Upworking From Anywhere with Saty Bahadur, CTO at Upwork

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Sati, CTO of Upwork, about the revolution of remote freelancing. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) I think I've hosted maybe close to 200 jobs and $500,000 worth of work on Upwork. So I'm like a Upwork power user.

(Sati at 00:00:21) Yeah, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) Yeah. So when I saw you were coming on the show, I was like, this is gonna be great. And then my producer's like, you need to put away your list of product suggestions.

(Sati at 00:00:31) I will take them all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) Person for that.

(Sati at 00:00:33) Yeah. Hey, what kind of person would I be if somebody who's a power user and I get to chat with them and they're telling me all the suggestions? I'll take them. If not on the show, I'll take them off the show. Yeah, what do I know? You know better than I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Yeah. I mean, we love using it, by the way. I've actually started training my team on how to use it too. It's great for smaller projects and for the team because they can be integrated into my billing. Like, I bring them on to my team, right? And then I taught them sort of how to hire and what to look for and how to do a good job post. Like, for example, we posted two jobs yesterday and today, actually. One of them I know what it is. I don't know what the other one is, but one of them is for making clips, right? Like, we want to make these very specific style of clips. And so I was sharing with Andrea who's doing this. She had posted a job looking for people to do clips and taking resumes and looking at portfolios. And I said, if you post a link to the style of clip that we want and say, this is the style we're looking for, we're looking for someone, then it'll make your job as a recruiter, hirer, or a person much, much, much easier.

(Sati at 00:01:36) See, now you are actually talking exactly—I mean, I could leverage this for our community product. Like, we have this side that we're expanding. It's all about community. And you are talking literally about best practices for your team. But if you could just do that and tell people, if you want better hits, you want better people to show up and you want to have your exact problem solved, you could probably put on the community and teach people, this is how you would do it. And as a client, and then talent could go, oh, if I know that, then I can really have a good idea of how much it costs for me to build it, how much time, et cetera, and they can bid appropriately for it. Making that connection much, much, much better. At some point in time, if you're recording a video of that, I would love to leverage you on the community site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:19) Yeah, I didn't even know you had a community site. So this is news.

(Sati at 00:02:24) I think the engagement with clients and talent is what we would like, right? The long-term engagement. We want people to first get started and get started in a way that the first time they come on, the experience is really beautiful. So they go, okay, I'm not lost in what I need to do here because most people tell us, if I had a script on what I need to follow, then I would. I would get my first hit, then I know how it works. So you kind of figure it out one or two times and you know what works and what doesn't, then they can get started. And I think that is, if you could solve that by training, by videos, by people collaborating like you or anybody else who's done it multiple times, teaching people on both sides how to do that, that would be lovely. And then that gets the whole flywheel going for all of us because these guys will start putting more jobs on. Because once you get used to it, you go, wait a minute, I can—I use Upwork for scheduling my holidays. And I didn't know I could do that until I saw somebody doing it. And I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm planning my holidays. I go, yeah, that's like a stressful process for me. I gotta figure out where I'm going, do the bookings, you know, do the end to end, like tour guides and all that stuff. And it's painful, but my wife and I do it every single year. And we have this big plan, and this person on my team goes, well, why don't we use the platform? I said, what do you mean? He said, I use that, I use the platform every single year. And then he showed me how he does it, how he posts the job up, what does it look like, here's what the parameters are. And I go, okay, great. And I even asked him rude questions like, so do you give your credit card to this person to take care? He's like, well, with the person that I have right now, I have eight years of established relationship. So, yes, absolutely. This person takes care of everything for me. And I started seeing the exact same person, and my life has been made awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) Yeah. I've gotta tell my wife. Because we—she uses Upwork for her business too, by the way. She has a separate account.

(Sati at 00:04:19) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) And she uses it because she does social media management for veterinary clinics.

(Sati at 00:04:23) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:24) And she, like, WordPress upgrades and WordPress security—she doesn't want to get too deep into that. She'll make the page, but the maintenance of it to make sure it's up. She has a network of three or four people she constantly does micro work with, and it's fantastic.

