Jamie Diamond went on a rant about

remote work and and zoom uh in a town

hall and uh here's a snippet a lot of

you were on the zoom and you were doing

the following okay you know looking at

your mail sending text to each other ask

the other person is okay not paying

attention not reading your stuff you

know and if you don't think that slows

down efficiency creativity creates

rudeness and Stu it does okay and when I

found out that people are doing that you

do that my goddamn meetings you go to

meeting with me you got my attention you

got my focus I don't bring my goddamn

phone I'm not sending text to people

okay it simply doesn't work the Young

Generation is being damaged by this that

may they may or may not be on your

particular staff but they are being left

behind they're being left behind

socially ideas meeting people in fact my

guess is most you live in communities a

hell of a lot less diverse than this

room that's not how you run a great

company we didn't build this great

company by doing that by doing the same

semi disease that everybody else does

Colson Brothers tell us about how you

run stripe are you remote does this

resonate with you four years after we've

come out of the

pandemic I love listening to Jamie

Diamond rants like I feel like that's

business ASMR um business ASMR that

itself to be a great podcast I was about

to say I'm subscribing that's an instant

$10 a month

subscription what do you think John yeah

I don't know people just said a lot of

during the the pandemic like you

remember it's like oh handshakes are

going to be over business travel is

going to be over every company is going

to be fully remote I would say stripe

broadly is in a pretty similar spot to

where it was beforehand which is most

people go into an office like most

people are you know uh part of our San

Francisco office or New York or Dublin

or or Singapore wherever and then we

have a bunch of people also who work

remotely I

think kind of obviously you know Jimmy

is right on some points I think also

working remotely has had a bunch of

benefits where there's a way larger

talent pool available to companies like

stripe and there's a lot of people you

know you see uh kind of the two- body

problem where it allows a lot of couples

where you know maybe one partner is

assigned to some Hospital in Idaho and

like they don't get to choose what

hospital necessarily they got assign to

and the other person gets to work a a

high-paying Tech job and so I don't know

I think when like like one of the

theories for declining dynamism in the

US and declining tfp is there allocative

efficiency uh of of you know people

deine as women enter the workforce

because now you have you know what John

describes this two body problem where

you know both people have to make

coordinated

switches and uh rem remote works out

actually yeah freeberg you're running a

company now you're the CEO of ohalo tell

us uh does this resonate with you what

do you think especially about younger

people his point and like being rude or

being focused being in the meeting and

then like maybe there's too many

meetings where people are partially

paying attention maybe there should be

half as many meetings and people should

be paying attention what do you think

well there's always room for

optimization there we we deal with this

too too many meetings too many people I

think what was most striking for me

about the Jamie Diamond rant and the

resonance it seems to be having

particularly in Silicon Valley and

particularly with folks that are in

leadership positions or on boards is

that this is another example of what I

think is kind of a different tenor for

leaders in business right now relative

to where we were a few years ago leaders

are starting to step up and speak their

mind and speak more directly and lead

from the front rather than lead from the

back I think the last couple of years

and I would say that the whole kind of

transition a away from wokeism and

coddled employee workforces which is

something that a lot of folks talk about

I'm I'm not trying to just characterize

it I'm just saying that's the

characterization that's been placed on

it is that the employees made the

decisions and then the leaders kind of

said okay I'm subjugated to the

employees whims and needs and look at

what's gone on with Zuck he said you're

with me you're me here's a buyout option

Elon obviously was an Exemplar of this

at Twitter uh We've now seen this become

coinbase Brian and his letter and we've

now seen this become I think a bit more

of a standard in the kind of emergence

in the postco era that leaders can lead

from the front speak directly and say

this is the way things are going to be

my job is not to coddle my employees my

job is to lead my employees so that our

organization our team wins and we

achieve our mission that's the objective

it's not to create a family workplace

for everyone to be happy all the time

it's to help the organization succeed

and so I think I have heard from people

individually I've seen this tenor shift

underway right now um and I think that

Jamie Diamond is another kind of

Exemplar of this that that seems to have

some resonance all right shth I want you

to respond specifically to this next

clip let's play the second clip about

organizational bloat every area should

be looking to be 10% more efficient if I

was ready to depart with 100 people I

guarantee you if I wanted to I could run

it with 90 and be more efficient I

guarantee you I could do it just I could

do it in my sleep and the notion these

bureaucracies I need more people I can't

get it done no because you're you're

filling that request that don't need to

be done your people going to meetings

they don't need to go to someone told me

to approve some his wealth management

that they had to go to 14 committees I

am dying to get the name of the 14

committees and I feel like firing 14

chairman of committees I can't stand it

