The Next Web NYC - Leo Widrich, Buffer

Justin Halsall Welcome back, welcome. I hope you all had something to eat and you're ready for some more excellent speakers. You're really in for a treat because the next speaker was my very favorite in the Next Web in Amsterdam. So, he's all about company values and he's all about transparency. And before we get to him, I have a couple of announcements. Speaking of transparency, the Next Web is broadcasting all of the things around the conference on Instagram stories. We also have some more good stuff for you. For example, the after party is going to be a lot of fun. It's at Rough Trade and Newark Venture Partners and Expenditure are sponsoring it. Thanks to them, it's going to be really, really amazing. Make sure you get there early because if we fill up, then there's no more space. So, it's from 9 to 2. Definitely get there. And at the end of the day, we'll not end with a talk. We're actually going to end with an after hour session. So, what will happen is, hopefully, you've all signed up. There's a whole bunch of tables and chairs outside. And there's 30 industry leaders who are going to actually have a conversation with you and with a lot of your peers. So, sign up for that. There's still space for a couple of tables, I think. If you don't make it to one of these tables, you're too late with signing up. We also have a whole bunch of beers that are going to be given out by Radeberger. And you'll be able to make some new friends. Which is awesome. It's always good. And you get an early start on the after party. So, up next, my favorite speaker of the Next Web Amsterdam. Ladies and gentlemen, his name is Leo Widrich. Hello, New York. How is everybody doing? Who is still hungry? Raise your hands. We need to get you some food afterwards. I want to take you back really quickly, five years ago. It's 2011. Think about what you were doing in 2011. In 2011, I was 20 years old. And I just was making all the startup mistakes in the world. And there was something that happened to Buffer at the time, which was that a publication by the name of The Next Web wrote an article about us. And after that article was written, we gained about 100 sign ups, which was more sign ups than we had gotten in the past two months prior to that. And so, I just want to open with that and say I'm really grateful to be here at The Next Web. I love these guys. I love everyone that supports them. And that they really helped us put us on the map. Today, three breakthroughs, two failures. And I really have one prompt, one ask for all of you in the room. And I know a lot of you are on the phone. There's the laptop. There's a lot of things. We have a million things going on. But I really want to, my goal is, there's five things I'm going to talk about. I want you to take just one thing away today. Right? And whichever one of these five points will be the one thing, I don't know. But I would love to ask you to send me a tweet after the talk at LeoWit. It's on there as well. And let me know what was the thing that you took away. And if you totally zoned out, then tell me that. Because that's really helpful as well. Who hasn't heard of Buffer in here? What's your name, gentlemen? What's that? Chris. Chris. Okay. So Chris doesn't know what Buffer is. So this is for you, Chris. We build social media management software. We help you organize your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn account. We help you kind of publish to all your social networks from one place. We help you collaborate. And we also help you analyze to let you know how well you're doing. So if you give us a shot and if you have any questions, come to me afterwards. Anyone else? Everyone who knows Buffer, thank you so much. It's awesome that you're already on board. Just for size, I want to give you some stats. This is where we're at. 2010, my friend Joel started Buffer in Birmingham. And right now today, we're making about $12.5 million in ARR. We have about 60,000 paying customers. We're completely remote with 80 folks all over the globe. And this is really our mission is to give companies a voice on social media. That's what we are all about. And this is what we're going to talk about. I'm going to walk you through three breakthroughs, things that I consider are breakthroughs. You may disagree. Those are things that are dear to my heart that I think is something I want to share with all of you that helped me, helped us build a stronger, better company, helped me live a better, more fulfilling life as well. And then some failures, some things where I think we really messed up. And then hopefully in sharing that with you, there's some things that you can all take away from that. Someone I interviewed, an engineer, once walked up to me and said, we had this discussion. I interviewed that person and asked him, why do you want to work here? Why do you want to work at Buffer? And he said, you know what? I know more about the company, about your company, than about the company I currently work for. So therefore, I want to go and work for your company. And that thing really stuck with me. That really stuck with me from the sense of what does transparency, when we live it out in our lives, create and how does it impact others? And at Buffer, we have done a bunch of things in terms of transparency. We have made our salaries transparent. We've made equity transparent. We've made revenue transparent. A lot of things that we put out there. And the one thing that I always come back to is why, why do we do that? Why are we transparent? And the reason for all those things is really a very personal one. That early on, Joel and myself felt one of the greatest philosophies that we believe are important in life is to live transparently. Is to, you know, make people, trust people with information. Trust people with, and think of people as worthy to be able to have access to all of that information. And so very fundamentally, we think that it's something that helps us live a better life. And oftentimes, you