(Sati at 00:04:39) I think we're all finding new ways to outsource the work that we are used to doing, right? And I think it's at a both personal level. And also, I mean, I found people in my neighborhood. I live in Seattle pretty much. It's like everyone around here is tech or tech-focused or is trying to start a business, et cetera. So I meet a different set of people, to be fairly honest. But in social conversations, it's all about, like, oh, I use your platform a lot. I'm like, oh, great. Tell me why. And almost always it is, we have an idea that I want to go think of. I want to start it. I want to build something. I want to ideate on it and I want to iterate on it. And that's the platform we use. I'm like, oh, okay, great. That's—and it's a different sub. Somebody talked to me about their fashion website. Somebody talked to me about how they're doing marketing, talked to me about their accounting side. I'm like, oh, I mean, the impact that I am seeing more is it's like the Genius Bar, right? Like you are a startup in the Bay Area or in Seattle. The first thing you do is you walk to the Apple Store and you go, hi, can I have four laptops set up like enterprise stuff? Thank you so much. Somebody spends an hour with you at the Genius Bar. Kind of using that logic to, we need a set of skills and people to go solve a particular problem. And I'm using Upwork as the place where I go and get that. And that to me is super powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:57) Yeah. I did that two weeks ago with an AI question that I had to understand if something was possible. I don't know if this is, if you see this happen a lot, but I'll post and I'll say, hey, I'm curious to better understand this, and I need somebody who's an expert here, and I'll pay you hourly. And most times, the way those end is they answer the question in the message, and I just start a job and pay them. Like, because I want to contribute to the ecosystem. Like, I could just as easily say, you know, thanks. You know? You gave me the answer to my question, but I want it to keep going forward. And it was very valuable information. So it's really great way. I didn't know that this would be a Upwork love fest, but I really do like the product. One of the things that made the biggest impact, because I've been on it for like ten years, I think—

(Sati at 00:06:42) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:42) —was when you started reusing job posts. I know you're new though, right?

(Sati at 00:06:49) You've been there for almost sixteen, seventeen months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) How did you get involved with that?

(Sati at 00:06:55) Actually, so a long conversation, but Hayden reached out, and she was—Hayden's my boss. She's the CEO of the company. And she was talking to me about, like, hey, this is the opportunity. We are trying to expand our business. Here's—and here are the things that we would want to do. And we want to have someone come in and help us do that. And at that point in time, I knew of Upwork. I hadn't used them enough. So I kind of did my own research, talked to a bunch of people, kind of get a sense of where was the company going? What were they doing, et cetera? But the mission of the company, that was the one thing that clicked in my head. I'm like, wait a minute, this has the potential to impact people all over the world. This is not about you have a specific skill in a specific area. You're not just doing regular contracts that people do. This is different. And that was energizing. And I could see that opportunity there that, forget the business aspect of it, like, you know, a huge trillion-dollar market to go address. It's the capability of being able to change so many lives for the better in a way that is globally distributed. Okay. That's a beautiful problem to go solve. And so that kind of drove me to the company. Obviously, we went through our whole meeting other folks, et cetera, but that's what got me here. And I think the last sixteen, seventeen months, I've been focusing more on—we're going from millions of users and want to go to tens of millions of users. So how do we do it in an effective manner where we are scaling our business, making sure that our customer experience is beautiful, simple, rock solid. And the word that I'm looking for is actually intuitive so that the training of new customers becomes lesser and lesser, and it becomes more like we are out of your way. Here's what you get. Here's the simplest way to guide you through, and you're done. Right? So that has been the focus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) Yeah. Well, the wizard, for lack of a better term, to get through has—it's really gotten significantly better over the—and, you know, there's—you watch it grow over the years and you see they try things and whatnot, but overall, it's never been an impediment for me to get what I want. It's always just like, oh, okay. Here's the new change. The apps have been pretty good. There's this weird thing where there's two separate apps, and it's kind of confusing, but I'm just being nitpicky now.

(Sati at 00:09:10) No, no. I like—I said, this is great. I think that's another aspect of stuff. We need to pivot to be the mobile-first company. And we have, right? We have, we already have. Now that we are on that journey, we want to make sure that most people who use us, especially the talent, is globally distributed. And the day of the desktop is long gone in, specifically in those areas. People are either on tablets or on their phones, et cetera. So having the first-class experience on the mobile device is a number one priority. And so if you notice, we have these two apps, per se, one for talent, one for client, et cetera. They have slightly different stuff. They were done for reasons, and they were done based on research. But as far as we can make sure that the experience on each is customized and then we kind of get to the next step and next step and optimize that funnel, that's what we are working on today. And we want it to be super fast globally, per se. Because again, imagine somebody in a geo which has low bandwidth requirements, et cetera, trying to use the experience. They probably need to find a landline, sit down, get out to the land and work on it. We want to kind of get out of that. We want them to get into this whole collaborate quickly, look at your stuff on your phone wherever you are, reply back to contracts or whatever really, really quickly on your phone, chat with their customers, et cetera. Those capabilities have to be enhanced. Like, they have to be first-class citizens, and that's what we're working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:37) Is that the most important thing happening today? Or, like, what's the big thing happening with you and your peers?

