Why remote and async teams should use Loom (Vinay Hiremath & Sam Corcos)

What is the purpose of a meeting? In the modern world or remote and asynchronous work, live meetings are more and more a thing of the past. The replacement often takes the form of async communication highlights, such as open threads and video messages. In this episode, Levels CEO Sam Corcos sat down with Vinay Hiremath, CEO of Loom, to discuss the important role that video can play in the workplace.

Meetings have an emotional appeal

Vinay thinks the meetings still hold an allure because of the emotional leverage they have.

For me, I think that a meeting is a great way to, first and foremost, get an emotional read on how everybody else is feeling about some piece of information and then be able to quickly react to it. There’s the book thinking fast and slow, the fast thinking brain, like being able to quickly emotionally react to it and then see whether or not the tribe actually buys in is probably the predominant reason that people do meetings. It’s also the reason why sales people push you to get onto a sales call versus just emailing in trying to close something. Because emotion creates leverage. I’d feel solving the meeting culture, my view is that when high stakes decisions need to be made, I’d want to make sure there’s emotional alignment between some small corporance of stakeholders. It doesn’t have to be everybody, in fact, it shouldn’t, but the minimal quorum. I want to make sure that those people are not only aligned on the logic, it’s like they’re emotionally aligned too.

Tag people in

Whether information is shared in meetings, videos, or notes, Vinay said that it’s important to make sure the right tidbits get to the right stakeholders.

What people might actually care about within a meeting is not so much being able to send them a really critical part of the conversation, it’s feeling proud that they got called out in the meeting. Or feeling proud that their work is important to somebody else who’s on the sales call. I feel emotion and pride are a big part of the recorded context of a meeting. One part might be collaboration over that specific part of the meeting, so you can imagine at Loom that’s recorded and you highlight a part of the transcript and you’re like, “This is really useful for Sam,” and you’re like, @mention Sam. Maybe there’s a little bit of collaboration over that in the same way that there might be a little bit of collaboration over a random Slack message or threads forum, where you actually document the decisions should still happen through your central system. Otherwise, you’re just never going to be able to find the information.

Video is affective and temporal

Research shows that video resonates with people because it can forge the emotional connection valued in traditional meetings and tell stories that stick.

Why is video as a format picking up in the workplace? Basically, we read through five or six extremely boring white papers on different psychological experiments that these researchers ran, also different multi-generational like from TV to where we are now studies on the affective video. Basically, it came down to two things. One is, video is really affective with an A, which means that it evokes emotion in the person who’s watching it. Then two, video has a temporal, a time-based linearity to it, which allows you to tell a story. What they found is that if you were to see a recording of me with just my face giving you the same piece of information, then you could read over text, it’s not going to be any more affective. In fact, a recorded video is even less affective because now I have to spend the same amount of time it took to encode that information to watch it. But if I show something else and tell a story on top of the video, it sticks. It sticks a lot better than if you were to just read a wall of text.

Assume positive intent

As humans, we’re often hardwired to assume silence means someone isn’t working. Video allows a unique medium to provide updates and share decision making rationales.

Think about it this way. If an IC on your team is not keeping you up to date about the progress they’re making, but they’re actually making progress, the default human assumption is that you’re doing nothing. That’s the default human assumption. Same thing up. You want to assume positive intent, but it’s like, I think that these, I guess, scarcity strategies are just, my guess is that they’re probably hardwired into us. Context is incredibly important in constantly reminding people that you have to share out context whenever possible. My guess is that’s probably what resonates.

Find creative ways to scale

The issue with async arises when your team grows larger and more unwieldy. You have to figure out who needs what communication, how, and when.

We’ve reached a scale where doing all of those updates all the time to the entire company in all hands is just impractical. It’s not like actually useful for a lot of people on the call and then b, we just miss out on really important updates for like I’d go to where the team’s at. We’re trying to figure out what the purpose of communication is and then like what the proper boundary is. I don’t know if we’re far along enough to know whether or not there are certain patterns of purpose expanding to larger groups versus contracting to smaller and smaller groups. My guess is that in depth project status, in depth project update, that pruning of the tree going higher and higher until eventually, at the top level, you want to know whether or not a project is just red, yellow, or green. That’s it.

Make information discoverable

It’s not enough to make information available. You have to train employees where to find information on their own instead of asking others by default.

I think the bigger question of discoverability is, once you have the tools, how do you actually make sure you create consistent documentation around the top level things people need to be aware of and then how do you actually, how do you create consistency, so they don’t have to learn a bunch of new things when a new roadmap gets created, and then how do you train them consistently to know where to find that information? So they’re not pinging the people in the company. We have this problem where we have five or six PMs in the entire company and when people want status updates, they basically go to these people all the time asking them for status updates and it’s like, they’re like, “It’s already documented. It’s here.” We’re facing this problem right now where we have to train people and say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter that it’s in a Google sheet versus a notion table versus whatever. You just need to know to go here. These five or six people can do the real jobs, instead of answering questions that are already documented.

Perfect is the enemy of done

Vinay theorizes that many people hold off on recording things because they want it to be perfect.

I know GitLab has, they have a principle of perfect is the enemy of done when it comes to documentation. They force people to send work-in-progress documents to each other, because otherwise what they found when I was talking to Darren, the head of Remote at GitLab, what he found was that people were just not sharing information nearly fast enough and shit was just not getting done. I feel like that this is a human thing of like, once things are recorded, it’s there forever and I’m going to be judged. I’m going to be judged really hard. Whereas, if it’s ephemeral, it’s in the past and everybody’s open to messing up, and also communication person-to-person is something that we’re so used to. We’ve had over a hundred thousand years to adapt to talking to each other and then basically, less than 10,000 to write and read. Then, if you think about a recorded video, there’s basically no analog to it.

Overwriting the role of writing

Writing is difficult, as it takes thought to lay ideas out on paper. Video allows non-writers to share their thoughts faster.

Writing is not the same as it was before. Now that we have the ability to record this video content, if you’re looking at either medium, it’s going to be easier to record the video, it’s going to be easier to get your point across. Yeah, I think that you’re going to have this uncanny valley, or uncanny valley is not the right word here. It’s like, you’re going to have this valley of despair, that’s the phrase I’m looking for. You’re going to have this valley of despair when you think about writing, because writing imposes linear, rational thought, which just takes up way more cognitive horsepower than speaking. I think that there is this crux with writing, it’s like building a writing culture basically means that you have to hire people with the skillset that basically nobody has. Even really effective readers, a lot of them are not good at writing. I read their docs and I’m like, “Oh man! You would’ve been better off just recording a Loom, even though I think you should have written this thing down.”

