TECH TITANS: Why Remote Work is Here to Stay with Saty Bahadur, CTO at Upwork

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're doing something very special. We're taking the best leadership episodes from the most popular past guests and distilling them down to ten-minute segments to turbocharge your leadership. If you want even more ten-minute condensed leadership episodes, you can subscribe to Joel Beasley Tech Titans in your podcast app. Sati from Upwork joins us in this episode to share his best advice on working both quickly and wisely. You're listening to Joel Beasley Tech Titans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) What's the big thing happening with you and your peers?

(Sati at 00:00:36) I can go through a list. The number one stuff I talked to you about is scaling—scaling in a manner that's not linear, scaling to tens of millions of customers. So we have and building really fast experiences for them. Two, making sure that they are walking through the funnel really quickly.

(Sati at 00:00:53) So the way you describe it as a wizard, but it's a 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. Right? So I'm kind of taking you out from the guessing game, but being super customer-focused on it.

(Sati at 00:01:16) Then the third part is obviously expanding to the world, getting 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 giving you the right talent or the right things in front of you first. So relevancy of the search is super important.

(Sati at 00:01:45) 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.

(Sati at 00:02:00) So you probably need somebody who's really good at sending traffic to it. Right? So 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?" Great. 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 00:02:29) 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 00:02:35) And I came from that world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:39) Yeah, you spent some time over. Right? Culturally, are there similarities between Amazon and Upwork?

(Sati at 00:02:46) 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 the people get assimilated into that culture, and there is a very nice mindset on how that evolves, et cetera.

(Sati at 00:03:06) So it has its advantages. Upwork is nimble, fast, an evolving culture. It's taking the best from every place, not just Amazon or any one place. And I think it's evolving rapidly to be super fast, customer-obsessed. 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.

(Sati at 00:03:29) And it's evolving really rapidly. So we've 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 00:03:53) Let's go to the future of remote work. You guys are constantly around thousands, tens of thousands of people who are working remote. What trends are you seeing? Where's remote work going?

(Sati at 00:04:07) 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 gonna happen when this pandemic is over? Is it going to be, will we see lower rates? Will we see people going back to full-fledged regular work as we knew it before the pandemic?" And we are not seeing that. We are seeing a lot of people, at least in their high twenties right now compared to where it was before, are moving to remote work.

(Sati at 00:04:31) 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 meet them when there's some collaboration needed or you meet them when there is, you know, when you get together to solve a specific thing once in a while or get together more for social/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. 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 now. From a company perspective, 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, Upwork globally, this is a beautiful thing that's growing. And, well, who wants to be stuck in traffic for two hours?

(Sati at 00:05:32) 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 gonna be there. People won't have relationships with each other. Collaboration is gonna be a problem."

(Sati at 00:05:49) Well, we as a human race actually overcame much of those or have learned very well. Even we have learned how to onboard new people 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, 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 around it.

(Sati at 00:06:15) And 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. And that has almost always been the case. So we kind of had the playbook on how to do this.

(Sati at 00:06:43) And so when I moved from Amazon over to here, I'm like, "I wish I had this playbook." Are you guys considering giving this playbook out to enterprises to say, "We've solved this problem. We've been doing it for years. Here you go." And 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 00:07:13) 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.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:37) 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 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?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:05) 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 00:08:14) 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 we have a significant European footprint, flew over to Istanbul. A, they had a great bonding 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 bonded and then we are not paying the cost. I mean, there's cost benefits too, which you probably already considered, right?

(Sati at 00:08:46) There's no cost. Commercial real estate is expensive. You could get people together for far less than commercial real estate, and it pays way more dividends and people don't really want to come into work. We sure have an option. If you do want to come into work, there is an option. But by and large, it's more, you know, choose as you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:10) 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 that they wanna get together for a remote office or something, we've done that before. But it's ad hoc. It's not like we're forcing, you know, when there's five people in your location, we're forcing you all to go in the office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) 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.

(Sati at 00:09:40) They're just

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) 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 00:10:07) But 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 run by managing management by walking around or by, you know, micromanagement. They don't run about, add 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.

(Sati at 00:10:35) And that is, it worked for us. I mean, when I started my first job, that's what I would do too. For many years, I did that. So I'm kind of not saying 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. And the older companies have a culture that has worked for years for them. So that'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 00:11:11) 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. 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 00:11:35) Oh, wow. That's a tough question to answer. I think freelancing is gonna grow, and it's gonna grow rapidly. It's probably gonna grow proportionally different in different countries. I suspect that in countries where there's unequal or there's a big wealth gap, it's gonna grow rapidly there. 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, Southern South Asia, et cetera, because what's happening is there is these high prestigious colleges that people go to or they have education, et cetera, but there's this long tail of places that you could learn from, even Courseras, et cetera, 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. All the self-driven people have an incentive to get onto the platform faster. So I think that's gonna happen organically any which way.

(Sati at 00:12:35) In part, the overall it's gonna change. Would we all go to freelancing? I don't see that yet. 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 there need to be. There will 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. Those things are not health industry, for example. Those things are not gonna go away. There would be data protection requirements, and there might be laws to be followed.

(Sati at 00:13:13) I don't suspect those things go away. But for a majority of work, yeah, why not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:18) 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 00:13:41) 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. Right? To be able to

(Sati at 00:14:14) Yeah. It absolutely is. But it's also a hunger-driven thing in the terms of hunger for achieving what you want, and that's global. 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," et cetera. And they're like, "Yeah, we know." And I go, "Wait a minute. How do you know?" I become, 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 00:14:41) 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, et cetera. 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, "Oh, 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?" 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.

(Sati at 00:15:25) 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.