(Sati at 00:10:42) I can go through a list. The number one stuff, like I talked to you about, is scaling. Scaling in a manner that's not linear, scaling to tens of millions of customers. So we are, and building really fast experiences for them too, making sure that they are walking through the funnel really quickly. So the way you describe it as a wizard, but it's the consolidation of all our multiple products that we have for different segments in a manner that you don't have to guess what you need. We intuit it for you. I know that you're looking for X, so here's the next step sort of thing. Rather than go and figure out which product really works best for me, per se. Right? So I'm kind of taking you out from the guessing game, but being super customer-focused on it. Then the third part is obviously expanding to the world, get into different geos, localize and make wonderful experiences for whichever country we go into so that that market is tapped in the right way. And then search and match and discovery is a basic thing that we need to build on because you use the Upwork search engine. We want to be first, if you go—the right talent or the right things in front of you first. So relevancy of the search is super important. Second part of that, developing more on the AI aspect of it is we want to intuit what you're actually looking for. So if you said, hi, I'm trying to build a website. That's great. The next part of it is once you build a website, you probably want to send some traffic to it. So you probably need somebody who's really good at sending traffic to it. Right? So, like, we should probably put that in front of the customer and say, now that you're building the website, have you considered this person who would help you get traffic to that site? Okay, great. Like, have you considered this person who's really good with Google AdWords or whatever? Right? So the things that make your end product better or move you forward, things that you haven't yet discovered, but we have enough to know of customers like you to drive you forward is what we are trying to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:33) It's like Amazon. They say, you know, 70% of people also bought these items, and then you can bundle them together. You know?

(Sati at 00:12:39) And I came from that world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) You spent some time over at Alexa. Right? Did you have the pleasure of knowing David Limp? Did your time overlap there?

(Sati at 00:12:49) No. I'm not aware of him. And as soon as you said that word, I start to shut off my Alexa device because it's gonna respond to you later.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) He was employee one on the Alexa project. He was just the first person at the company, and he built the original teams and all of that.

(Sati at 00:13:05) I have not worked with him. I worked on Rohit Prasad's team, which was basically the platform that—well, my team specifically was the platform on which Alexa is built. So think of it like, you know, how do you build the models? How do you have the end-to-end engineering? How does data flow through the system? So that's what my team was.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:23) That is pretty cool. And so you did that for a couple of years?

(Sati at 00:13:26) I did that for a couple of years, and then I ran trust and safety for a couple of years. So how to make sure that when you buy something from Amazon, A, the product is what they say it is, and then making sure that, you know, you're not getting swindled, and then making sure that Amazon is not getting swindled.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) Culturally, are there similarities between Amazon and Upwork?

(Sati at 00:13:47) I think Amazon has a very unique culture. It's also set in stone for a long period of time. So it evolves, but it evolves slowly. The company breathes and lives its culture. So it's like the people get assimilated into that culture, per se. And there is a very nice mindset on how that evolves, et cetera. So it has its advantages. Upwork is nimble, fast, an evolving culture. It's taking the best from every place, per se, not just Amazon or any one place. And I think it's evolving rapidly to be super fast, customer-obsessed.

(Sati at 00:14:23) All the same things that you would hear in different places, but kind of picking the best of both worlds, optimized to what it wants to be in its current journey today. And it's evolving really, really rapidly. So we have made our processes better, how we plan, how we execute, how we run the company, how we actually are thinking about what drives the customer, where we want to spend the time and energy on making sure that the experience gets better, et cetera. So we are evolving in those spaces, and then we are also doubling down on certain areas like I just talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) Oh, nice. I have a question. You mentioned countries early, going into different countries. So I recently made friends with this guy named Gaga. He's a founder of a company called Redberry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:01) They do software design. They're based in the country of Georgia.

(Sati at 00:15:05) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:05) He was telling me about how their country, it's super hot for outsourcing right now. The government is giving all of these tax credits for tech outsourcing to sort of get on the world stage and to make an impact and become a place. Now that's one country. There's hundreds of countries in the world. You mentioned that you go into different countries or you start service. Can you explain how that works?

(Sati at 00:15:27) This is slightly different. So I think what you talked about is that many countries are spending or incentivizing people to be in the freelancer space, or if not in the freelance space, the contracting space, the IT space, et cetera. So they are all sort of pushing them forward. I think that is more to build local export zones where companies can come in and open a contracting office, et cetera. That's good. And that's part of what we would take as well. Those would be agencies on our platform, et cetera. Right? So those would be people that you would work with both from an enterprise suite perspective, or you can directly work with them per se.

