I mean the only way to really know or think you know what you're going to do is to work with someone you've worked with before.
I had talked to you both and I was just like, yeah, I'm going to do that.
No reason to waste my time looking because this is what I want to do.
Hello, hello, hello!
This is episode 42 of the Metacast behind the scenes podcast.
And we have a very special episode today.
This is our first episode with our first employee and first engineer.
Second engineer I guess, I don't know.
Jenny, welcome Jenny and we have Ilya and me Arnab in here.
It's like you forgot to say the name up front that you like squeezed it in the last minute, right?
It's cool. Well done man.
Our last episode, episode 41, the thing to improve.
We always do like one thing to improve in our episode.
The thing to improve was always remember to say people's names.
So yeah, we did that today.
We nailed it in a contrite way.
Have you had a repeat guest before?
Because I might be your first repeat guest back from episode 17.
Yeah, I was actually listening to episode 17 yesterday.
It was such a fun like lively episode, right?
And it already showed us how good of a like culture fit human culture fit.
Yes. That was the interview.
You just didn't know it, Jenny.
That's my kind of interview for sure.
Yeah. But I think it the flow, the chemistry, everything was so good in that episode.
I'm just extremely happy that you decided to join us.
Today we'll go through that journey, what led you to leave Amazon joined like this thing.
And how we decided to like compensate you for it.
But yeah, you were on episode 17.
Do you want to quickly reintroduce yourself?
Yeah, hi everyone. My name's Jenny.
I'm engineer. I'm higher number one of Metacast and previously worked with Arnav and Ilya at Amazon.
And I'm excited to be working with you both again.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's kind of funny because when we recorded the previous episode, 25, maybe a year or so ago, which is about 25 weeks.
Almost six months, right?
We were already courting you whether you realize it or not.
I think we talked about that actually, but off the record.
Yeah, so it's so cool to actually have you part of the team and also on this episode today.
Because I remember back then, Arnav is like, Jenny is probably going to leave Amazon.
And it's an opportunity for us because she's awesome.
And I think you reached out to him to get some advice or something.
Or whatever, right? And he's like, yeah, let's talk to her because now we also have like this touch point that you can like continue building on.
And yeah, 25 episodes later, that's where we are. That's amazing.
Arnav's been technical and career mentor of mine, probably for like five or six years.
So even after he left Amazon, as I was feeling like my time at Amazon was coming to a nice time to conclude it.
I had continued to reach out to Arnav to consider my next steps and my options.
I connect with both of you and your explanations of why you wanted to leave big tech.
So I kind of knew I didn't want to continue with another big tech company.
And so then like, what did I want to do? So yeah, I definitely leaned on Arnav as a resource in those conversations.
And of course, Arnav was like, well, we'll see where our company is.
But you know, we could consider that. And so yeah, I'm super happy that it worked out.
Yeah. So quick side topic. Okay. Before we get started with a meaty discussion.
The last one, episode 17 was in May. That was six months ago, like Ilya said.
And in that episode, as I was listening to it yesterday, we tried to chat GPT do intros for us.
And it was bad. It didn't know us. It insulted Ilya and all that. It's only been six months.
It was when it said Arnav must not be famous. I don't know anything about him.
It was like this kind of comments, right? Ilya. It's something about Ilya.
I don't know Ilya. It knows you, but another you like somebody else with the same name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it flat out said I don't know anything about Jenny. Something like that, right?
I mean, there's that famous line. My training data only goes till July 2022 or something like that.
That it says. So if you became famous after that, I don't know about you.
Yeah. So now this is a bit of like the AI world, I think, has gone crazy, right? It's just accelerating so much.
Now, if it doesn't know a topic, it can go do a search, a Bing search because of the partnership with Microsoft and kind of find out more.
So today, I asked again, what do you know about Jenny Buickner? And I prompted it a little bit. I said she worked at Amazon.
This is what it came back with. Jenny Buickner has an intriguing professional journey.
After a 12 year career in teaching across three countries, she transitioned into software engineering and messing over six years of experience in the field.
Her transition was facilitated through the Ada Developers Academy bootcamp, post which she landed a software engineering role at Amazon.
And then it goes on and on and on. And then finally, it says like her journey showcases a notable career shift and a proactive engagement in tech projects that impact a broad user base.
Oh, no, I don't like that. It's great. This is exactly who you are, but I couldn't have said it any better now. But we're talking about your intro, but also the leaps and bounds of progress that this tech has made.
Ilya, I asked about you and me too. Do you want to hear? Yeah.
Okay. So what do you know about Ilya Bessula and Ilya Bessula has a multi faceted career with significant experiences in tech companies and entrepreneurial ventures.
Here are some highlights. So it goes on to list like Maracas go founder and CEO your previous industry experience education experience.
Personal your podcast brand and your podcast and all and your technical skills. And then finally concludes these snippets portray Ilya as a tech savvy entrepreneur with a pension for sharing insights and experiences through modern digital platforms like podcasts and newsletters.
I thought it would say like LinkedIn, which is also on by Microsoft. It could have. Yeah.
So I wonder if it gets this from from LinkedIn maybe. Yeah. And then I asked about me. We won't go into the details. But finally I asked are these people connected.
It's certainly here are some similarities among Jenny Ilya and our now Amazon experience. So it actually pointed out the years and the projects we work together at Amazon, which is from LinkedIn, I guess.