know, a lot of good things have come to transparency to us from that. But really the fundamental reason is it's just a philosophy that we think helps us live better lives. And I want to talk about what it helped us do. Very early on at Buffer, it's about 2012, we published an article on the Buffer blog. It's the Buffer open blog. We share all our learnings there. And we always share a monthly update about our finances. How much money are we making in this month? And in this update, we talked about how much revenue we make. And in a SaaS business, who runs a SaaS business in here? Show of hands. Awesome. Quite a few of you. In SaaS, there are some really technical terms that we got absolutely wrong. And the idea here was that you have ARR, annual recurring revenue in SaaS. And we absolutely completely misinterpreted how that should be calculated. And one of the amazing things that happened is that people in the comments pointed out and gave us the calculation of how we need to improve the tracking of our business. And that's why getting help from strangers is such a fundamental positive thing that happens when we were able to really be transparent. The other thing was when we made salaries transparent, the night before we made salaries transparent, I remember Joel and I, we were really scared. We thought we're going to make this transparent and everybody out there is going to be really upset. They're going to criticize us. They're going to have a lot of negativity. For us, for some reason, that was in our heads. And then the day we made it, we hit publish on a blog post with a lot of anxiety. We were hit with such an incredible overwhelming response of positivity from people that really blew us away. And the thing that I always want to remember here is that on the day and the month that followed making salaries transparent was that we had over 4,000 people apply to come work at Buffer. And that was absolutely incredible to me. And for me, that was a sign that people are really fundamentally interested in working at a place that values the openness of information and gave us a lot of confidence to keep going down there. We're just hiring a leadership team at Buffer. And I had a call with someone. We're in the middle of making them an offer. And we talk about salary. And it's very transparent at Buffer, as you know. And they came back with a very reasonable ask, which was, do you have a bonus system in place? Do I get a bonus? And the short answer was we don't. And what happened was because we're so transparent, it was very easy for me to work with that person and share, look, I'd love to pay you in the best possible way. However, I can't just create a bonus for you, which then everybody in the company won't have. And they actually were very, very open to that suggestion. And so instead I said, why don't you come in and we create a bonus system together that's fair and across the board. And the reason I give that example is because it talks about this idea of effortless accountability. Without me having to wrestle with my own morals, just by putting transparency in place, it keeps me accountable. This is another one of the big lessons, the big takeaways that was so important for what we built. The second thing that I think was a real breakthrough for us was to work remotely. Who here works remotely today? Who thinks that within the next 20 years, we're going to be able to work remotely? In 20 years, at some point, they might be working remotely. Awesome. At Buffer, we fundamentally agree with you. We fundamentally agree with this idea that the future of work is going to be remote. At Buffer, we have 80 people that all work remotely across five continents, across over 40 cities, all over the globe. And it's something that's really become dear to us to create a place that lets people live the lives that they want to live. And I want to talk about why we do that. This picture is from one of our data analysts. His name is Matt, and it makes me really happy. It really represents something that is important. Matt, earlier this year, he sold his house and he bought this RV. And he's been traveling around the U.S. for the last few months. And he's able to do that because we have a remote work culture. And it makes me really excited to be able to give people the opportunity to go and do that. So letting people travel the world, letting people to find a place where they're happiest is one of the things that's become really, really important to us. Not everybody wants to work remotely, right? In the sense that traveling and needs to be picking up and going somewhere all the time. But we also have this, you know, amazing thing happen where this is a picture of us, you know, a group of people from our team being in a meeting together. And this is Nicole with her baby Anthony. And Nicole has been the, or Anthony in this case, is the first, we call it the first buffer baby. And it's the first time we had someone, you know, because we're still a young company, you know, have a baby and then take leave and share the experience of what it's like of doing that in a remote company. And being able to be there for the kid and being there to raise the kid, you know, a lot more intimately. And a lot of people come to us for that and are so grateful for that. I remember one time we had an in-person meeting. And Adam came up to us afterwards, one of our team members, and he gave Joel and me a hug. And with tears in his eyes, he talked to us about the fact that, you know, he's so grateful what, you know, Buffer was able to do for him and his family. For being at home and for being able to really help out in that way that he's present for his kids now growing up. So that's another thing that I'm so, so grateful for when it comes to remote work. And I think in this day and age, I just want to emphasize that remote work is not just about the kids. I want to emphasize that remote working is possible, right? We use Slack, we use Zoom, we use Trello, Dropbox. Those are the key things for