(Sati at 00:16:04) But what I was describing is something different. It's like, if I want to go to, say, and I'm totally making up a country, if I were to say I want to launch a version of Upwork in Brazil, and I'm making it up completely, then the experience in Brazil is slightly different. The talent in Brazil is slightly different. What the local clients in Brazil expect is slightly different. It's like, you know, the Big Mac burger, if you can now order in Brazil, it's different than what you get in the US. And so we would move our business forward. We could have a really beautiful version for that specific customer in that country if we optimized the look, the feel, the site, the search capabilities, the matching capabilities for that particular geo. Right? And we believe that that is going to be one of the largest drivers for our business going forward. So again, on a journey, but we want to make sure that we have the thoughtfulness behind how we enter markets, when we enter markets, when is it mature enough for us to go in, et cetera. And that, A, having your platform ready, and B, sort of having that framework around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:09) All right. Let's go to the future of remote work. You guys are constantly around tens of thousands of people who are working remote. What trends are you seeing? Where's remote work going?

(Sati at 00:17:21) The beauty of remote work now is that it has expanded drastically. There was a lot of concern, at least in the back of my head that, hey, what's going to happen when this pandemic is over? Is it going to be like, will we see lower rates? Would we see people going back to full-fledged regular work as we knew it before the pandemic? We are not seeing that. We are seeing a lot of people, at least in the high twenties right now, compared to where it was before, are moving to remote work. Even now, I mean, if I survey people around in the Seattle area, most people have switched to more remote work, many of them. And companies are not any longer, at least not in the Seattle area, pushing people to come back to work. It's sort of like, yeah, you read them and there's some collaboration needed or you read them and there is an idea where you get together to solve a specific thing once in a while per se or get together more for social slash bonding reasons. But by and large, I am not seeing, at least in my circle, people sort of being asked to come back to work.

(Sati at 00:18:20) So when I see stuff like you're watching on Twitter or anywhere else, like, hey, come back to work, I don't see that as a macro thing happening around. From a global perspective, remote work is even more prevalent. So obviously seeing the rise of the freelancer and it continues to grow across the board. So from how I see it, like Upwork globally, this is a beautiful thing that's growing. And well, who wants to be stuck in traffic for two hours? Nobody does. And we have established in the last two and a half years that it has literally no material impact at all on all the things that we used to talk about. Like, oh, the productivity is not going to be there. People won't have relationships with each other. Collaboration is going to be a problem.

(Sati at 00:19:03) Well, we as a human race actually overcame much of those, or have learned very, very well. Even we have learned how to onboard new people very, very well. That used to be a big problem. One of the bigger things that we started actually back at Amazon in my team then was like, how do you onboard people we just hired who's living across the country and we just have to ship them a laptop and say, welcome. And then, you know, we built the muscle about it. And that I think every company did that. And Upwork has been doing it for years. My majority of my own workforce, we are customer zero for what we offer Upwork as a remote solution. And almost 85% plus of my workforce follows the Upwork model. They are all geo distributed across the globe, my engineering team.

(Sati at 00:19:50) That has almost always been the case. We had the playbook on how to do this. When I moved from Amazon over to here, I'm like, I wish I had this playbook. Have you guys considered giving this playbook out to enterprises to say, we've solved this problem. We've been doing it for years. Here you go. I think that was the beauty of watching that work, getting really good engaged employees, people who are remote, doing the management of their teams remotely, like a person in, for example, in Georgia, managing a team over in Ukraine and Poland, et cetera, because they're sort of very close in time together and still working on really wide deliverables across the board. So I give you a long wide answer on remote work, but I think it's expanding if not anything else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:33) I see the same thing. And our company was in-person prior to the pandemic and then fully remote after, and then we made the conscious decision to scale the company fully remote after a lot of debate. And one of the cool things is you get a remote culture. Right? And we just last week flew everyone into Nashville, Tennessee. We got to meet people who had joined the team. We do this about, you know, three times, three or four times a year. We'll pick a different location and bring everyone in, and it's great. We get to meet the spouses and the friends. Some people bring their friends, and it's this whole thing that we would not normally have if we were all in the same city. You know? It would just be us all going out to dinner, and we all know each other. So it's got there's pros and cons, but, you know, I'm an optimist, so I'm gonna make it all pros.