And transitioning into this meta casting. So there we go. Six months in I think we can't bash it anymore. Okay. So that's a great intro.
Or actually we have another side topic before we and let's not ramble too much. But Ilya, an episode 42 is special for another reason, right? You want to go into that a little bit?
Yeah. We will get all the answers right now to all of the questions to the life universe and everything. Yes. From the ruler of all mankind. Jenny is completely blank face. Like you have no idea what you're talking about, right?
Well, ruler of all mankind rings about. Yeah, that's your title in the company. Yes.
Well, yeah, when you asked me what I wanted to have as a title, that's what I said. But you have no idea of significance of 42.
I mean, I feel like it's someone's age. It's not mine. Is it one of yours? Is that what it is?
It's mine, but it's not bad. It's the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
Okay. Yeah. When you all are talking, whatever you just said, I thought, oh, this kind of sounds like it might be related to that.
So there's like a civilization that has spent millions of years building a super computer so that they can figure out the answer to the question of life universe and everything, right?
And then they finally complete the project and they have like a huge celebration where they're going to like kind of cap the ribbon and ask it that question.
It thinks for a while and then says 42 and everybody's like, what? And it says, well, I know that that's the exact answer.
The question is you don't know what the question is. So go think about the question now. Yeah. No, it's like a classic sci-fi novel.
It's funny and hilarious if you haven't read it, you might enjoy it if you like sci-fi. And then the whole thing, when it reaches Kraschendo, it kind of abruptly ends with this 42 answer, which doesn't make any sense, right?
It's exactly my kind of like campy, quirky kind of humor with sci-fi mixed in.
Just to be clear, many, many, many people like the novel and they hold 42 deer to their heart.
And when mask turned 52, he posted on Twitter 42 plus 10. That was just the whole content of his tweet, which signified that he turned 52 years old.
I think I'm a little more excited by 420 than 42. This one's a little too head scratchy for me.
You can just add a zero to it. Zero's don't have any significance.
Yeah, I don't know what 420 is signified. Okay, maybe Janik and Light On Us now.
I don't know where it comes from, but it's something in pot culture around smoking pot at 420 or I don't know.
It's the April 20th, is the like international smoking pot day kind of thing.
Oh, that's why it's 420. So it would be 204 in the rest of the world.
Yes. Yeah. Okay, cool.
So let's actually get into it, right? Jenny, you said you were thinking about it.
Tell us a bit about like, how did you come to realize that your time at Amazon was coming to a sweet, happy ending?
What happened next? Yeah.
It was like a multitude of factors I had been thinking about changing. I just was thinking like something new would be good.
But we are working on this project that was really interesting and I wanted to be with it until it launched, which it eventually did launch like a few months before I left.
Can I say what the product was or are we like not? Yeah, it's public now, right?
Okay. Yeah. So it's AWS user notifications and Arnaud and I had worked on it from the very beginning of its inception.
Like many, many years. Yes. I might have written the original one page of this or something like it back in many, many years ago.
You were definitely in the funding part of that project because it was a huge project, right? Multiple organizations needed to collaborate and stuff.
Yeah. So by the time it launched, I was definitely feeling ready to do something else. There's so many things.
But the really like forcing factor was that I and my family had decided to move to Costa Rica.
Yeah. So we've been here for like two months now.
But Amazon was having this returned office mandate, which I was not particularly aligned with, regardless of whether I was moving.
And they definitely weren't going to be cool with me working remotely from another country.
So I kind of always knew that leaving Amazon was going to be part of my move.
So we moved here and I kind of considered did I want to look for a remote job.
I had talked to some companies and recruiters, but ultimately working with you both was the most appealing to me for sure.
But I guess that's jumping ahead. I remember you were specifically looking for like calm companies, maybe a bit smaller size companies where you could do more.
Tell us like what were some of those things that were like, this is what I need to have in the next thing I work on.
Yeah. I definitely took some time to reflect on work and what it means to me.
Yeah, where I want it to fit in my life and how I want it to make me feel. And I love to have a challenge and to learn.
But I do not love jobs that still too far outside of its boundaries.
I have a family. I have interests outside of work and definitely there are times in Amazon where there was a very stressful tension between work demands and my ability to like.
Enjoy my life outside of work. So I knew that that was something that I really wanted.
I read a book called the good enough job that had some really interesting things to think about about like what work should look like.
And I think that that helped me kind of like center myself in my values.
I'm trying to remember now like what some of those things were.
I know one thing that I was really looking for at first was just a four day work week because I was like company that has a four day work week is going to putting their money where their mouth is, I guess, you know, every company when you talk to them are going to say that they want you to have work life balance.
So of course, we don't want to burn out our people and blah, blah, blah.
Like everyone's going to say the right thing.
How do you know if they're telling the truth or how do you know if they are effective in enforcing what they claim to want for their employees.
So I did think like companies that have something like a four day work week or a something built in that's like, oh, half day Fridays in the summer, like something like that to me was like a signifier that the company stood by its values for what what it wanted for its employees.
Talking about that the lip service aspect that most companies have.
It was also really disappointed to hear about the Amazon like return to office stuff, but even more so because I think the year before I left Amazon in Amazon like leadership principles are huge and they were two leadership principles added to the existing 12 I want to say 12 is
they're like really these are the not stars for our company and people actually care about them at all levels from VPs down to like SD ones.
And one of those leadership principles I'm forgetting the exact name maybe you remember Jenny, but it was something about employee thing.