Vinay Hiremath:
It’s not that you’re perfect at communicating. That’s not what gets people to listen to your message and have it have some limbic resonance and actually sit deeply with them. It’s the confidence to be wrong and the confidence and openness. Screw up is what actually makes you seem confident and it’s so counterintuitive. My suspicion is that seeing your face and hearing your voice on top of a piece of work is just an uncomfortable experience and you just need to get through it and get enough positive reactions to that type of communication being useful for you to be like, “Oh, okay. This is actually way more effective, it’s helping me get ahead and it’s actually helping me get my point across much more clearly than I could have with 10 pages of text, whatever it might be.”
Ben Grynol:
I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.
Ben Grynol:
When building tech products, you know you’re onto something if the company starts to become a verb. What does this mean? Well, Google’s a good example. Google is a noun, very much the name of a company. It’s also a verb that we often refer to in society, “Google it”. It’s become part of the vernacular, the common linguistics that we use as a society to communicate with each other. Well, for Loom, Loom is very much a platform that we use internally as a team at Levels. It’s a video platform where you can communicate asynchronously, so you can send each other video messages. Sometimes they’re just of you, they’re a video of you talking to a camera or the screen. Other times it will be for screen sharing. There are all these things that you can use it for. Walking through documents, giving feedback, introducing concepts to people that might be harder to articulate through writing. The point of it is very much to have a way of communicating asynchronously with other team members, with people that you interact with on a daily basis.
Ben Grynol:
For Vinay Hiremath, CTO and co-founder of Loom, he has a ton of thoughts when it comes to asynchronous communication. In fact, he and Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, the two of them have spent quite a bit of time together, even as roommates at one point in time. The two of them sat down and they talked very much about some of the philosophical values or the outlook that they each have when it comes to remote and asynchronous communication. They dove into what is the point of Loom? How do people use it? Where could it go? How can it help companies to be more impactful, more effective in the way they communicate? Not just efficient, but what can it help to do when semantic meaning is needed when trying to communicate asynchronously with other teammates? Sometimes things like tone and sentiment, they’re lost in text. That’s where video comes in. Anyway, no need to wait. Here’s Sam to kick things off.
Sam Corcos:
As you know, we’re taking the async remote concept about as far as one can and take it in a company.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. Our whole company is really just an experiment on what happens when you maximally index on deep work. Obviously, Loom has been a pretty indispensable tool in making that happen, but I’m starting to come to the recognition that these types of casual, this format of casual recorded video is a pretty nascent medium. Really, only maybe in the last five years, people have become comfortable with it. Maybe it had something to do with Twitch or Snapchat. I think there’s actually a lot more than needs to be explored and built here, so I wanted to explore some of those ideas and tell you what we’ve been working on.
Vinay Hiremath:
Hundred percent. All things considered, humans working together, in general, pretty nascent medium, right?
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
Just getting things done for a free market perspective pretty early on, and it’s crazy that we feel we have these established ways of working and it’s like we’ve barely been tribal and working together in agricultural farms. It’s just a very small percentage of the entire human experience. Yeah, I think we’re at the earliest stages of what technology can unlock for all of us. It’s funny, I don’t know who’s listening to this, but I hang out with Sam all the time. He’s actually one of my, one of my old roommates. We used to live together and I always feel like Levels is just so far ahead of the curve. You all are just trying new things and I think it’s really dope and it’s admirable, and honestly, I feel like Loom can learn a lot. Even though Loom is indispensable to how we all work, I feel the way we all work together, there’s just like, hopefully it’s a lot of industry setting going on over the next five to 10 years.
Sam Corcos:
It could also just go horribly wrong at some point. Oftentimes, when every company does things a certain way or every person does something a certain way, there’s actually a good reason for that.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah.
Sam Corcos:
Sort of the Burkean argument for why you shouldn’t try to make such sweeping changes in the way that people do things. It’s possible that it works pretty well for us right now at our scale, we’re only about 35 people now, and I wonder how that changes as companies grow.
Vinay Hiremath:
For sure, definitely.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is that there are trade offs to every medium of communication. One of the good things about writing is that you can quickly skim through it and jump to whatever part is relevant. It’s much faster to consume information. Also, it’s easier to know what’s in it. Because of that, you can create a table of contents. I think there are some companies, I think Grain is one of them that tries to summarize meetings. I haven’t used it myself, so I don’t know how effective that is, but it’s definitely one of the challenges that we’ve had. We started recording more of our meetings, having fewer people in them. We have a rule that we won’t have meetings with more than three people. Those meetings get recorded and they get distributed.
Sam Corcos:
But the problem is that it doesn’t really solve for the meeting culture problem. As much as you still don’t know what’s in the meeting unless you watch the whole meeting and it makes it slightly better because it’s asynchronous, so you don’t have to be physically present, but it’s not that much better. How do you think about some of those types of problems when they might not even be solvable in the video form factor?
Vinay Hiremath:
I have a lot of thoughts here. I’d actually be curious and I’ll go first and I’ll answer first, but I’d be curious to hear what you philosophically feel the utility of a meeting is. Because I think that that’s at the core of the entire problem statement. For me, I think that a meeting is a great way to, first and foremost, get an emotional read on how everybody else is feeling about some piece of information and then be able to quickly react to it. There’s the book thinking fast and slow, the fast thinking brain, like being able to quickly emotionally react to it and then see whether or not the tribe actually buys in is probably the predominant reason that people do meetings. It’s also the reason why sales people push you to get onto a sales call versus just emailing in trying to close something.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. Because emotion creates leverage. I’d feel solving the meeting culture, my view is that when high stakes decisions need to be made, I’d want to make sure there’s emotional alignment between some small corporates of stakeholders. It doesn’t have to be everybody, in fact, it shouldn’t, but the minimal quorum. I want to make sure that those people are not only aligned on the logic, it’s like they’re emotionally aligned too. I find that a lot of meetings come with that type of information, and so when I think about recording meetings, it’s like I’m thinking about an all-hands. An all hands is recorded, what do people actually care about? Maybe they care about the information, but ideally your company systems should capture project updates and the things that are critical in a more linear fashion versus narrative fashion.
Vinay Hiremath:
What people might actually care about within a meeting is not so much being able to send them a really critical part of the conversation, it’s feeling proud that they got called out in the meeting. Or feeling proud that their work is important to somebody else who’s on the sales call. I feel emotion and pride are a big part of the recorded context of a meeting. [inaudible 00:09:55] might be collaboration over that specific part of the meeting, so you can imagine at Loom that’s recorded and you highlight a part of the transcript and you’re like, “This is really useful for Sam,” and you’re like, @mention Sam. It’s like yeah, maybe there’s a little bit of collaboration over that in the same way that there might be a little bit of collaboration over a random Slack message or threads forum. Where you actually document the decisions should still happen through your central system. Otherwise, you’re just never going to be able to find the information.
Vinay Hiremath:
What I’d say that on the effectiveness, the other thing that you had mentioned on the effectiveness of video, me and Joe, me and my co-founder, Joe, we go out and we do our founder planning every year for the next year that’s coming up. One of the questions that we had to answer at the end of 2020 is, why video? Not from a Mary Meeker’s internet trends report blah, blah, blah, enterprise leads consumer by 6 to 7 years, but actually, why is video as a format picking up in the workplace? Basically, we read through five or six extremely boring white papers on different psychological experiments that these researchers ran, also different multi-generational like from TV to where we are now studies on the affective video.
Vinay Hiremath:
Basically, it came down to two things. One is, video is really affective with an A, which means that it evokes emotion in the person who’s watching it. Then two, video has a temporal, a time-based linearity to it, which allows you to tell a story. What they found is that if you were to see a recording of me with just my face giving you the same piece of information, then you could read over text, it’s not going to be any more affective. In fact, a recorded video is even less affective because now I have to spend the same amount of time it took to encode that information to watch it. But if I show something else and tell a story on top of the video, it sticks. It sticks a lot better than if you were to just read a wall of text. There’s something about the affective nature of video with a narrative.
Vinay Hiremath:
If I think about that in context of meetings, like going back to that pride example, it’s like the idea that everybody else is watching those slides and someone’s calling it out versus just being a bullet in a notion dot to an investor update, there’s just something else that makes that person who’s watching that feel a lot more prideful and a lot more happy and feel aligned with their work and probably a lot higher likelihood of them being a retained employee and feeling like they’re actually part of the Levels journey or the Loom journey. That’s a lot. I’ll pause there, but I’m curious what your thoughts are.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. I took a couple notes there. I’ll come back to the question of what is the utility of a meeting, but I’ll talk about a couple specific use cases of recorded conversations and meetings that have been positive. I don’t fully understand the reasons why they’ve been productive, but just one of the reasons why I’m interested to get your take on it. I think understanding the underlying principles really helps to understand what tools to use, when and why. Something that I have found just in the last couple months to be really useful is in recording the meetings in which decisions are made, there have been a couple of conversations where we decided to make an offer to somebody. Josh and I had a 30-minute conversation and we just recorded it. We hadn’t previously recorded very many of those meetings, but we just decided to record it. We posted it to the leadership team and just having that visibility into why the decision was made, made a really big difference.
Sam Corcos:
We actually had almost all of that content written down somewhere, but for whatever reason that I can’t to explain, the ability for people to see me and Josh talking about it, the medium changed the way that that decision was understood. I don’t know if you have any theories as to why that might be.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I don’t have an answer, unfortunately.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
I think that there is. One thing goes off in my head that’s just an initial gut reaction, which is I think it’s really easy when you see decisions on … this is the problem for most PMs. I’m sure that if a PM is listening to this, they’re probably just cringing because how many times do you have a product requirement stock where there was a lot of research that went into why you made a decision and maybe there’s even documents that show that research. But at the end of the day, it’s the most condensed form of that information possible, and so it’s really easy to look at a bullet and be like, “Well, why are we making the hire?”
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s for these five reasons, and then you’re like, “But what about these reasons? It’s like we talked about those reasons. Maybe part of this is also, you see a recording of two people spending 30 minutes together or however much time deliberating over the edge cases of what could or could not happen if you make the hire, don’t make the hire, and people just feel safer that at least some thought went into it. I wonder if there’s a little bit of that. It’s interesting that the recording of the meeting made it so that there was, in general, less objection and more alignment. I think the faster alignment is the really interesting thing there, because as I understand it, this is just you and Ben on a Zoom call just recording it.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s not like there’s like a presentation or anything. You’re just talking back.
Sam Corcos:
No.
Vinay Hiremath:
How many people watch that?
Sam Corcos:
Not a ton. Maybe half the leadership team, so eight people watched it? But I think part of it also … yeah, could be. Yeah. I think also part of it is one of the really nice things about it is that at a lot of companies making these important leadership hires, everyone on the team has to get into a meeting and it’s very expensive, and maybe half those people don’t need to be in the meeting or don’t want to be in the meeting, but they feel like they have to anyway. I wonder how much of it is just the fact that it’s respectful, when you’re an adult working with other adults, they want to know why decisions are made. Thinking of the classic parent-child relationship, which is, “it is this way because I say so”, as opposed to giving the people the respect of explaining to them why decisions were made, I wonder how much of it is just simply that. This was the conversation in which we thought through this process and we are showing you how we came to this decision instead of just telling you the way it is.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. That’s interesting, the parent-child. I think that that speaks to the directionality of the relationship in this case, because, you’re the CEO of the company, and so it speaks to the directionality of the relationship, but I feel like it flows the other way up too. If a group is making a decision that you are like, “Why are we making this decision?” Like, “I don’t trust the outcome of this decision. I have a better solution in my head”, I’d say even the other way down, it is just like, “Hey, why didn’t we make this decision?” Ultimately, this comes down to trust. How do you actually build trust when it comes to decision making?
Sam Corcos:
Totally, yeah. I actually, I have in my notes here. My notes are not super well-defined, I’m just reading them verbatim. Something here are about trust batteries, which is a term that Toby from Shopify uses, like building up the trust battery with the other people that you work with. Something about video does a much our job at charging trust batteries than written communication. In fact, written communication, I would argue almost necessarily depletes trust batteries. I’m not entirely sure why.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. That’s so interesting. I’m not entirely sure why either. I think we can make some pseudo anthropological reasons as to why when I see your face, Sam, explaining something to me, I’m like, “Okay, I get it. I trust it.” There’s a human on the other side of it that I have a baseline level of trust with. There is like this other principle of a assumed positive intent, which let’s just assume that everybody at Levels is trying to do that. They’re trying their best to stay positive with that. I think that’s the place that most people find themselves in. It’s like within that world where people are assuming positive intent, being able to see a face and a person actually narrating over the decisions is probably a worthwhile experiment. Actually, I’m going to write that down for Loom, for us to try that. It’s like anytime a decision is made, just record a video who’s the decision maker, why that decision was made on top of the text to see whether or not we get less questions about why the decision was made. That’s actually fascinating.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. It’s an interesting thing that I’ve also found. There’s a curse of knowledge problem as part of this, where a conversation that miss, and I had miss as our head of ops, I wrote a very long document on principles of effective communication, really making the case for why we need to kill Slack. Miz had some follow-ups and it was pretty clear that we agreed on maybe 90% of the document, but there was about 10% where we had substantive disagreement. We ended up having a conversation and we recorded it. One was just having the conversation synchronously. We solved the problem much, much faster and with the less animosity than it would’ve been, if it had continued in long form written communication. But also, the information ended up being super helpful for other people on the team to try to understand the intent behind why we made some of the trade offs that we made.
Sam Corcos:
We ended up publishing something similar to that with me and Miz on a podcast that we did. It’s another funny thing where both Miz and I, after the recording, thought, “Wow, that was stupid.” But when it got published, we got all this positive feedback from people where they really appreciated the values-based thinking around communication, and neither of us thought it was going to be interesting, but other people who are interested in why we came to that decision and the thoughts behind it found it really helpful. I don’t know what the principle is there.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. I think this is something that I’m finding out all the time. I think that it’s not like an executive problem, because there’s the saying that when you become C whatever O, your job is actually CRO, which is just chief reminding officer, just reminding people of why you’re doing stuff.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
Constantly putting context out that you have that nobody else as. But the truth is, is that there’s tons of context that people at Levels have about stuff that you have no idea of because you just can’t absorb all of that information about the Levels ecosystem. It’s just impractical and it’s suboptimal for anybody. My guess is that the thing that probably resonates is that a lot of people who have a lot of context assume that that context is just noise for other people.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, exactly.
Vinay Hiremath:
But the truth is it isn’t. A good example of this is that every quarter, the team has quarterly, we do the OKR system and we have personal OKRs too. I always release my OKRs to the company with full comment access for people to ask me why I’m spending my time doing different things, because I think that a lot of times people don’t have the context and then as the hierarchy grows within your company, people are also afraid to ask. I always do the OKRs, I record a video over it and I’m like, “Hey, if you have questions about why I’m spending my time doing these things, please DM me. Here’s a private Google forum, if you don’t feel confident or comfortable asking me, and just so you know, it is normal to wonder what your executives are doing.
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s not done. I think it’s a good forcing function to do it, and so I think context, just doing that every quarter, I probably get four or five roommates who reach out being, “Yo, thank you for doing this. It genuinely makes me trust leadership more that you all are not doing nothing,” which is actually the default of what most people think in both directions. Think about it this way. If an IC on your team is not keeping you up to date about the progress they’re making, but they’re actually making progress, the default human assumption is that you’re doing nothing. That’s the default human assumption. Same thing up. You want to assume positive intent, but it’s like, I think that these, I guess, scarcity strategies are just, my guess is that they’re probably hardwired into us. Context is incredibly important in constantly reminding people that you have to share out context whenever possible. My guess is that’s probably what resonates.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, totally. I think it’s especially important on remote teams because you can’t just look over and see that people are present and working. I think that you have to be much more intentional about building the trust battery when you’re remote or filling the trust battery. One of the things you said is interesting and I’m curious to dig into it a little bit more on, what you might think is noise at least someone probably thinks a signal, which is definitely true. Just recently, we’re updating our company values and Josh and I decided there were some things that we had some disagreements on, we decided to record the conversation and we’re turning them to a podcast and it ended up being useful information. But maybe not for everybody, maybe only for 10 people on the team out of 35 who really want to understand stand the intent behind it.
Sam Corcos:
I was talking to Scott on our team, who’s our head of product about this. We’re already at the point, we’re only 35 people, we’re already at the point where there’s a lot of noise just generally, and if everybody posts every day or every week what it is they’re working on, it becomes overwhelming very quickly. Figuring out what the right audience is, but also we have this concept of an open silo versus a closed silo of information. Everything should be available to you if you want it, but then, I guess maybe the principle is discoverability versus notification, I think that maybe that’s the dichotomy there.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. It’s funny. When you say there’s a lot of noise, what mediums would you say there’s the most … I would assume that threads would be one, right?
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
How do you try to get around that in threads? I’m assuming you create groups.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, they have … you can think of it like any forum. There are forums. Imagine this like a subreddit. You have the product forum has its own, there are threads within that. It’s just like any kind of forum like that. It’s a pretty standard format.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. I’m curious whether or not the silo boundary is … you have the concept of closed silos and open silos. It’s like communication that circulates around a certain team boundary. It’s like, what is the purpose of that communication primarily? Then I think working your way back from there has been useful for us, although I think that we have a lot of cleanup to do. For instance, we have like this channel called team end show and tell, where all the engineers drop Looms in about the work that they’re working on. We’re actually considering opening that up to all of R&D. By default, most people who were on product design and engineering will just be in this channel, updating each other about product, because the point of that channel ideally is to just build hype and a sense of velocity that things are going on.
Sam Corcos:
Yep.
Vinay Hiremath:
But we’ve reached a scale where doing all of those updates all the time to the entire company in all hands is just impractical. It’s not like actually useful for a lot of people on the call and then b, we just miss out on really important updates for like I’d go to where the team’s at. We’re trying to figure out what the purpose of communication is and then like what the proper boundary is. I don’t know if we’re far along enough to know whether or not there are certain patterns of purpose expanding to larger groups versus contracting to smaller and smaller groups. My guess is that in depth project status, in depth project update, that pruning of the tree going higher and higher until eventually, at the top level, you want to know whether or not a project is just regular [inaudible 00:28:23]. That’s it.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