(Sati at 00:21:24) Me too. I'm an optimist too. And we do that too. We call them meetups. And we recently had a meetup in Istanbul. And so pretty much everybody, some people from here flew over and a whole bunch of people from the Europe area, and you have a significant European footprint, flew over to Istanbul. A, they had a great morning time. Two, they got to solve some really complex problems that they were working on. So that required a lot of collaboration and stuff. And by and large, it was a really, same thing. They had a chance to bring their families along and stuff. So as a team that bought it, and then we are not paying the cost. I mean, there's cost benefits too, that you've probably already considered, right? There's no cost that commercial real estate is expensive. You could get people together for far lesser than commercial real estate. And it pays way more dividends and people don't really want to come into work. Sure, we have an option. If you do want to come into work, there is an option. But by and large, it's more like, you know, choose as you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:18) Yeah. We've done things where three or four employees will happen to be in the same city just out of happenstance. And then if they ask for they want to get together for a remote office or something, we've done that before. But it's ad hoc. It's not like when there's five people in your location, we're forcing you all to go in the office. So, yeah, it's been interesting watching all the different companies and especially in the financial services space, the older companies that are just older. There's they're just managed by these boards, and they're just, you know, 500 year old companies and whatnot. They've been pretty strict on the coming back into the office thing, and it's just kind of funny because I get it. There's half of me that gets it, but the other half of me says, if your KPIs are aligned right and your culture is the right people, then you're not babysitting or anything anyways. You just are getting the work done and the results happening.

(Sati at 00:23:14) But what you mentioned a really cool point there. You said if your KPIs are aligned, I don't think many of those places run by KPIs. They're run by managing management by walking around or by, you know, micromanagement. They don't run about maybe some top-line goals. Right? So if they actually had the right metrics to be able to look at what they're measuring and what their app looks like, and if people can track to it, it will be awesome. They don't need to do any of this stuff, but they haven't. They'll just kind of be like, Hey, Joel, what are you working on? Okay, great. When can you get this done? You know, that's the mode that they operate in. And that is, it worked for us. I mean, when I started my first job, that's what I would do too. Too many years I did that. So I cannot not say that you're wrong. It works. It's just a different way of working. And you cannot, you know, this is slightly a different way, specifically, I mean, coming from newer companies per se. And the older companies have a culture that has worked for years for them. So that's it's a there's some inertia there from moving from that to here. And I think all of them are trying, but they're in different ranges of trying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:17) And I think it's also the concept of the right tool for the job. You can be in love with a language, a specific programming language, but it might not be the right tool. You have to figure out what's the the thing that's needed to solve that problem. In some places, the way that everything is set up in-person is just the way it's going to be for now.

(Sati at 00:24:33) Exactly. Exactly. And that's okay. That switching cost might be too high. Even my daughter's school, right? They were preparing to go online even before the pandemic. And they had it more from like, what if you have snow days or extended shutdown times? And honestly, at that point, I didn't see the value. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know why they're spending their time on this stuff. The kids go to school, if they shut down for two days, it's not going to be a problem. But the minute the pandemic happened, they were the most prepared because they switched over overnight and the kids knew exactly what to do. There was no panic at all. And they just switched over and it was completely seamless. And I think that's great planning on their part. Kudos to them. But there are other people who just don't have the luxury of doing that or don't want to spend the time doing that because it's not on their priority list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) Yeah. It's probably a private school. I don't think public schools could have handled that.

(Sati at 00:25:28) They do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:31) Yeah. I know. I just it's funny. I keep seeing all these memes with Elon Musk, and they're like, you know, he goes into Twitter. He fires half the people, and then it's running faster and better. My wife's like, you need to get off Twitter. I was like, all right. Cool. Because I never used it before. Really? My team uses it to push out clips, but when Musk bought it, I started going on and following him and watching the Twitter files and all of that. And then I realized that, you know, I generally, as a person, don't do news really. And so I realized that I kind of got lured in to the Twitter files and to see what was happening, but then I realized that a lot of it's like news. And then that typically makes me not happy. It's distracting, and I just cut it out, and I get happy again.

(Sati at 00:26:13) I am not watching the side. The only thing that I hear about is I hear people talking about it in our virtual corridors per se, and it mostly goes like, well, looks like this guy doesn't have a good understanding of how software works. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) Oh, yeah. It's been so fascinating, the different, well, I mean, look. He was, you know, software guy, and then he became the richest man on the planet. Right?