Something about being the best place on earth to work.
Yes, the best employer in the world or something like that right like a really North star. It depends on what metric you find is if best equals biggest.
I'm probably succeed in that dimension. No, yeah, true, but I think usually the leadership principles come with a bit of explanation of what it's about right.
It really read like Amazon wanted to be the best employer.
Yes, yes, but I feel like it did not translate at all into the actions the company took for employees right after and I was really disappointed because I still respect I love Amazon right like I work there for 12 years.
I was like that was one of the biggest head scratching moments for me like what why would you come up with this kind of a North star leadership principle and then immediately do things like return to office and all that there's some conflict going on internally.
You know it's tracks me about this leadership principle, but I didn't know about it. So now I'm just learning about this new leadership principle all of the other leader principles are focused inside the focused internally on the things that Amazon can control right and this is the best by whose standards.
So it's almost like external validation. So it's like best employer by version of what the Forbes magazine or whatever use of those ratings right.
So this is the best place is to work. I forgot which magazine runs those, but I think the principle itself almost like goes against the culture in some sense because it's focused on external validation instead of being like something that you can actually control internally entirely.
You're saying stuff like customer obsession. That's like doesn't matter what the rest of the world is doing or what they're rating or baseline is we want to be obsessed about customers and here's how and why.
Yes, yeah, we earn trust. We die of deep. All of that is just like it's almost a representative behavior. Whereas being the best employer, especially things like I'm triggered at a Twitter and another crap, right. It just doesn't compute.
Yeah, anyway, enough into like Amazon.
Not bashing like I like the company. I love it. And I was disappointed in a big big time disappointment. I think I've said before that Amazon would be probably the only big tech company I would gladly go back and work for until I spoke to someone you and I know.
And he shared this what Amazon has become and I'm like, OK, so maybe not just things change, but I have only fond memories of Amazon.
I just think working with both of you at the time that we worked together on the project that we work together, like that was an incredibly unique experience within Amazon.
I just feel so like fortunate and grateful to have that because it was such a learning opportunity, not just for like the technical side, but for the product side.
It's incredible colleagues the best. And no one was a jerk. There were none of those cliches of like the rock star engineer who is just a jerk or anything like that.
I think we had at one point like 50% female engineers. It was such a special place and I work so hard to recruit other folks from my program who were like transitioning from different careers.
I'll go out on a limb and say, I don't think you will find any other team pretty much in any big tech where it's engineering focused like their building a product.
And there's we had three, I think three women transitioning from different careers almost within like a few years of each other.
Oh, right. One of them was a nurse. I remember that. Yes.
And I'll just say that that little utopia like didn't last forever. It was great to have experienced it and known that it could exist. But I don't think that that type of thing really exists in Amazon anymore to be honest.
But we're building our version of a little utopia here now, which is awesome. That's why I wanted to join you both.
Yeah, I almost feel like we represent kind of the golden age of Amazon in terms of I guess our memories and our culture.
Golden age is a bit too much. I think we're nowhere near there.
No, I mean in terms of like I guess our Amazon experience was the experience from give or take the kind of the golden age.
At least I guess maybe golden age after 2010 or something because I don't know what was happening in the 90s and early the thunders. It might have been a different company.
But I feel like we brought the good things from Amazon to this team and we'll continue to build on that experience like without having to force people to crandle their desks and all that stuff.
But at the same time we do earn trust, we dive deep in all the other. I almost want to say cliches but like that's something that people don't get about Amazon.
I remember I was in a party with primarily Microsoft people in Seattle, friends of mine.
One of them was doing an interview with Amazon and he was laughing about leadership principles. He's like always like this.
This empties to me and like it's like cool. People think like cold colds. Yeah, colds. Yeah. And then they were asking me about those.
I'm like you're just not getting it unlike other companies. Those leadership principles actually do mean let's have the company worse.
That's why you can pass the interview because he didn't get a job because you didn't prepare. Yeah, anyway.
What's our next question? So I remember like a few months back when you were thinking about like going to a different company moving to Costa Rica.
I'm sure there are some listeners here who would be interested. How did you go about trying to find these calm companies?
Is there a job board where you go and see like these are calm companies and then how did you validate for yourself?
Like are they actually calm or not?
I didn't spend too much time researching it. Honestly, I was like so focused on moving.
We sold everything that we owned and came here with like six suitcases while we sold or donated everything.
So like the last month, I think I look at Amazon August 1st or something and we moved to August 18th.
So I was so focused on getting my family out of Seattle and then at Costa Rica and get my daughter started at school and all of that.
It wasn't until mid September that I even was like, okay, now I'm going to think about work again.
And by then I had talked to you both and I was just like, yeah, I'm going to do that.
No reason to waste my time looking because this is what I want to do.
So I knew I wanted to find a calm company. I just didn't look for any other.
You did like you didn't meet people from a few companies, right?
I mean, I clocked to some recruiters because I was just like, I should find out what's out there.
I also like talk to a few former managers who had gone to other companies just to kind of know if they were hiring.
I mean, the only way to like really know or think you know what you're getting into is to work with someone you've worked with before.
So that's kind of where I started. You know, I have people from the Ada network who were posting jobs and said like, oh, there's an opening on my team.
So the best way to validate things is like through first degree connections in your network.
So that's kind of where I was starting. But I didn't go too far down that path.
Arnapp has a phrase for this. He used on the other podcast leveraging your robust LinkedIn network.