us to stay in the loop. And if you'd asked me 10 years ago if you can work remotely, I'd probably said it might be more difficult. But I feel like technology has advanced to a place where I think that's a lot more feasible. There is an entrepreneur that I highly respect. His name is Tony Hsieh. He's the CEO of the shoe company Zappos. And he was once asked. When he sold Zappos, what is something he would absolutely do differently if he had to start over? And Zappos is a company known that's really well known for their culture. And the answer he gave really surprised me. And so Tony Hsieh said, the one thing I would change is I would start with company values even earlier. And I remember Joel and myself sitting there with, you know, this five, seven person startup. What was Buffer at the time. And thinking about, wow, you know, someone that's already such a mentor to all of us in the world about culture still talks about starting earlier. And that was just a wonderful primer for us to start building a culture first company. And we started to put values in place. These are our 10 values that we try to live by. And it's really helped us to build a company that we are having a lot more fun being part of every day. And I want to talk about a couple of things that came out of that. One is not so nice. It's that when we started to put our values in place, five months in, we fired half the team. Right? And that was really painful. That was really painful. But we had just written down these values and we could no longer turn away from the truths that we had defined for ourselves. And we really had to live by that. And so in that sense, culture is really like a disinfectant. You know, it stops you from being able to turn away from the truth. Once you have it written down, there's one thing that's going to happen. Either you're going to live by your values or you're going to make it just a piece of paper that's written on the wall that everybody ignores anyways. And we really wanted to go down that route. And that was one of the most painful, however most, you know, unifying things at the same time that sent a signal that this is truly what we are about. The other thing I want to talk about is this culture is your safety net. There's a book from Nicolas Simteleb. And it's called Anti-Fragile. And if you think about the definition of anti-fragile, I really, really love that if anyone has read this book. And it says that, you know, systems that break and then come back and then come back stronger than they were before, that's the definition of anti-fragile. And that's really what I think if you have a culture-first company, what it allows you to do. It's not resilience. It's not, you know, just being able to absorb a shock. It's actually to grow and get a lot stronger from when you get hit by something that's a really negative experience. And that's why I believe, you know, company culture is so important. I'm going to pause you real quick. Those were a couple lessons. Those were things that were really important. Those were things that I'm celebrating as breakthroughs that we were able to accomplish. But I want to take a moment and kind of, with this black slide, move us a little bit to the dark side. Right? To the dark side of things that didn't go so well. You know? Things that, you know, as first-time founders were really, really difficult. And I want to dive into that briefly. So this is us getting hacked. And when I told my parents we've been hacked, this is what they thought was going on. And it was, you know, something that they couldn't really comprehend. It was something that me going through some of the worst periods of my life with the company was really foreign to them. You know? Did someone steal our computer? Did someone, you know, take boxes when I explained service to her? And so I woke up in late December one day and I opened my Facebook. And there is every Facebook post is weight loss spam. And I'm like... Well, whoever got hacked. They are in deep shit. And I looked at who was publishing these things. And I realized it was via our product. And that was by all means the moment where I thought, that's it. We're done. You know? We can pack in and we can go home. And it's really one of those lessons, one of those things where we made some mistakes that, you know, led us to that. Where some incredible learning came out of that. And one of the biggest things. Is this idea of security. Who here rides a bike more or less every day? Right. Who here wears a helmet when riding a bike? Much less. All right. So the psychology that I read up about this. The psychology of wearing a helmet is really fascinating. As humans what we do is every day that we ride a bike and nothing happens to us. We count that in our heads as, you know, one more time. One more experiment that's gone well. So if you ride our bikes 100 days in a row and never ever anything happens. We think that the statistics of us ever getting into an accident are really, really low. Right? Because we have the evidence that over the past 100 days nothing has happened. And that analogy I think is so important because it's exactly what's going on with security and startups and with all of you building great companies today. Which is that, you know, because nothing has happened. Because another day has passed where nothing has happened. We think we are safe. When the thing, the logical mistake that we make is that when we have an accident on the bike or when we get hacked, it's not something that we have done. It's something when someone else makes a mistake and hits us on the bike. Right? And so that was the same lesson that we took away. And I'm really grateful for our CTO Sunil to say this is not about fixing any individual problem. This is about changing your mindset. Right? He talked about a security mindset. Which is that security is never done. You just proactively every day think about how do you create a better system. And yes, we did a bunch of things like, you know, two-factor authentication and much