anymore all right shth the bloated

bureaucracy at big companies your

thoughts well you know there's that

adage that says something akin to 50% of

advertising is useless we just don't

know which 50% yeah I think it's

probably true for most corporate

structures in general which is that a

lot of the organizational bloat has

evolved because of the way that people

have responded to how you use technology

so meaning if you went looked back 50

years years ago if you look at that

famous picture of the Microsoft early

team they didn't rely on software

necessarily there wasn't Salesforce

there wasn't work day there wasn't all

of this

infrastructure and so instead they

probably organized by what they were

good at and they just tried to do things

efficiently and I suspect that many

companies in the absence of Technology

found a way to just be very efficient

that started to change when you had

these rigid demarcations of where one

job ended and another job started and

part of why that happened is because you

had all this software that went in and

convinc people this will create

efficiency but in return the chief

marketing officer's job is XY and Z this

is how the roles are defined this is how

people do it and so I think that the

reason why things have become so

bureaucratic and Bloated is that there

is just this propensity to run towards

software because you think it's a

solution at best it's a

symptomatic Aid it doesn't address the

root cause and in fact it otes

bureaucracy and it promotes the bloat

that Jie's talking about and if you look

at Jamie's p&l he spends $16 billion a

year on it and I suspect that if you

streamlined that you'd actually have

half as many people because they'd be

doing the job in a wholly different way

and by the way the the counterfactual to

it is if you look at companies like

Facebook or Google or Tesla or SpaceX

who designs and I'm sure stripe is the

same who designs a lot of stuff

internally that's custombuilt

for their or I think the way that you

see this in the revenue per employee and

a bunch of these other metrics in terms

of the efficiency of those companies so

I think what he is talking about is that

he is a

victim of this push to productivity

because he would look like a lite if he

didn't ad drop technology but by

adopting the off-the-shelf stuff he

introduces organizational blo because

these things are demarked very very you

got the marketing team as you mentioned

using HubSpot and then you got like the

sales team using I don't

organ the other thing I just want to say

on the first topic is I've mentioned

this

before other than Engineers who are who

are naive but can be extremely

productive from day one there are very

few other job types where naivity is an

asset most people early in their career

are in a jcurve where they are

negatively contributing and the whole

whole goal SL everybody down and the

whole goal is that you invest in these

people so that come out of the J curve

there are probably other jobs that are

like engineering but many many are not

and so I think it's important to get the

kind of Ming you get by being in an

office and in the absence of that I

think these young people like Jamie said

are totally lost that's that's on them

but then for the company they're

completely unproductive and useless

which is on us hey John uh Toby I I

don't know if you know Toby from Shopify

but he did this like zerob based

budgeting kind of concept for meetings

he just purged all meetings at the

beginning of the year he just like

deleted everybody's meetings from the

top down I'm curious how you think about

bloat and just all of these meetings and

committees do you worry about that at

strip we know Toby very well and I don't

know I always feel like yeah we should

I'm tempted to uh take some of the ideas

like we haven't done the meeting

deletion one and you just say oh the

meetings get recreated but they measured

it and they didn't it sounds like uh and

I do always enjoy Toby's perspective

which I think that you know many organiz

ation problems are in fact software

problems and you know you just need to

write a script to literally like I think

he wrote the script to all the meetings

you know from the Google Calendar

instance but uh there's kind of this

Purity that uh you're you're over

intellectualizing your problems and I do

agree with jamat on the remote thing

where like it's it's very dangerous one

thing that can be dangerous with as CEOs

think about this stuff is I think there

is these unfair anecdotes that feel

unfair that get people really riled up

the quiet quitter is the anti-work

subreddit you know all these talk of

people working two jobs and that

generates a lot of energy with corporate

leaders but you don't want to design

your policies around like the bottom 5%

of the company that would be a horrible

mistake yeah you want to design your

policies against the top town and we

have some like outrageously productive

remote people and they're off and again

the cabin Idaho somewhere just you know

Co coding up a storm the thing that we

have seen and interestingly we measured

this before Co because we were doing a

lot of remote hiring and we wanted to

see we want wanted to see how much we

should lean into it is that it is not

good for early career people we could

actually measure it in our productivity

Data before the whole discussion about

remote work happened during covid and

it's bad from a work point of view it's

also just bad from a personal point of

view where they go mad because they're

23 years old and they're not solitary

confinement it's literally solitary

confinement it's ridiculous and by the

way breaking news here Jamie Diamond now

uh knows which 2,000 or I'm sorry

1,739 employees to lay off first there

is a coworker.org petition to get Jaimie

to retract his statement so the optin

has been created if I know Jamie I know

he'll be retracting that statement right

away