Yes. That was in episode 40 with tram line folks.
I remember when we talked, we told you that hey, Jenny, like it'd be awesome if you come work with us.
You already kind of knew what we were building and all that anyway.
And it was going to be a completely new tech stack and everything brand new, right?
Like you have not done any of this for neither have me and Ilya.
We haven't done this before building mobile apps and audio and all that.
But I know that that was a big part of the attraction.
But I want to hear a bit about like how much of a percentage of decision making was that.
But before that, I remember we told you about this.
And then you were discussing this with your family and you had your daughter and one of her friends there who came out with some like really clear thinking.
It's a bit fuzzy for me now, but remind us like what happened. Yeah.
Yeah, totally the time that we talked there was a timer.
It was kind of like, are you going to get funding?
And if you get funding, then you might have money to hire me and then.
And I didn't know.
But then at one point we talked and it was a different model where you didn't necessarily need to have funding.
And we'll talk about that later about the compensation discussion.
It just became clear like, oh, okay, this isn't a blocker.
You still are open to me like coming on board.
And now am I open because what I definitely like envisioned was moving to Costa Rica and having a salary.
So it was definitely like a mental shift to consider what my life look like here.
If I don't have a salary for a while.
So I had some kind of like wrap my brain around that.
So after we had that conversation, I got off the phone and my kiddo and her friend were like on vacation.
And so I told her like, oh, you know, they do want me to join the company.
And they immediately were like working through the pro cons list with me.
And yeah, my daughter was like, you've worked with them before.
You really want to work with them.
And you know, she knows that I work for Amazon.
And she's like, imagine if you were like the first person to join Amazon, like how much money you would have now.
I'm like, well, I don't think this company is going to grow like that.
But she was still like, this is a learning experience.
And if you wait, then you'll kind of miss out on all of the early company stuff you could learn.
Like if you wait for them to be bigger and have a little less risky perhaps.
I mean, you know, kids are probably a little bit less risk averse.
So they weren't very many cons.
She was like, oh, yeah, you know, you won't make money for a while.
But you have savings, which ultimately I did decide like I have enough saved.
I have her one way.
And I believe in the company.
So I think we're going to start making money at some point.
It was amazing when I heard that first because they're like less than 10, right?
Those kids.
Yeah. That kind of clear thinking.
Essentially what they're describing is like the Jeff Bezos regret minimization framework.
Oh, I'm not familiar with that.
But I'm sure they haven't heard about any of that before.
You haven't heard about it too.
So it's amazing that it came like naturally to them to kind of think through in that framework.
That was awesome.
But Jane, you have not heard of the framework before?
No. The key principle behind this is, I guess, the key idea.
When you're very old and you would be like, what should they have done?
What do I regret not doing?
So that might as well be one of those things that you would regret if you didn't take the opportunity.
And that's how Bezos describes his decision making.
Would they regret not trying at least?
Because you know, trying and failing is very different from not trying and not knowing how it would pan out.
I would say it's a very dangerous framework though.
Because it's one thing to be 80 or 90 year old and look back at your life and say, what were those critical things I could have done and I did not do and have regret about it.
And it's completely different being in your 20s or 30s or 40s and realizing that this is what I will regret at 90.
I think it takes a lot of like soul searching.
But Ilya, you and I have talked about this before.
Like doing this metacast was one of those decisions.
Like we would totally regret it if we did not do it.
Yeah, as I was talking to my wife when we were just getting started right or I probably didn't include my job.
I was like, there will be no other time when the person I deeply respect and trust and want to work with is available to do the thing that we are both very passionate about.
Because like, if you don't do this now, you know, Arnab is going to take another job.
And that moment will be gone. There will be no second chance to do the same thing again.
Or maybe a thing like this or maybe a thing without Arnab, right?
And so yeah, we just plunged into this.
No, I am just amazed that the three of us could figure out the time and space in the universe to work on something together again.
And it's like our room thing. That's amazing.
Yeah, let's talk about like you mentioned, you were looking forward to move to Costa Rica and have some sort of a salary.
But this was going to be without salary.
So, so I think there's two things. One is from our perspective. How did we think about it?
And from your perspective, what were you expecting? How did you think through this process?
I guess to start with, we had no idea how to compensate someone means other than cash.
I mean, we kind of had an idea that you could pay salary and you also get kind of stock options.
Very similar to what we were getting at Amazon, right? We got a salary, fixed salary.
And I received it because it's probably company. That's why you know, it's a risk of stock units in the startup, its stock options.
But then we like, we don't have any cash flow to actually afford salaries.
And we were trying to figure out what's the best way to develop a framework for ourselves.
So like if you join, if somebody else joins, what do we offer them in a way that we just both fare and also we don't shoot ourselves in the food.
And so Arna, we wanted to tell about your friend who actually introduced you to the framework.
Yeah, so like last year, why a combinator summer school or startup school or something like that.
I did that and met some people here. One of those friends is the CEO of a startup in Vancouver, pre-ish.
And so I know that he does this quite a lot where he doesn't have full-time employees, but he has a lot of like people consulting for him and contracting.
And he has a framework. So we went to him. He introduced us to like this buffer buffer is a company.
I think around 2016 or 17, they were the first company to like go public with this is how we figure out equity for our company for employees.
And they produce like a spreadsheet. And then there's Joel Spolski had a really good post about how to think about like early employees and all that.