(Sati at 00:26:39) Got you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:39) That is such a unique experience. So I admire him from that regard. But, yeah, there's always things people can be doing better. And as you know, being at the top of the company versus the stack, it's, it's like physics. Right? There's different principles at different levels in the stack, and it's been fun to watch someone come into such a large organization and have such detailed changes. Right?

(Sati at 00:27:07) And he's going so public with it that we are all getting a view into it. Now all of us don't know the context, so we all have opinions. I'm sure that he has more context, so he's doing stuff. But sometimes, okay. Fine. I would not do that. Or, you know, that sounds interesting. That's what I keep hearing from people like, why he's done X versus Y. I'm like, okay, fine. I don't know enough. But it sounds interesting. And the fact that he's finding the time to be so public about it is the other aspect of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) I know. I think the most fair criticism that I've heard of this entire thing that, you know, because I like the guy. But the most fair criticism I've heard is the criticism regarding him not being as directly involved with Tesla and then the shareholders and the investors there. I'm like, that's a fair criticism because it's very clear that he's eat, sleep, and breathe twenty-four seven at Twitter right now, and I don't know how long that'll last.

(Sati at 00:28:06) So I'm on my third Tesla right now, and I love them to death. So I had a Model X, then I swapped out. I got another Model X and I got a Model Y and I loved them. These are beautiful cars. But if you go back five years, remember he was sleeping in the Tesla factory because he thought he would be bankrupt in two months? Right? There was a time where funding secured, whatever. Remember that debacle? It seems like his logic is I need to fix the problem at hand and I will put in whatever is needed to fix the problem at hand. And at that point, too, he was tweeting. That seems to be his outlet. That's fine by me. He's fixed the problem. That company is doing just fine. Teslas are all on the roads. Back in the day when I had a Tesla, I would go to places and people would want me to open the side doors for the Model X, the whatever the I forget what the new doors are called anymore. But now it's like every second car that you see, at least in the Seattle area or the Bay Area, is an EV and it's most likely a Tesla. So, great, he's arrived. Maybe he's doing exactly the same thing to Twitter because he did the same thing with SpaceX. We had a bunch of failures.

(Sati at 00:29:11) That's on our path. Maybe his management style really is jump in, dive deep, go hard, fix the problem. Sure, he has some rapid thinking, studies, spends time on Twitter talking about it. But that may be just his personality. And as you just said, he's a software engineer who became the richest man on the planet. So in fact, I think, okay, it's good enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:31) Yeah. Do you know how interesting it would be if all of a sudden tomorrow we woke up and the Wells Fargo CEO was like, oh, I used my own app and I tried to transfer funds to my daughter, and this thing sucks. Screenshot. And he has engineering fix it in twenty minutes. And then there's just this constant stream of these CEOs using their own product. I kind of think that that would be a cool thing to see.

(Sati at 00:29:54) By the way, our CEO is the number one user of our product. And she is not public, but she is so customer obsessed that she finds things before anybody does. And she knows it so detailed. So, so detailed down to exact panel that I mean, exact panel, exact metrics, how much that time takes to load. She's got it down perhaps from an obsession for customer obsession.

(Sati at 00:30:23) Oh my god. I mean, she does a fantastic job on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:26) And I love that. And so I'm, you know, newer in my management career and whatnot. I'm 34 for context. And I'm an entrepreneur, by the way. We don't have a huge company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:36) We have about 15 people currently. But one of the things that I've learned more recently is one of the most rare things to be able to find in people is exactly what you just mentioned, being like, caring, like, simply caring. Whether it's contractors I'm having do some work on my house or it's just people across the board that I'm hiring for my company, I'm always trying to figure out, does this person care about the quality of their work? Because I can take a perfectionist and coach them down, but I can't take a lazy person and make them run.

(Sati at 00:31:07) Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's a culture that needs to permeate top down, right? It is something that you have to tell people. Well, you're going to do X and it's going to drive Y business result. And the first question should be on, what is the customer experience?

(Sati at 00:31:23) Is it going to make their life better or worse? And you should be able to make that decision in terms of, sure, I can go after the pennies that's going to make me, but if I'm going to make somebody's life worse, they're not going to come back. And tomorrow when there is a competing product or there's a competing thing, they have no incentive to stay. Right? It's just sort of like, we work for people that we like to work for simply because you have this established trust and relationship that you care.

(Sati at 00:31:49) And then when you do that, then I would go above and beyond for you when needed. And that's the same thing with anything that you interact with or play with. If you are making sure that you're managing, you're looking after them, sure, you have your business results to go be, but if you're looking after them and you're making your experiences in a way that caters to what that person needs to do to make their life simpler or get their job done or whatever outcome they want, they will keep coming back to you. And now you have a long term relationship exactly as with people established with your customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) 100%. Yeah. I like your style, man.

