way things are going to be my job is not to coddle my employees my
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job is to lead my employees so that our organization our team wins and we achieve our mission that's the objective
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it's not to create a family workplace for everyone to be happy all the time it's to help the organization succeed
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and so I think I have heard from people individually I've seen this tenor shift underway right now um and I think that
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Jamie Diamond is another kind of Exemplar of this that that seems to have some resonance all right shth I want you
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to respond specifically to this next clip let's play the second clip about organizational bloat every area should
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be looking to be 10% more efficient if I was ready to depart with 100 people I guarantee you if I wanted to I could run
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it with 90 and be more efficient I guarantee you I could do it just I could do it in my sleep and the notion these
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bureaucracies I need more people I can't get it done no because you're you're filling that request that don't need to
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be done your people going to meetings they don't need to go to someone told me to approve some his wealth management
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that they had to go to 14 committees I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees and I feel like firing 14
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chairman of committees I can't stand it anymore all right shth the bloated bureaucracy at big companies your
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thoughts well you know there's that adage that says something akin to 50% of advertising is useless we just don't
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know which 50% yeah I think it's probably true for most corporate structures in general which is that a
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lot of the organizational bloat has evolved because of the way that people have responded to how you use technology
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so meaning if you went looked back 50 years years ago if you look at that famous picture of the Microsoft early
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team they didn't rely on software necessarily there wasn't Salesforce there wasn't work day there wasn't all
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of this infrastructure and so instead they probably organized by what they were good at and they just tried to do things
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efficiently and I suspect that many companies in the absence of Technology found a way to just be very efficient
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that started to change when you had these rigid demarcations of where one job ended and another job started and
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part of why that happened is because you had all this software that went in and convinc people this will create
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efficiency but in return the chief marketing officer's job is XY and Z this is how the roles are defined this is how
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people do it and so I think that the reason why things have become so bureaucratic and Bloated is that there
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is just this propensity to run towards software because you think it's a solution at best it's a
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symptomatic Aid it doesn't address the root cause and in fact it otes bureaucracy and it promotes the bloat
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that Jie's talking about and if you look at Jamie's p&l he spends $16 billion a year on it and I suspect that if you
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streamlined that you'd actually have half as many people because they'd be doing the job in a wholly different way
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and by the way the the counterfactual to it is if you look at companies like Facebook or Google or Tesla or SpaceX
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who designs and I'm sure stripe is the same who designs a lot of stuff internally that's custombuilt
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for their or I think the way that you see this in the revenue per employee and a bunch of these other metrics in terms
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of the efficiency of those companies so I think what he is talking about is that
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he is a victim of this push to productivity because he would look like a lite if he
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didn't ad drop technology but by adopting the off-the-shelf stuff he introduces organizational blo because
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these things are demarked very very you got the marketing team as you mentioned using HubSpot and then you got like the
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sales team using I don't organ the other thing I just want to say on the first topic is I've mentioned
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this before other than Engineers who are who are naive but can be extremely productive from day one there are very
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few other job types where naivity is an asset most people early in their career are in a jcurve where they are
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negatively contributing and the whole whole goal SL everybody down and the whole goal is that you invest in these
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people so that come out of the J curve there are probably other jobs that are like engineering but many many are not
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and so I think it's important to get the kind of Ming you get by being in an office and in the absence of that I
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think these young people like Jamie said are totally lost that's that's on them but then for the company they're
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completely unproductive and useless which is on us hey John uh Toby I I don't know if you know Toby from Shopify
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but he did this like zerob based budgeting kind of concept for meetings he just purged all meetings at the
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beginning of the year he just like deleted everybody's meetings from the top down I'm curious how you think about
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bloat and just all of these meetings and committees do you worry about that at strip we know Toby very well and I don't
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know I always feel like yeah we should I'm tempted to uh take some of the ideas like we haven't done the meeting
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deletion one and you just say oh the meetings get recreated but they measured it and they didn't it sounds like uh and
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I do always enjoy Toby's perspective which I think that you know many organiz ation problems are in fact software
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problems and you know you just need to write a script to literally like I think he wrote the script to all the meetings
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you know from the Google Calendar instance but uh there's kind of this Purity that uh you're you're over
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intellectualizing your problems and I do agree with jamat on the remote thing where like it's it's very dangerous one
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thing that can be dangerous with as CEOs think about this stuff is I think there
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is these unfair anecdotes that feel unfair that get people really riled up the quiet quitter is the anti-work
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subreddit you know all these talk of people working two jobs and that generates a lot of energy with corporate
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leaders but you don't want to design your policies around like the bottom 5% of the company that would be a horrible
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mistake yeah you want to design your policies against the top town and we have some like outrageously productive
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remote people and they're off and again the cabin Idaho somewhere just you know Co coding up a storm the thing that we
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have seen and interestingly we measured this before Co because we were doing a lot of remote hiring and we wanted to
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see we want wanted to see how much we should lean into it is that it is not good for early career people we could
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actually measure it in our productivity Data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during covid and
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it's bad from a work point of view it's also just bad from a personal point of view where they go mad because they're
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23 years old and they're not solitary confinement it's literally solitary confinement it's ridiculous and by the
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way breaking news here Jamie Diamond now uh knows which 2,000 or I'm sorry 1,739 employees to lay off first there
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is a coworker.org petition to get Jaimie to retract his statement so the optin has been created if I know Jamie I know
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he'll be retracting that statement right away