Yeah, I think those were some of the things we started with and then we created like a equity framework for our company and created a calculator.
Yeah, basically copy-pasted buffer framework and just I think simplified it a little bit.
Simplified it, but also I think one big thing that we noticed is this framework typically when does a startup or a small company start hiring people.
Usually you don't get to a place where people are willing to work for you like you are Jenny right now, right?
Like you are willing to join the company at this early stage before we have started making a new money.
So I would say actually no one in their same mind who doesn't know us would join our company, I think.
So it's actually it's this level of multi-year trust that has been built that is I think the underlying foundation.
Jenny, if somebody else came to you and asked you to work with equity, what would your reaction be if you didn't know the people?
Equity is a percentage of something and if that something is nothing, then it's worth zero right now the equity is worth zero like I know that.
And I'm not trying to win the lottery with a payout.
I talked earlier about my values. I want to have a job I enjoy that doesn't ruin my life outside of work that I learn and I have fun with the people I work with and all of that.
And on top of it live a comfortable life. And I think that in the long term, this is that for me and I'm willing to like wait and in the meantime, I mean we'll talk about it, but like I am being compensated more in equity because I'm coming on before there's a salary.
Yeah, so that's what we kind of thought is when would a startup start hiring like when would a Jenny join a startup is when you started making money or you have investment from a VC or somebody like that.
And you are joining us way before any of those places, well, maybe not way before, but well before any of those things and you're taking a lot more risk than the first employee would typically take.
And so we decided to adjust the formula for that.
We should talk about the components of the formula. So the formula includes I think seniority.
The role. Yeah, the role so the role is like engineering design product. So kind of the type of the role. Then seniority is like experience.
It was experience was actually seniority in the company like the hired for.
So those are two different things. Yeah, there's like level inside the company and your experience.
Okay, okay, they are separate things and there was a fourth component. I think the fourth component was between how much equity versus how much cash you take.
So that's your choice component and then there's the risk layer, which is what size of the company you're joining at.
Oh, yeah, it's like one to three employees like four to six, but they were seven to fifteen.
So essentially the later you join, it's like an exponentially decreasing amount of equity that you'll get.
So some of those factors are multipliers and some of those factors are denominators denominators.
Yeah, so essentially it's I have the framework open here. It's role component and it's like a number multiplied by your experience.
So these are like things that are adding on or increasing your equity and then it's divided by the risk component.
And there's a bit more to it. We'll share in the show notes because rather than audio, I think it would be easier to read this and see a Google sheet.
But essentially, yeah, those are the components and how we thought about it.
Right. Yeah, in the place where we tweaked this model is because there is no cash component.
I forgot how exactly we did it. I think we added a multiplier for that.
So typically what companies do is when you join a startup, you have a choice. Do I want cash or do I want equity?
And if you take equity, you're given like a 30% extra compared to like what you would get in cash.
Maybe just like let's put it in numbers. Let's say if you like pirate for 150k a year and then you say I want less cash more equity, then maybe you're still getting your hundredk.
But then instead of 50k in cash, you get 70k in equity.
It's basically showing that you are putting more trust in the company and in the long term future of the company.
So you're getting a 30% increase in your total compensation for it.
However, that's a choice. Some people would choose I want to take all salary and no equity.
Some people will sell take all the equity. Some people will go in the middle.
In your case, we don't have that choice. So we thought that this is one point where we need to do something about it because having a choice and making a choice versus not having a choice are two different things.
And usually you don't have that in a startup. So we applied a multiplier here for that.
We kind of created like no choice as a thing in the calculator and put a multiplier for it.
Yeah, I don't correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe if we just followed the model from buffer, we would have ended up with something like one or maybe one point 25% or so percent equity spread or four year period.
So that's what an employee number one would get with one year cleave, by the way, because they want you to commit for at least a year before you get any of your equity.
That's the standard right in the industry and in the start of space where if you are the first person joining a company, you would get like 1.3% of the equity, investing over four years.
And it'll start investing after one year. So pretty standard like big companies like Amazon when we work there except you won't get one percent or Amazon.
Yeah, so we applied the multiplier of I think you would take three. So I think we ended up with something like 4.8% and we were like, okay, let's just make it to 5% and even number.
We applied the same thing to best over four years, but we removed the one year cleave condition because we were thinking like it just wouldn't be fair for somebody to work for three or four years before they see any equity.
And I think we wouldn't have done this for anyone we don't know because it would be too much risk to have somebody actually basically own parts of the company like outright after the first month, but because of that mutual trust we changed the rules.
I don't think any other employee of the company would get the same kind of terms at this point.
Yeah, plus I think it like you said it won't be fair to not get anything for one year. That's because there is no salary component. If a person joins and they're drawing some salary, then it is fair that you have a cliff of one year and get the equity after that.
Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's what I'm saying. Like it would be unfair for someone to work for free because essentially free, right? Because assume whatever like prisoners dilemma. I don't know if it's right or not.
Before one year anniversary, you fired the person. And then you got like one year of free of work and then the person walks out with nothing. I mean, there are also some scenarios that you can make up that are very distrapping here.
But by the way, Ilya and I we ourselves have cliffs for us. I don't remember the details, but one year cliff for both you and me or it is one year cliff for both of us. And after that, we have monthly investing.
It works. After one year, we get 25% of our share, our respective shares. And then we get whatever 136th of remaining 75% every month afterwards.