(Sati at 00:32:26) Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:27) This is really good. I want to talk a little bit more about the future of work. Just out of curiosity. So, you know, I usually don't throw stats out, but one of the stat websites said that there's about 70 million people who freelance in the United States, and that's projected to be about 90 million people by, you know, in the next three to five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) If we extend that infinitely, do we all end up as freelancers? Have we always all been freelancers and now just the way we access the job is different? How do you see that?

(Sati at 00:32:58) Oh, wow. That's a tough question to answer. I think freelancing is going to grow and it's going to grow rapidly. It's probably going to grow proportionally different in different countries. I suspect that in countries where there's unequal or there's a big wealth gap, it's going to grow rapidly there.

(Sati at 00:33:17) Right? And the reason for that is you're equalizing the playing field. So that makes that thing, the place that I see massive growth in Africa, Asian continent, Southern South Asia, etcetera, because what's happening is there is these high prestigious colleges that people go to, or they have education, etcetera. But there's this long tail of places that you could learn from, even Coursera, etcetera, that you make your skills better. And it kind of levels the playing field for everyone to start earning money, growing, and expanding in their careers.

(Sati at 00:33:49) All the self driven people have an incentive to get onto the platform faster. So I think that's going to happen organically any which way. But it's going to change. But would we all go to freelancing? I don't see that yet.

(Sati at 00:34:03) And I think at some point in time, that corporate structure might change. I don't see that today. I mean, there will always be regulated industries as they need to be. There'll always be security requirements or things that will require people to, you know, I know exactly who you are and I have a very good understanding of what you do and cannot do. And I have to manage that.

(Sati at 00:34:24) Those things are not a health industry, for example. Those things are not going to go away. There would be data protection requirements per se, and there might be laws to be followed. I don't suspect those things go away. But for a majority of work, yeah, why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) I like that you mentioned the leverage you give self driven people that can achieve outcomes. Myself, personally, I started freelancing on a site called ScriptLance when I was 13 to 15 years old. They didn't know I was a kid sitting at home. They just had an outcome that they needed achieved, and I could achieve it. And then you get a reputation, and then it's I'm a username on a screen that can achieve an outcome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:01) Right. And that is so fascinating because without the Internet and that happening, I wouldn't be able to do that. Yet I had the capability to walk into an engineering firm, but I would have to go through layers and bureaucracy and relationships, and they would look at me like I'm a kid, you know, differently. So it's fascinating how you look at it because I haven't looked at it like that, but it's opening up opportunity so that you can choose to improve and grow and become, I mean, it's a very American thing.

(Sati at 00:35:32) It absolutely is. Also, a hunger driven thing in the terms of hunger for achieving what you want, and that's global. Yes. I was talking to folks from my own brother back home and, you know, and I was talking about, hey, you know, here's what I do, etcetera. And they're like, yeah, we know.

(Sati at 00:35:47) And I go, wait a minute. How do you know? I understand a few of you are on the site. They're like, no. Many of us are on places like Upwork and on different sites.

(Sati at 00:35:57) And I go, okay, tell me more. And they kind of talk about how it's become easier for college students to pay for college by actually spending some time, either freelancing as tutors, teachers, etcetera. So there's a kid in college who's teaching algebra one to somebody in the United States and making enough money to pay their college fees in India. I go, wow, that's mind blowing. And they're like, everybody who is motivated does that because this is no longer a matter of, you know, hey, dad, mom, can you fund me through college?

(Sati at 00:36:29) I have to spend a few hours and I'm easily able to do that. And I go, great. And then these guys are now have their own economy and they're forming companies even before they graduate. And so that whole entrepreneurial spirit is coming out really, really to the forefront. And I would say the next billion and trillion dollar businesses would come from any of these places.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:50) Oh, absolutely. And I love it. Yeah. The hunger across the globe, I've gotten to interview people, you know, all around the world. And that's when I found out, you know, after hundreds and hundreds of these interviews, I'm like, I like the people that like to get things done.

(Sati at 00:37:06) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:06) And they like to do that in the context of being genuine and helping raise up others. And so now I have some awareness of the type of people because, look. You're skilled, and you have the resume, and you have a financial status where you could go spend your time however you want, but you're choosing to spend it there, which means after meeting you that you clearly have a great team around you. Right?

(Sati at 00:37:29) Right. The team is excellent. I could not have asked for more. In fact, my globally distributed team is fantastic. Every single one of them.