At a certain level you might want to know, is this OKR x percent done? If you’re at Google, you don’t want to understand every fricking project that rolls out into an objective more than likely. I do wonder where … I feel I think about it more as what type of information and then whether or not that team boundary is going to be expanding or contracting over time.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. The concept of the difference between an open silo and a closed silo is the idea that all information should be discoverable if you want to find it. A closed silo would be like an email that you me and Ben are looped into and nobody else could find that information if they wanted to. That turns it into a discoverability challenge. One of the things that’s nice about threads specifically has a really great primitive that I think is important, which is the ability to request a follow-up from somebody specifically. You can unsubscribe to an entire forum, but if somebody tags you that follow up action item doesn’t go away. This is one of the things that we have to solve with email, where you have to follow every part of this email. If it’s a long thread that involves 10 people back and forth, you have to follow along to see if somebody asks you to do something.
Sam Corcos:
Then when they do, you can triage that to tomorrow, but then the conversation keeps going, and then it gets untriaged, and then you just lose track of what’s been requested of you and you have to play this whac-a-mole game of trying to stay on top of what needs to be done. I think they’ve solved a lot of this with that primitive, where you can unsubscribe to the entire forum. I don’t need to follow-up anything that product is doing, except when they specifically request something from me, then I’m looped back in. We found that to be really a really good primitive. That’s one of the ways that we solved it. The challenge is really around the discoverability. It’s hard to know what information you don’t know. If a new forum is created to track the blood work project, and you don’t even know that that forum exists, how do you know to look there? You can’t. How do you do that, except you don’t also overwhelm people with just an unlimited proliferation of new forums that are being created. I don’t really know the answer to that.
Vinay Hiremath:
I think about this as, let’s take that blood work project example. The way that I would personally think about it, and I don’t know if this is the right answer for Levels. Your company operates … if there’s a sync versus async spectrum, you guys are far ahead of everybody else and still further ahead of Loom, and I feel like we’re pretty async compared to most companies. I don’t know if this will apply, but my thinking would be that that would go through a roadmap process. There is a roadmap, the people who are driving in owners off the roadmap would see that there is a new item that gets attached to the roadmap and they would be made aware of it, and the people who specifically need to be consulted and informed on that item will be called out once it’s added to the roadmap.
Vinay Hiremath:
Then maybe one part of that would be linking to the group that contains all of the different threads that are leading up to that project. It’d be, the discovery of that information to the people who are most critical in that project work stream would ideally be the roadmap, the product roadmap. That’s the way I would think about it. Now, the problem becomes … I honestly think the problem is more of a training problem. It’s like, “Okay, for all people who are really interested in the product roadmap, in the project roadmap, and want to be informed of updates, but are not PMs or direct drivers of those roadmaps, how do you train those people over time as you grow your company to know where to look for it? Because I do think that at some point, the search bar for threads is not going to be the answer to how you actually dig in and find information. The channel layout of Slack is obviously definitely not the answer, right?
Sam Corcos:
Right.
Vinay Hiremath:
We tried that. We tried to pre [inaudible 00:32:52] project dash whatever, and that works the best.
Sam Corcos:
Yup, yup.
Vinay Hiremath:
People are like, “Wait! Project SF hangs 2021? What does that mean?” I think formalizing your roadmaps is incredibly important, and that’s probably one of those – that is a primitive of a company’s operating system in general. I think the bigger question of discoverability is, once you have the tools, how do you actually make sure you create consistent documentation around the top level things people need to be aware of and then how do you actually, how do you create consistency, so they don’t have to learn a bunch of new things when a new roadmap gets created, and then how do you train them consistently to know where to find that information? So they’re not pinging the people in the company.
Vinay Hiremath:
We currently have this … I’m laying all this stuff out, not as if Loom does a great job of this. We have this problem where we have five or six PMs in the entire company and when people want status updates, they basically go to these people all the time asking them for status updates and it’s like, they’re like, “It’s already documented. It’s here.” We’re facing this problem right now where we have to train people and say, “Hey, it doesn’t matter that it’s in a Google sheet versus a notion table versus whatever. You just need to know to go here. These five or six people can do the real jobs, instead of answering questions that are already documented. That’s where we’re at. I don’t know if that’s the right answer once we get past 300 people or 400 people or whatever, but it seems to be the right one in our growing stage right now.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. The problem as a training problem, I think, most of the time the tool should be sufficiently aligned and intuitive to where … oftentimes, coming up with best practices is just a crutch to work around a bad tool or some legacy. One of the things we’ve been talking a lot about internally is how people come into starting at Levels with a lot of legacy learning that’s maybe not great. They expect every day to be playing whac-a-mole on Slack, and they expect to have meetings all day every day. They expect that dopamine pathway to be triggered constantly. Having all week free is uncomfortable for people. But once we get past that, you realize how much better it is. We’ve been thinking about the, I think it’s going to take some meaningful training to get people used to recording Looms, in general, or recording themselves on video, because it’s a relatively new medium that almost nobody does.
Sam Corcos:
There are a lot of business norms around, like having a meeting and people are pretty comfortable with just asking for a meeting, but the idea of recording that meeting and distributing that meeting feels weird. I wonder, I don’t really have a good answer for this, but I’ve definitely noticed a lot of discomfort around recording things, especially, for a lot of people, especially in the very early days when they start at Levels is, one of the rules that we have for using Loom is only ever do one take, just be okay with that. If you stumble, that’s fine, just do one take. Most people, when they’re talking live, they have pauses and they think about stuff and that’s okay. The default for, if you are being recorded, the assumption is that it has to be perfect. It has to be edited and made for radio. I think that’s generally incorrect and it’s taking a lot of training to get people used to that. I don’t know if that’s something that you’ve experienced.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah, for sure. It’s funny because you were talking about affective communication. You wrote up a doc on affective communication, and the funny thing is that the more, it’s not that you are perfect at communicating, that’s not what gets people to listen to your message and have some limbic resonance and actually sit deeply with them. It’s like the confidence to be wrong and the confidence in openness. Screw up is what actually makes you seem confident and it’s so counterintuitive. Actually, there is this problem in documentation. I know GitLab has, they have a principle of perfect is the enemy of done when it comes to documentation. They force people to send work-in-progress documents to each other, because otherwise what they found when I was talking to Darren, the head of Remote at GitLab, what he found was that people were just not sharing information nearly fast enough and shit was just not getting done.
Vinay Hiremath:
I feel like that this is a human thing of like, once things are recorded, it’s there forever and I’m going to be judged. I’m going to be judged really hard. Whereas, if it’s ephemeral, it’s in the past and everybody’s open to messing up, and also communication person-to-person is something that we’re so used to. We’ve had over a hundred thousand years to adapt to talking to each other and then basically, less than 10,000 to write and read. Then, if you think about a recorded video, there’s basically no analog to it. No one was … if you think about a meeting, yeah, that’s just like being created digitally. When it comes to like a recording of a video, there’s just really no analog for it.
Vinay Hiremath:
I think the bar and the perception of perfection is just even [inaudible 00:38:41], especially since all of the video we see that’s recorded is evergreen. It’s made for broadcast. It’s made for TikTok and YouTube and all these other channels, and this is the first time that we’re using it at work. I do think that it takes some training. I also think that, it is our job at Loom to automate the polish as much as possible, and that’s something that we’re fully staffing against like autocorrecting Is, removing ums and ahs, trying to make you sound more confident. My suspicion is that seeing your face and hearing your voice on top of a piece of work is just like an uncomfortable experience and you just need to get through it and get enough positive reactions to that type of communication being useful, for you to be like, “Oh, okay! This is actually way more affective. It’s helping me get ahead and it’s actually helping me get my point across much more clearly than I could have with 10 pages of text, whatever it might be.”
Vinay Hiremath:
You had mentioned something interesting, which is that best practices are, you find that a lot of times it’s a bad tool or a habitual tool. I also think that because there is some amount of chaos that it’s just unmanageable, there are no tools that are the right tool for the job. The only tool is the process in that case, which is unfortunate, but that is the idea of a product roadmap process or whatever else. Would it be awesome if you could type in product roadmap and then threads have automatically understood it and then it’s created the roadmap for you and was like, “Hey, find which part of the roadmap you want to go into.” Yes, but I think that we’re probably far away for that integrated of a workplace tool.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. I think it’s not universally true, but I think many times you create, certainly in my experience, I have created process around tools that are not meant for the use case and are actually, in many times, actively fighting against what I want people to do or what we want to do just in terms of values alignment. Slack is the company that we pick on a lot, because it is so diametrically opposed to a type of culture and company we want to build. If you say we had a rule, all communication should be done in public channels, no communication in DMs. Hard rule, no DMs. When I talk to most companies, you can look at the admin stats and they’re usually about 95% DMs. We, with an explicit rule against DMs that we reinforced constantly, we’re still at about 70% DMs.
Sam Corcos:
You could just keep reminding people that, “Hey, we’re not doing DMs, remember? It’s communication in forums, that’s the way we do it.” “Up, got you.” But Slack is constantly pulling you into it. We have things like, Slack is an asynchronous tool, you don’t have to answer in real time, everyone should turn off notifications. Everyone has them on because Slack is trying to hook you into using their tool in a different way than we want it to be used. It’s like fighting us the whole way. We’re trying to create process and rules around a tool that is diametrically opposed to how we want to operate. Sometimes we have created process to try to solve for deficiencies in the tool, but sometimes process is the only answer.
Vinay Hiremath:
Out of curiosity, that brings up a good point, which is, let’s say you turn off DMs, there’s no way to privately message within Slack?
Sam Corcos:
Yep.
Vinay Hiremath:
How do people end up privately messaging each other? Where do they end up doing it? Because where there’s a will, there’s a way, and I feel what is the base reason that people want to talk in private? I would assume that one is, they don’t want some critical information to be seen, and so they’re like, “I just do not.”
Sam Corcos:
No. Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
That’s one reason.
Sam Corcos:
I’ve talked to people on the team about it. The fundamental reason is the signal-to-noise problem that we talked about earlier, which is they feel like, “Oh! This is just like a random conversation between me and these two other people.” We didn’t want to bother other people with seeing this, I didn’t want to interrupt them. The reality is that most people don’t need to see it, but maybe a couple other people do. There’s this default assumption, it’s the closed silo problem. One of the nice things about threads is that we don’t have the same DM rule in threads because it’s very easy to turn a private conversation into a public conversation. If you and me have a private conversation and we say, “Oh, let’s move this to the product forum.” We can just very easily do that, in Slack, you can’t. Slack is, it is a closed silo forever. It’s very easy to transition that out if it may end up being useful to somebody else. That’s an example of where the tool itself actually helps with that type of communication.
Vinay Hiremath:
I see. You do have the ability to do private messages within threads.
Sam Corcos:
Mm-hmm)affirmative), yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
Okay, got it, because I agree with that. I think that signal-to-noise is probably one of the biggest reasons. I think there’s probably a lot of reasons, but signal-to-noise is probably the biggest. I would say also with Slack, it’s people viewing DMs because of how Slack is built. People viewing DMs is a way to short circuit their way to getting a faster response, which speaks to batching responses and a whole bunch of other behaviors, which I know that you and the Levels team have done some work on. I was going to say though, it’s good to know that threads has a way to privately message because there are just some things where you do not want it to be part of a public channel or you know that you will likely never [remove 00:44:44] to be public.
Vinay Hiremath:
An example would be, okay, I’m throwing out a ludicrous example. “Okay, we found out that our CFO is embezzling money out of the company. Hey Joe, we need to talk and figure out how to transition and pull the board in and a whole bunch of stuff.” Yeah, it’s good to know that there are private threads that can then be made public as well.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. Most of the people that I’ve talked to who use direct messages more than I would like us to just from a culture of transparency, it’s almost entirely the signal-to-noise problem, where they said, “Well, I was just asking a question of this person and I didn’t feel like I needed to tell the entire product team about it.” It’s like, “Well, maybe two other people also have that question. We can just post it there and people who are not interested can just ignore the question.” I think that’s been maybe 80+ percent of the reason why people have been using DMs more, where it was more of the case in Slack than it is in threads is that, Slack is a synchronous tool that is masquerading as an asynchronous tool.
Sam Corcos:
You don’t get a dopamine hit when you send an email and you might hear back from them sometime in the next 24 hours. But when you send them a Slack and you’re just waiting for them to respond, and then you get that response, you get that immediate feedback, it creates these pathological pathways and compulsive behavior that I think is bad. Slack encourages bad behavior, whereas threads and other tools like it, I think, do a much better job of preventing that from happening.
Vinay Hiremath:
That makes a lot of sense. It’s funny, man. We’ve tried to make this work so many times and this is at every level. That objection of I just don’t feel like this is useful to other people to see, there are people on our team who are religious about this. When I talk to them about it, the idea of opening up more transparent and public communication within a group is terrifying for whatever reason.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, totally.
Vinay Hiremath:
I’m friends with people who do some pretty risky stuff. I’ll talk to my friends before they go cycling down a double black diamond trail and they’re common than me talking to like some leaders and execs about, “Hey, maybe we should talk about that performance management issue in the private channel that we have with all leaders and all execs”, and they’re like, “No, no, no, no. No one needs to know about that.” I’m like, “Okay.”
Sam Corcos:
Yeah, totally.
Vinay Hiremath:
We’ve tried to reverse this, and I’m probably going to end up being a little behind you here, as always I think, when it comes to communication practices. I just feel Slack is so difficult. It’s so difficult to get people to openly collaborate. It’s really hard.
Sam Corcos:
Because the tool fights you.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah.
Sam Corcos:
That’s why.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. It’s good to hear that like threads has been going well for you all. By the way, I’ve also heard great things about Facebook Workplace as well.
Sam Corcos:
I haven’t used it.
Vinay Hiremath:
They have the idea of like, “Okay, if you do want synchronous chat, don’t fight synchronous chat.” But what synchronous chat ends up becoming is the group threads. By default, you have these different groups. People can post to these groups that are not in the groups and that ends up becoming a forum like threats. Then they have their DM system, which is two groups by default, and the idea is that you are going to lose that context very quickly. It’s like, anything that have been there, do it because you want a fast turnaround and you don’t want to wait a long time and do it knowing that, whatever we put in there don’t make it too much brain power to answer. If there’s too much brain power default to posting within the forum on the group, which I think is like, it’s a mix of the threads and Slack use case. It’s like, “Okay, if there was a fallback to chat within threads, when would you actually use that versus posting something to a top level forum conversation.”
Sam Corcos:
That actually brings me to another thing that I’ve been thinking about is, we lean pretty heavily on video and asynchronous everything. One of the things that we do very often, we send, somebody requests a meeting and we ask them for what the agenda of the meeting is. They send us the agenda or the questions, and then our team will often just record a Loom of ourselves answering those questions and then it mitigates the need to have the meeting to begin with, which is great. However, I found that some percentage of the time people get really offended when we do that. I don’t really know why that is. I don’t know. You’ve had much more experience with this than I have. Do you have any sense for why that might be?
Vinay Hiremath:
What exactly … when they say they get offended, are they offended you send out a video to respond to these questions openly?
Sam Corcos:
Let’s say you sent me an email like, “Hey, Sam, I want to get your thoughts on fundraising.” I would say, “Cool. I don’t really have a lot of time for meetings right now, but if you send me a list of questions, I can answer them.” Then they’ll send me questions and then I’ll record a Loom of myself just answering those questions and then I send it to them. Instead of taking 30 minutes of two people’s time, it took me about five minutes to record it and then they watch it at 2x and then it’s just much more effective. But people, they don’t like that, so I don’t have a theory for why that is.
Sam Corcos:
I’ve also found similarly some percentage of people maybe less than 5%, but some people get really offended when you send them a calendly link to schedule something instead of the like, “Oh yeah. How about 4:00 on Tuesday?” “No, that doesn’t work.” “Okay. How about Friday at 1:00?” “No, no, no.” “Okay.” Instead of doing the back and forth, the fact that you’re sending a link for somebody to just grab a time, for me, I love it when somebody sends me a calendly link, saves me so much time, save all this back and forth. But some people still get really offended. I don’t really know what the rationale is behind it.
Vinay Hiremath:
Yeah. I have a personal assistant who I CC into planning personal trips with my friends.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah.
Vinay Hiremath:
Some people get offended by that and are like, “Do you want to hang out with me or not?” I think the answer here is, do you want to do business or not? Do you want to get the right answer or not? What do you want to do? Do you want to spend time boosting your ego and feel like you have this important relationship with someone? Or is it like actually more important for you to get the answer? An example is like now that Loom has had some success, like there are investors that reach out to me all the time about my thoughts on a company or they’ll be like, “Hey, what are the thoughts of your teammates who implemented at zero or something? We’d love to get their thoughts. We’re thinking about investing in a competing product or whatever.” I’ll be like, “Cool. Here’s a Loom from them.” Or like, “Here’s a Loom from me.” Sometimes they’ll be like, “Hey, I just hop on a call with them”, and I’ll be like, “No, they need to do engineering.”
Vinay Hiremath:
It is funny. I think that, I guess the question would be for these people like, not only do you want to get the answer faster, do you feel there’s agency stripped away from you when you’re not synchronously with someone going back and forth? Do you feel there are questions that might pop up that just will never get answer? Isn’t that I send you this message back? “Oh no! That’s it? I’m never going to be able to answer you on follow-up emails if you have other questions?”
Vinay Hiremath:
I don’t really know what it is to be honest. I think the calendly thing is different from the Loom thing though. Like the calendly thing is like you’re so important that you can’t just spend five minutes to set up this meeting. Like the answer is yes, I am and you should be too. You should be too. It’s just that it’s at a greater scale for me and you, so the time saving is amazing. I have nine hours of meetings today, and then I start work. It’s like, sometimes that just happens for me. Sometimes it just happens for me. I know that’s a crazy thing to say for somebody who’s running an async tool startup, but it’s like, I have limited amount of time.
Vinay Hiremath:
The calendly thing I think is different from the Loom thing where, the Loom thing, maybe the thing that people are getting offended by is, on one hand, could you have just written up all the texts to send this to me, so that way I can parse through it over and over again? Maybe that’s one part of it. I don’t really know because I’m not in the interactions. In which case, maybe that’s fair and maybe it’s not. It’s also like, “Hey, I’m doing you a favor by getting you this critical information you reached out to me for the favor.” The [inaudible 00:54:06] end of it would maybe be the ego thing like, “Why can’t you hop on a call with me?” Or maybe there’s like an ulterior motive for why they wanted to actually hop on a call with you, right?
Sam Corcos:
Sure.
Vinay Hiremath:
I get VCs reaching out being like, “Hey, do you have a recommendation for this founder? I saw they worked at wherever, like you’ve worked with them in the past.” I’ll send them my recommendation over a Loom. Then I find out that they actually wanted to hop on a call because they want to invest in the next round, right?
Sam Corcos:
Sure.
Vinay Hiremath:
[crosstalk 00:54:34] relationship, and it’s like, so maybe port of it is also, “Hey, I can’t really build the relationship in the same way with you as if we hopped on a call,” which is fair enough, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to like get back to work.
Sam Corcos:
A couple of other questions that I really wanted to get to. It actually comes to a question you asked a while ago, what is the utility of a meeting? One of the interesting, as you would expect, we do a lot of experiments on communication and asynchronous tools. One of the experiments that I did, writing especially long-form communication, there’s a higher emotional threshold to committing the time to write. I remember talking with Tom about this, he’s our head of partnerships, where he said that he’d been putting off writing this thing for some particular document for weeks, because he felt like it would take him a whole week to write it. Then when he finally sat down to do it, took him less than an hour. But he said the emotional cost of writing that document was so high, as opposed to doing a one-hour conversation, the emotional cost is super low.
Sam Corcos:
There’s some principle there that’s interesting. One of the experiments that we’re running right now is, we want to do more retros on projects, and getting people to write out a retro has been excruciatingly hard. I think it’s because the project, once it’s shipped, you have that completion of the project is done and then saying, “Oh yeah,” and spend a couple hour hours writing up new stuff afterwards. It’s really hard to get over that emotional hurdle, but doing a one-hour debrief conversation with someone on the product team, not so bad, and you can record that and then you can share that. That’s been super easy to get implemented and it’s basically the same information. But what I’ve found as interesting is I did an experiment with Josh, my co-founder, Josh, where to try to see what if we just did a recorded conversation, me thinking through my process for some memo and we record it and just use the transcript as the basis for the longer form piece.
Sam Corcos:
What’s interesting is we did, it was a one hour conversation times two people. The whole memo, if I had started from scratch, probably would’ve taken about two hours. Equivalent amount of company time put into this, we got the transcript backed and I put it into the memo format and I started pulling useful bits from it. I probably got three to five sentences that were useful out of the entire transcript. I was really surprised at how low resolution that exchange was, given that in the equivalent amount of time, I could have written the entire memo. I don’t know if you’ve had similar experiences. It seems like there must be a different type of information, and I think you’ve touched on the emotional connection. That’s maybe the point of what is the utility of a meeting.
Vinay Hiremath:
Storytelling is the ultimate, the narrative behind the information is, it’s the most important factor to actually aligning with that information and retaining it. The affectiveness with an a again, the affectiveness of video or of a document is the most important thing. As you read through this document, does it evoke an emotion? Forget about good or bad. It can be a bad emotion too. You’re going to remember that document. It’s just like, does it evoke emotion in you? It is part of affective communication. I think that the truth is, and I’ll go back to this, is that we’ve been writing as a species for such a short period of time, our brains are just not equipped, are not nearly as equipped to write as they are to absorb information by speaking with each other. It is so much easier for me to like fuel an emotional attachment to what the other person is saying when it’s like a story that’s being told and that’s conversation.
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s easier to get that kind of narrative affectiveness from video, because writing is so hard. I write all the time. I would consider myself a very good writer and I’m still probably shit. If you go, how in the world are you going to get people to be that good at writing? Writing is a luxury skillset forever. I’d say that it’s even more luxury now because writing is like writing out a bunch of like 280 character tweets or like [inaudible 00:59:22]. Writing is not the same as it was before. Now that we have the ability to record this video content, if you’re looking at either medium, it’s going to be easier to record the video, it’s going to be easier to get your point across. Yeah, I think that you’re going to have this uncanny valley, or uncanny valley is not the right word here.
Sam Corcos:
I know what you mean.
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s like, you’re going to have this valley of despair, that’s the phrase I’m looking for. You’re going to have this valley of despair when you think about writing, because writing imposes linear, rational thought, which just takes up way more cognitive horsepower than speaking. I think that there is this crux with writing, it’s like building a writing culture basically means that you have to hire people with the skillset that basically nobody has. Even really effective readers, a lot of them are not good at writing. I read their docs and I’m like, “Oh man! You would’ve been better off just recording a Loom, even though I think you should have written this thing down.”
Vinay Hiremath:
It’s funny because I read this tweet, and I’ll send it in the chat, but I read this tweet from John Cutler today. He’s like an engineering leader and he’s like pondering this for a reasonably healthy team, and the quote is, “We don’t do retrospectives, they feel like a waste. If people have a problem, they work it out on the spot. If it’s serious, they bring it up to,” and then in quotes, manager, and she unblocks us, making it formal, felt, unnecessary and disruptive. Literally, what we’re talking about here, and I just sent them in chat, I do think that the cognitive barrier to writing is really high. By the way, this is like the number one problem with coaching and management. It’s not only tactically what is getting in your way, the question that I always ask people when I’m trying to figure out where they’re at is, what do you know you need to do that you keep putting off because there’s an emotional barrier stopping you from making the decision you already know you need to make?”
Vinay Hiremath:
There’s probably a decision you already … Most decisions are not that complex. They’re really not. There’s a lot of input, but I think that we’re actually really good at pattern matching as long as we have the right information to make the decision. The thing that makes it really hard is, “Oh shit! The decision I need to make is giving some really critical feedback to someone,” and that’s going to suck. In this case, the decision of writing is, I’m going to need to go through this journey that I know I suck at and that takes me like, I have all of these memories of these high school essays that I did and these college essays and they took forever and they really sucked. I think that the thing you’re up against with writing is that it is genuinely a difficult skillset and there’s this emotional barrier that gets in the way. The emotional barrier is, honestly, what gets in the way of most good work, in my opinion.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. Reminds me, I should probably do a podcast with David Perel who does a lot of, he puts out a lot of thought on writing and what the limitations are of writing would be an interesting conversation as well. He’s very focused on that medium. One of the things that I’ve been considering is, as part of the de-programming of joining Levels might be one of the weeks in your first month, no written communication, only video to just get used to doing it. Just like, all communication this month can only be done in Looms. No typing is allowed, only send Looms to other people for the week, and just get used to that because it’s a really effective way of communicating different types of information. It’s an interesting idea that we might experiment with.
Vinay Hiremath:
Dude! Well, if you all do that, I want to be there for that experiment. I want to be quarterbacking it in whatever way. I want to hear about the failures as soon as they come up. I want to be ready for video calls with your teams if they have questions, so please let me know if you run that experiment.
Sam Corcos:
Totally.
Vinay Hiremath:
Because I heard it is a, crazy, b, I think Levels is one of the few places where that would actually get pushed through and I’m super excited to see what comes off that. I think, obviously, you would not want to, at least in the current incarnation of Loom, you would not want to replace all of your communication with Looms. But the idea of doing that for a week is pretty hardcore and, dude, I would love to support it in any way and learn. That would just be such a massive, massive learning opportunity for our entire company.
Sam Corcos:
Yeah. We could try just doing it for all communications, because one of the nice things about it is that surfaces the failure modes of doing it that way. It’s like, “Oh, well, we discovered that these three types of communication really cannot be done effectively in this format.” Just knowing that is really helpful information, so yeah. I’ve had it on my list of things to experiment with and I’ve talked to a couple people on the team, so we probably will do it in some capacity.
Vinay Hiremath:
Dude, awesome. Let me know when that happens too, so I can gear up a chart for our board meeting. Be like, “Guys, we’re [testing 01:04:26] this new product and we’ll get the [fact 01:04:29] at Levels, they’ve just 5xed their depth of engagement.
Sam Corcos:
That’s funny.