So it also best over four years, but we have a one year delay. The other thing we try to do is the stage that you're joining in. Right.
So Ilya and I put in, I don't know about a year of thinking or like whatever into it, we're about to go beta, but we thought, okay, so that's fair that we have taken more risk than you in the beginning.
But from this point on, it's almost like equals, right? The three of us. So what we also decided is the revenue model. Ilya, do you want to talk about like the employee salary pool and the distribution of that?
Yeah, I don't think we should say the specific numbers here, but what we were thinking about is because none of us draws any salary because we don't have any in cashflow right now.
So what we decided to do is until we are able to pay everyone, let's say full salary X, right?
What we will do is we will calculate all of our revenue minus expenses taxes, basically all of the outgoing cashflow, right? And then what's remaining that will be our, I think we called it the salary pool.
So let's say we have $10,000 in this kind of post after cost after expenses. I don't want to call it profit, but it's almost like a profit, but before salary.
So then we can just divide this between the three of us until we reach that point when we are able to pay full salaries and actually we are able to make some profit that actually stays with the company and can be reinvested.
And we were all thinking that we could be in different financial positions. So we could also make use of IOUs, which stands for IOU.
Wait, wait, are you saying IOU stands for IOUs?
Okay, isn't that logical? No, I mean IOU is like an abbreviation, right? But it could also be.
I know. It sounds better when you write it out or it looks better when you write it. It doesn't sound better when you write it out.
Exactly, yeah, it sounds actually pretty silly, if you just listen to it. Like USA stands for USA.
Yeah, so we can just say, okay, we will have a ledger where we could say, okay, so I could take less this month, but then the company owes me more at a later point.
So Joe's post, he really documents this really, really well in the article, which we will also link in the show notes.
We haven't made any revenue, so we haven't put this model to the test, but it seems to be a workable model. What could go wrong?
One thing I want to say there is before we actually go to Jenny, sorry, we have kept you waiting while sharing our perspective for it for a long time now.
But one last thing I'll add here is typically the norm for these kind of like employee salary pool and distribution like salaries from it is to go by the percentage of equity you hold in the company.
But there we decided to do something different. This is what I was saying that, okay, we initially took the risk more like Ilya and me, but from this point on, we are equally all taking the risk and putting in all the same stuff into the company.
So that salary distribution will basically do like one third, one third, one third. That's one more way we try to like do something different in this case because you're kind of joining at a unique circumstance that the fourth person joining.
If it is like a standard startup trajectory, they won't get this kind of benefit. They'll get that salary according to their or this is not salary. This is more like bonus. They'll get the bonus according to the equity they hold in the company.
So what we are curious about is when we talk to you what expectations you to come with and also what was your reaction to what you saw.
Yeah, I've never worked for a startup. I haven't done research on startups before. So a lot of what you shared was just like education for me. And I did read like some other articles about startups and equity.
But like you said, a lot of them don't apply because it's with the assumption that like the startup has funding.
Or it's going to get funding and it's going to go towards an IPO. Yeah. Right. So a lot of the things out there were talking about like with the assumption that there was a salary involved, which there isn't in our case right now.
So I think ultimately like it was good to know what the standard is in the industry, but because we are a special flower. And on top of it, we have the shared mutual trust. I mostly just went with my gut around like does this feel fair. Does this seem reasonable.
We all are working right now without salaries and eventually would like to have incoming flow again. So like when the company reaches the point where that's available, like it did seem fair that like there's a salary pool and we split it three ways.
And if one person needs it more and another person is in a position to kick that can down the road like the IOU sort of model often.
Well, does a stand for again. I owe you. All right.
So mostly what I needed to do is make a spreadsheet of how much money do I have saved. What is my cash flow out personally, which took some time because like as we moved to Costa Rica, it's like we had to buy a car.
We had to get health insurance. We had to get these things. But once we kind of got like a lot of the upfront one time or at least like for the year costs in the case of like health insurance and car insurance, like out of the way I did like really nail down like, OK, this is how much is going out each month.
And is it keeping me up at night, not having a salary when I first moved here. It was keeping me up at night. I was like, we hadn't rented our house in Seattle yet. So it's like we were paying that mortgage.
We didn't know how much it was going to cost for our long term rental here, all of that. So like at that moment, I kind of felt like we might be hemorrhaging money. And I just can't not have a salary.
But after like a month things settled. And then I was like, Oh, yeah, it's not super cheap here. But the expenses are less than in Seattle.
Right. Yeah, what I just realized as actually both of you are talking is we operate as a partnership more than as a starter in terms of like the feel of it.
So it's just partnership of three people and we just need to get this thing up and running. And then all partners benefit from this.
Co up. Yeah.
Co up. Yeah. I don't know what the co-op is. It stands for co-operation.
I don't know.
But typically you would see like small farmers or people like that. This is I think mostly in the agricultural area, but it's become popular elsewhere too, where let's say you grow rice and I grew corn or whatever.
Like we'll pull in together. We'll create a market. And whatever are the after the expenses and all that, whatever is the profit, we do the sharing out of it.
Okay. I guess it's different because co-op would be like each of us makes their own project earns money and then we contribute to the whole right. And then we divide it here because we work on the same thing.
I think the meta point here cast that point.
Yes. I'm trying to cast it. Yes.
Is that the models and the communication that's out there right now about it. It's really focused on VC funding and companies that are going to grow.