(Sati at 00:37:38) And we used our own platform to get our people onboarded to our company. We trained them up. I mean, we went through the same thing. If we look at you, you had a reputation of what you got done, we cannot talk to those people, but now they are fully integrated part of our team. Some of them have been around for ten plus years.

(Sati at 00:37:59) They have built this company from the ground up per se. So when you build a gen two, gen three, gen four, which is where we are in that state, they have all the expertise to go do that. That's why my job becomes much, much more easier. It's more about where do I go and which hill do I need to climb rather than, you know, how do I have the tools to go do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) You mentioned Africa earlier in the conversation, and I just recently had a friend that went to Africa. He goes there every year. I didn't know this about him, but he, you know, does charitable stuff, helps them build hospitals, and different things like that. And so I started looking into it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) Just facts about Africa, and I found a couple interesting things. I think one of them is that the median age was 18 years old. Like, they were very young. Right. And they're getting electricity and access and plugged in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) You see, you know, Zuckerberg did a coding agency or their foundation provided one. So they're going in there, and they're teaching people how to code. They're getting access to all of this. And then I saw that there was more Bitcoin transacted in Africa. Like, they were in the top three, more in Africa than China.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) And I was, you know, I don't know enough about Bitcoin to know how they're deriving this, but they said that they were using blockchain explorers. And so I was thinking to myself, you know, we might see some more of this. You see this independence on Upwork. You might see some more independence on currency. It's kind of interesting how the world is in every single way from that example I gave with Africa to the work that we've been talking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:31) It is favoring people who like to get things done and who care, and I love that that's the direction we're generally headed.

(Sati at 00:39:39) I absolutely agree. In fact, every place on the planet is expanding in terms of internet capabilities. Once they have access to great internet capabilities, they automatically unlock the next step, which is, I don't need anybody to teach me how to do this stuff. It's all available. And then they almost always optimize and go to the next step to say, how do I use this to better myself, better my community, etcetera.

(Sati at 00:40:03) Sure, foundations like Zuckerberg, etcetera, help. But I think that's more on the broader publicity, getting people to know about it. But the groundswell is happening every single place. And so the next thing happens is these guys get onto freelancing platforms. They start doing their own companies, etcetera.

(Sati at 00:40:22) There are companies right now who are specializing in African talent and they are growing rapidly. Just like you would think about, I'm going to go call center. These are the three places that I would hire from, most likely in Southeast Asia. There are large call centers for me to have. There are folks now setting up locations in Africa where they are getting real talent to work, good talent to be working.

(Sati at 00:40:46) South Africa is actually leading the charge on that. One of my friends, his entire company is based out of talent in South Africa. I'm like, really? He goes, yeah, it's really good. I've been using them for two and a half years.

(Sati at 00:40:58) I have the right leverages. I'll be able to load balance between that and using India. That's how his company is built up, eighty, ninety people, but it's talent from South Africa and Brazil and India. Which we would have not imagined a few years back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:14) Oh, yeah. It's fascinating where these little pockets pop up, you know, because all of my stuff is sort of subjective and personal, but I'll have a string of interviews from people that are doing amazing things in technology in Israel, and then I'll see how big that they are in technology for being such a small landmass. They're a huge player.

(Sati at 00:41:31) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:32) Uruguay is just this crazy. They give their kids laptops and coffee.

(Sati at 00:41:41) I did not know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:42) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I met a bunch of people from Uruguay just by happenstance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:47) And so I had one of them on the show, and I was like, what is going on in Uruguay? This is three years ago. He's like, yeah. One of the things we do is we buy a laptop. We give a laptop to every single person at a certain age or something, and then they're known for their coffee.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:59) And I was like, well, that makes sense why there's so many engineers coming out of there. You guys have them all jacked up on caffeine with the computer.

(Sati at 00:42:06) See? I would love that. If I was a kid and you gave me a laptop and so much coffee, I would love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:12) You know what's funny? I also want to mention this really quickly, and I'll have to ask some people that are smarter than me in the financial world, but you brought up an interesting thought in my head. There are so many people joining the economy in all of these pockets all over the Earth, and usually when we hear economists talk about it, I never really hear them reference how many new people are entering on a global stage because once you have the Internet, you can do business with virtually anybody minus sanctions. You know?

(Sati at 00:42:41) Exactly. And I'm not smart enough to know that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:44) Yeah. Me either. We'll find somebody. Well, man, this has been great. We made a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:48) How do you feel?

(Sati at 00:42:49) I feel great, Joel. This was fun talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.