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Unknown A
Jamie Dimon went on a rant about remote work and zoom in a town hall. And here's a snippet.
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Unknown B
A lot of you were on the zoom and you were doing the following, okay, you know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other. When asked 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 it does, okay? And when I found out that people are doing that, you don't do that. My goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus. I don't bring my goddamn phone. I'm not sending texts to people, okay? It simply doesn't work. The young generation is being damaged by this. They may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room.
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Unknown B
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.
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Unknown A
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.
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Unknown C
The pandemic, I love listening to Jamie Dimon rants like, I feel like that's business asmr.
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Unknown D
Business asmr, that itself could be a great podcast.
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Unknown A
I was about to say I'm subscribing.
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Unknown B
That's an instant $10 a month subscription.
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Unknown A
But what do you think, John?
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Unknown C
I don't know. People just said a lot of during the pandemic, like, do 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 part of our San Francisco office or New York or Dublin or Singapore or wherever. And then we have a bunch of people also who work remotely. I think kind of obviously, you know, Jamie 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 the 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 assigned to and the other person gets to work a, a high paying tech job.
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Unknown C
And so I don't know.
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Unknown D
I think when one of the theories for declining dynamism in the US and declining TFP is there's allocative efficiency of people declined as women entered the workforce. Because now you have what John describes, this two body problem where both people have to make coordinated switches. Remote work solves it actually.
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Unknown A
Yep. Freeberg, you're running a company now, you're the CEO of Ohalo. Tell us, does this resonate with you? What do you think, especially by 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?
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Unknown E
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 Dimon 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 away from wokism and coddled employee workforces, which is something that a lot of folks talk about, 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 wins and needs.
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Unknown E
And look at what's gone on with Zuck. He said, you're with me, you're against me. Here's a buyout option. Elon obviously was an exemplar of this at Twitter. 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 post Covid 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.
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Unknown E
And I think that Jamie Dimon is another kind of exemplar of this that seems to have some resonance.
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Unknown A
All right, Chamath, I want you to respond specifically to this next clip. Let's play the second clip about organizational bloat.
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Unknown B
Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was running a department of 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 in my sleep. And the notion these bureaucracies, I need more people. I can't get it done. No, because you're filling out request that don't need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don't need to go to. Someone told me to prove something as 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 chairmen of committees. I can't stand it anymore.
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Unknown A
All right, Chamath, the bloated bureaucracy at big companies, your thoughts?
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Unknown F
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, look back 50 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 workday, 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.
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Unknown F
And part of why that happened is because you had all this software that went in and convinced people this will create efficiency. But in return, the. The chief marketing officer's job is X, Y 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 promotes bureaucracy and it promotes the bloat that Jamie's talking about. And if you look at Jamie's P and l, he spends $16 billion a year on it. And I suspect that if you streamline that, you'd actually have half as many people because they'd be doing the job in a wholly different way.
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Unknown F
And by the way, 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 custom built for their org. 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 Luddite if he didn't adopt technology. But by adopting the off the shelf stuff, he introduces organizational bloat because these things are demarked very, very rigidly.
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Unknown A
You got the marketing team, as you mentioned, using HubSpot and then you got.
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Unknown F
Like the sales team using, I don't know, organizational bloat. 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 naivety is an asset. Most people early in their career are in a J curve where they are negatively contributing and the whole slowing everybody down. And the whole goal is that you invest in these people so that they 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 mentoring 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 on them.
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Unknown F
But then for the company they're completely unproductive and useless, which is on us.
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Unknown A
Hey John, Toby. I don't know if you know Toby from Shopify, but he did this like zero 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 Stripe?
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Unknown C
We know Toby very well and I don't know, I always feel like, yeah, we should. I'm tempted to 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. And I do always enjoy Toby's perspective, which I think that, you know, many organizational 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 get all the meetings, you know, from the Google Calendar instance. But there's kind of this purity that you're over intellectualizing your problems. And I do agree with Chamath on the remote thing where like 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.
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Unknown C
The quiet quitters, 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 talent. And we have some like outrageously productive remote people and they're off. And again, the cabin in Idaho somewhere just coating up a storm. The thing that we have seen, and interestingly we measured this before COVID because we were doing a lot of remote hiring and we wanted to see how much we should lean into it, is that it is not good for early career people. We can 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.
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Unknown C
It's also just bad from a personal point of view where they go mad because they're 23 years old and they're.
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Unknown A
Not in solitary confinement. Exactly. It's literally solitary confinement. It's ridiculous. And by the way, breaking news here, Jamie Dimon now knows which 2000 or, I'm sorry, 1739 employees to lay off first. There is a coworker.org petition to get Jamie to retract his statement. So the opt in has been created.
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Unknown C
If I know Jamie, I know he'll be retracting that statement right away.