Let's say to 50 people within a few years, that sort of outlook that kind of companies, right.
There isn't much for bootstrap style companies. And maybe there is an opportunity here where whatever the framework, maybe when we have the force person joining.
That's when we can actually create a public framework for this and share it or something like that.
Because you are a bit of a special flower as you have said again and again.
Yeah, always has been always will be.
I think earlier, Ilya might have said that you'd have to be crazy. So I would be crazy special flower.
I said that you have to be, I think I said out of your mind. To join somebody you don't know.
That's an important qualification here. So I wanted to ask a question, Jenny. So as you do your modeling of the cash outflow, which obviously I've been doing that as well.
How do you feel? You're always in the red and it just keeps like shrinking. How do you feel about it?
I think that it ultimately comes down to like the slope of the curve.
The runway that you have.
I have a friend who worked in finance for a long time and then stopped working and took some time to figure out a small business to buy and then COVID happened.
Anyway, ultimately like she wasn't working for at least a couple years.
So when I was thinking about this, I talked to her and I was like, does it keep you up at night?
This is a person who went to Harvard Business School and knows her shit.
She was like, no, it's not stressful at all because like I have a spreadsheet. I was like, okay, I just need to like model this out and know this is the number below which I'm not comfortable going and how far away is that and having to like include padding for unexpected things or catastrophic things.
I also like am operating under the assumption, which hopefully isn't far off the mark that like if I reach a point where I was like, I really want to make money that I think that I'm still marketable in the software industry and that there are still like reasonably enough remote jobs that would hire me even though I'm working in Costa Rica.
If I reach the point where I'm not comfortable with this anymore, I want to get a job that pays me a salary that from that point, it wouldn't take me a year to find that job. I think it would take me maybe three months, three to six months, whatever it is.
But yeah, ultimately I have enough runway. I mean, it definitely, if I were living in Seattle, I don't think I would have done this because my expenses are a lot higher in Seattle and also like the healthcare in the United States paying out of pocket is a lot more.
I can totally precise it's $850 per month. It's a lot.
That's for your family, Elia, four people. It's my family, yeah. It's a lot.
Yeah, and don't get me start on healthcare because that's just like what you pay. But then if you actually go to the doctor, I mean there's a deductible, right?
So you still have to pay all that. There's so much money that goes out before it legitimately kicks in.
I actually feel like it makes you more marketable because you have like six, seven years of experience at Amazon building like APIs and high scale back end services, right?
Now you're picking up something completely different. It makes you a more full stack engineer.
It makes you a more, I think more experienced, more well rounded engineer, but aside from the engineering and the technical stuff, I think something about working at a very early stage company, there's so much more.
I think that's the next segment we'll go into before we wrap this up. I feel like there's a lot of companies that value people like that with the entrepreneur kind of experience and spirit in them.
I think part of that is also you don't run your sort of in your swim lane like you would in a big company, right? You're all over.
You are part of all of the product decisions, design decisions, you see the entire business in and out and it just makes you much more rounded person, much more rounded professional in general.
I do feel like especially for the two of you for engineers, I think you become much more marketable after this and I think the opportunities for you are even better.
Right. Okay. So let's get into that last segment. What is your role at Metacast? What are you doing? Which part of the pigeonhole?
My role title is senior software. What is it? Senior software engineer. I mean, a title is a title like I'm here to do whatever needs to get done. I'm excited to like get this product ready for people to use it.
So anything that I see that I feel equipped to pick up and run with and get out the door like that's what I'm doing, which right now, as you said, I don't know what I'm doing so mostly ramping up.
But I am feeling like I'm making progress and getting a better lay of the land with the code base and all of that and their features that I want to see.
So those are the things that I'm excited to work on.
I'll have to add the correction to what you just said, but ramping up. So we had this long standing issue with HTML not rendering.
Not that big because you couldn't fix it. It was later in our backlog and we didn't prioritize it, right? I mean, it was a p0, but we just like, I know how to fix it. We'll just do it later, right?
I think the things that really differentiate our app, that's what we try to work on first. Then the table stakes of getting it just like every other podcast. What would you expect like from a podcast listening experience that, but even in there, we try to focus on the things that have unknowns, the hardest things, the things that like
you wouldn't know what's the right UX unless you build it and get a few people to like try it out and tell you how it's going. Those are the things. So this HTML thing we knew it looks like pathetic, where do you see this B and you L and L I HTML elements in the text.
And I think two people have told us that this looks weird, right? And we have told them, yeah, we know we know how to fix this.
Yeah, and then just I think one morning, like a few days ago, I saw this message and Slack, she's like, oh, I forgot exactly what the framing was. I think you need to distract yourself from like the thing you were banging your head on the wall with. And you're like, oh, I just looked at this and yeah, I found the library and it's just like it's done.
And I look at this and it just looks so awesome. So that's going to be your first publicly shipped user facing feature, right, which you ship to close beta users. So it's not just ramp up. It's actually already delivering value, what like two and a half weeks in awesome.
Well, to your point, the thing that I was working on, we were kind of like not sure what the UX is going to be. So I was messing around with it to learn, but I also was like, I don't want to dump too much time into this.
If we go a totally different direction, because it's also like new enough to me that refactoring it might be more confusing than if I just started from scratch. If we like go a completely different direction.
So I just wanted to feel like I delivered something. So I was like, this seems like a low hanging fruit. Let me like pick this up and bang it out.