better testing and much better storing of our different passwords and all those things. However, it's really the mindset, the security mindset that was the key takeaway that I want to share. And the second thing was that crisis communication, when something bad happens that's outside of our control. The way we react to it can fundamentally change the reality of that event. And so what happened in our case is that at Buffer we had five minutes after we were hacked. We sent the first tweet. So this is five minutes after being hacked to the world that we were hacked. And we didn't know what was going on. We had no idea. Recently, you know, a year ago, the FBI told us they got the guy that hacked. We had absolutely no idea. We had absolutely no idea what was going on. But we felt that communication and transparency were two of the most important things not to fix the situation but to clean up and, you know, help, you know, lift ourselves up from wherever we are. So really thinking hard about it. And there's an article we've written about how we fully, you know, tackle that. Really helped us create this, you know, incredible response from our community that they were still standing with us. That they were still being positive. Despite the mess that we created. That came to us and said, hey, I saw what happened. But you kept us in the loop every single step along the way. And, yes, you made a mistake. But you admitted it. And that's something that I now want to try and really still honor and give you another chance. It's something that, you know, will always stick with me as, you know, sort of this incredible response from a community that even when you make a mistake, they might stand with you. And the most recent thing, and I've never talked about this publicly. Up until today. Is that just a few months ago, we went through layoffs at Buffer. Which for the people, especially for the people that were laid off, I think that's one of the worst periods in their lives. People tell me that, you know, there's two things that are the worst things in people's lives. Is if someone in your family dies. And if you get fired from your job. And what happened was that earlier this year, in about May. At about around May, April, May. We were in a position where, if you look at this graph, we were making $900,000 every month. And we were spending $1.1 million every month. You don't have to be really good at math to know where that's going to lead you. Right? And so we were faced with this situation where we made the really, really tough call to lay a number of people off to correct the mistake they made. And I want to talk about some of the fundamental lessons that come out of that for us. The first one was that the biggest learning for Joel, myself, and our leaders is that we're no longer building a product. You know, we were waking up before that every day. How about this cool feature? How about another cool experiment over there? How about we try this? How about we try that? And now we really realize that you can't just try. You can't just try and experiment when there are people involved. And shifting from really acknowledging that you're building a company versus, you know, just hacking and building a product, that's one of the most valuable insights that I want to share with you that really fundamentally changed my mindset and how to approach decisions that affect people whose lives are on the line, you know, who have families, who, if they are just another failed A-B test, that, you know, that's a really, really poor way to treat somebody. And I'm not saying that was how we consciously thought about it, but that's how we started to habituate ourselves as we were building products over the prior years. So really taking that away has been really, really a strong signal for all of us. And the other thing is this very simple, and I know some of you will find it cliché, moment of asking for help, right? When we mess up, when we do something that's wrong, when we do something that isn't, you know, successful, sometimes it's difficult for us to look up and say, can someone help me, right? Can someone help us? And we've really changed here our mindset from, you know, before this kind of like idea that, hey, at Buffer we are kind of want to do something different with culture and with transparency, to now we need a lot of smart and experienced leaders that have built companies before and we need to do that together. So we have since then started to really invest in building our leadership team, hiring for VP roles, and really saying, hey, you know, if we want to not put people's lives on the line, we need to be able to do that together. So that's everything I had to share with you. And this is one of my favorite Zen quotes that I really like. And the quote is, this is it. And no matter what happens in your startup, all the good stuff, all the breakthroughs, all the salary, transparency, celebrations, some of the things that people have been applauding us for, all the bad stuff, the layoffs, you know, that were really, really difficult. I try to remember and remind myself, especially in times of, you know, turmoil in our lives, is to come back to this idea that this is it, right? Wherever I am right now, right this moment is what it's all about. And finding some acceptance in that has been one of the most fundamentally rewarding things for me. This is us being in Hawaii at a retreat. Earlier this year, before some of this bad layoff stuff happens. And I've kind of always come back to looking at that picture and whatever is going on, this is it. And with that, thank you so much for your attention. I really appreciate it. You can go check out open.buffer.com. You can email me. Please send me a tweet. And if you're in New York, the final thing, I just opened a meditation space. And co-working. So if you're interested in that at all, come, you know, ping me. I'd love to have you if you're in New York as well. And build community here. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.