Yeah, yeah. And also you were working on podcasts downloads, which of your own issue that you experience right now. And you're like, kind of fix it, right? And it's not complete yet, but you've started figuring it out.
So yeah, that's actually so awesome to see that capacity starts to increase right now in terms of the throughput. I guess that we can take as a team. I can already see that. It's not a two exit this point yet, right? Maybe like 1.31.4, I would say this point, right?
Because some ramp up still needs to be done. Also, Arnapp maybe needs to help more than he would when it's like a full speed. So it's just totally normal, right?
But like it's a big company. You would still be at this state like three months in now we are talking about two weeks, which is pretty awesome.
Plus, I think this goes both ways like at a early stage company, you need people like that. But you also need to foster that kind of culture in early stage companies.
Right. For example, in Amazon, you wouldn't know to pick up this other thing that you want to work on, right?
Out of 800 things in the back home. Yeah. And you wouldn't know how others would react to it if you picked up something else. If the product manager or the software development manager that you report to would be happy with that or not.
And this is the kind of thing you need in a startup is just go do it right like you have much more trust and.
I mean, that's one of the reasons I wanted to join you another reason is that I can skip the whole interview process. I don't have to study things that I don't need to know for this job.
I can skip over like in post or syndrome. You both know me. You know, I don't know any of this stuff. I'm not pretending like I do. We all know that I need to learn it.
You've worked with me before. You know, I can learn it. Yeah, we can skip all of that beginning stuff where I worry about what you think when I say I'm completely lost. I just put it out there like our knob. I'm stuck.
Like whenever you can. And in the meantime, I'll just pick something up that seems easy.
As you're saying this, I just imagined if there was a stranger in your place right now that I was feeling weird about having somebody like I don't know.
Like you said, you have to figure them out. When they say this, do they mean what they say? Is there any underlying meaning or anything like that?
But we know how to read each other. And there is no hesitation in asking for things like challenging each other because we've built this over the years.
So now I always feel like we are coming to a formula which I guess other people come to as well before us is when you start a company.
It's best to let it people you know because you just skip so much that ramp up on interpersonal level.
If you think about it, we have interviewed each other all three of us have interviewed all the other two of this group over like five to seven years.
That's why there was no interview or anything like that.
And never once did I have to traverse a tree.
Actually, we didn't interview Jenny for the initial job, but it'll be as soon as she joined our team.
It's true. It was my first time talking to a principal engineer in that loop as like an SD one. It was awesome.
I was like, my org doesn't even have a principal and I'm talking to a principal here.
Yeah. Yeah. So very soon we are at like 2.3 X engineers or something like that between me, Jenny and Ilya, who does everything, but also finds some time to code and do things on the side.
I don't know. We like totally distracted the whole time.
Yeah. So we are super, super excited and I guess welcome to the team again.
And I really enjoyed actually recording this because there were some things that we wanted to ask like how do you feel about stuff, right?
So which we just say word for this episode because you said you would be able to share it.
So we were like, okay, let's not ask this. Let's make it the first time conversation as opposed to repeating what we've already talked about.
So that's really awesome. If you talk about these things before the conversation when you're recording the podcast is never going to be exactly the same.
Actually, that reminds me of we have this like asynchronous workflow and Slack every few days a stand up thread with questions.
And the questions are like, what have you worked on since last? What are you doing next?
And we recently added how do you feel, which I think is really nice because I had been six and Sunday, but like not really so sick that I would tell you like, oh, you guys are sick, but adding the how do you feel?
You can just be like, I've been feeling a little crummy like or my kid is home today and I'm stressed like it just gives you that opening to like throw that out there.
So people kind of know where your head spaces.
Like, how do you feel physically or like, oh, I'm frustrated because I've been stuck on this thing like whatever that prompts you to respond with. I think it's nice.
Yeah, it kind of gives you that license to share. Like you said, like, should I share should they not share? And this is just prompt for you to just go for it.
And the way it came up, so are now just added it to his update where he said that he was up until one.
And then he was so like excited by the stuff he was working on that he couldn't sleep until four.
But then he woke up with his normal like morning hours and he was too sleepy to be properly functional.
So he's kind of a bit slow today. It's useful to know because then then we can you know give him a bit of slack and just be more gentle.
One of the most powerful things in a small early stage company where you have two, three people just working together is to go with your energy and flow.
Some days you're feeling great. Go for it. And some days maybe after that you decide, okay, I did too much. I need a break and you take a break.
There isn't like a standard every day in nine to five is expected from you. You have to take the positive side of that.
And I feel like because there can be energy flows like that, it's important for others to know how you're feeling today and what to expect from you.
Like you said, yeah, I've got a share this before on the podcast.
But one thing I figured out about myself recently, I just stopped forcing myself to be productive in the mornings.
I'm like, I'll do all sorts of unproductive stuff before 10, 11 a.m.
And then I slowly start getting into the groove of like going deep.
But then because I already cleared my mind of all of the small stuff, I can just go completely focused in there.
Whereas previously I would try to do the all of those productivity guru to recommend right here.
I would try to eat the frog in the morning, but then I would just get frustrated.
And then like the entire day is sort of man. But now I'm finding that.
And it's something that would be impossible in cooperation because of all meetings and just have to be there at nine o'clock no matter how you feel.
Cool. So, Janja and Arna, but it was great having you on the show.
And thanks for having me. We'll have you next week.
Bye. Bye.