The Remote CEO

In Conversation with Simon De Baene: CEO and Co-Founder of GSoft

This week’s conversation proved different. 

This week’s conversation is with Simon De Baene, the co-founder and CEO of GSoft. Simon was introduced to me through an old friend and current employee at GSoft. I was eager to connect with Simon who, after fourteen years of building and running GSoft in a traditional physical office space, was now in his early days as a remote-first CEO. GSoft recently made the decision to go remote, not just until it is safe to be back in the office, but indefinitely. 

I was curious. I wanted to know how a leadership team makes a decision like this, especially with regard to maintaining company culture (since it seems like so much of a company's culture is rooted in personal, face-to-face, interaction). I wondered how Simon would ensure that GSoft’s culture would remain strong and true to its ethos without the option to break bread with co-workers regularly. How do you cut someone off on Zoom, politely, if you’ve never shared a meal? 

However, our conversation about company culture evolved into a more personal one. Simply put, the guy is humble. He validated for me that it is indeed possible to grow a large and sustainable company while remaining modest. Even better, he reminded me that now, more than ever, it is okay not to have all the answers. That actually not having the answers creates opportunity. We talked about:

• Company culture: then vs. now;

• What going remote-first means for creativity; 

• Upskilling as this decades free lunch; and 

• The Opportunity Playground.

As always, I hope you enjoy the conversation and please share any feedback! Also a big thank you to Simon for doing the interview in English (his first language is French!).

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It’s 2006 and Simon and his co-founders have the initial idea to start GSoft. Fourteen years later, and fourteen years into building one of Canada’s largest private software businesses, he’s excited about the opportunity to blow it all up (my words not his). I learned in my short time with Simon that he’s always done things his own way. A contrarian of sorts, who is the heart and soul of his company. We got the chance to connect and discuss what it's been like building future of work software for the past decade, and why this pandemic-led moment is the perfect time to challenge the status quo.

Re-thinking Company Culture: It’s Okay to be Quieter.

Simon talks about an early culture at GSoft of just getting shit done. They worked hard, they played hard, and they did it their way. Of his company culture he proudly says, “we’ve always been a little weird.” Instead of following the typical startup-happy path of (1) grow quickly, (2) raise capital, (3) invest in growth,  (4) rinse and repeat, Simon was interested in taking his own slightly less-travelled path. He was enamored by Jason Fried of Basecamp (who created one of the original productivity and team collaboration software tools) who espoused: Start a business, not a startup. Simon and his co-founders chose to bootstrap the business, prioritizing sustainable growth over growing at all cost. He writes clearly about why here, and how this approach has allowed GSoft to continue to be resilient in such uncertain times. You can debate whether he left money on the table as a result, but GSoft continues to move along steadily, growing towards annual sales of over $100 million, with a few hundred employees, and no debt or outside capital on its balance sheet.

I share these details to shed light on how Simon’s unique vision led to the culture that’s been created at GSoft. I ask him point blank, “How do you maintain this mindset, fostering this scrappy culture, in a remote-first world? One where inevitably you’ll start having employees who work together yet have never met face-to-face?”

SDB: I co-founded this business when I was twenty years old while still in school. We hired a bunch of young people; we were just a bunch of bright young people working hard. It was a good time, we had amazing years. Now we have a more diverse workforce, which is also amazing. I think there's a lot of nostalgia about culture. We sometimes think about culture as just a lot of people cheering together. Culture is not just about those things. 

About going remote-first: I think there’s a feeling that when we're all together everything is so dynamic. But it's like running, if you're running fast but in a circle, you're not going anywhere. [Going remote] might mean we’ll be a little bit slower at first but we will make sure we’re running in the right direction.

We also know that this new model might not work for everyone and that’s okay. We're not trying to please everyone. I think it's okay to be a little bit more quiet as a company, maybe it will be less exciting than it was when we were twenty years old but it's going to be exciting for other reasons that we value more now. We will also need to accept that there will be some stuff that we just won't be able to do anymore, and there will be new things that we discover about remote work that are great. Less commute, more time for self-development, less distraction to get work done. There will be other things that are maybe less sexy in the sense of the very superficial stuff that we think of when we think about company culture. But at the end of the day I think it's going to enable us to go much deeper and I think it's going to create a much stronger company at the end of the day.

Don’t Just Make Remote Work Work, Do Better. 

It’s time to get comfortable with the uncomfortable again. For Simon, going remote-first isn’t simply about jumping on the bandwagon of tech companies moving in this direction or even just necessary evil of the pandemic. Instead, he views this moment as one with infinite opportunity, especially for the shifting world of work. This moment is about the opportunity to explore, it’s time for them to experience the shift firsthand. That’s why GSoft decided to default to a remote-first company. 

( 📸 GSoft HQ)

Making this change isn’t about removing the dreaded commute (most GSoft employees live near  the Montreal HQ) or forced downsizing due to the pandemic. For Simon, it’s about paving a new road and hitting some walls, saying “let's break some legs and noses and we'll get hurt for sure. It's a shift that we're doing today that will help us build better solutions for tomorrow.” I get excited hearing Simon describe the avenues ahead of them. Going remote-first provides the opportunity to explore new ways of working and foster’s creativity. It helps to develop greater empathy with remote-first customers while becoming one of the second-wave pioneers of remote culture. 

In theory this all sounds great, put what does it look like to put into practice? I ask Simon what it will take to make remote-first a success. 

SDB: I don’t have all the answers! What I know for sure is that as a company going remote- first we want to be very strict on the set of tasks that must be done online. As soon as you're not clear on those things people will get sneaky like “Oh can I do my one-on-one in person? I’m happy to drive to your place.” And if the manager says yes to that person now there's the potential of a favorable bias because they connect in person. If you want to be fair with everyone, you have to have a few rules, not many. It's not about having a bunch of processes. It's about having a few principles that you stick to. At the same time, it is also important to make sure that we're not blindly assuming that everything can be done online. At the end of the day we're social animals, let's never forget that.  

Simon also sees the reset brought on by the pandemic and GSoft’s shift to a remote-first model as an opportunity to de-program our working selves. To recreate the expectation of a typical work day from the ground up. Amongst some different ideas we discuss, Simon highlights the need to stop taking each other, and each other’s time, for granted. I’m reminded of something Jason Fried said in an interview about communication at work: “Just because you had time to ask, doesn't mean I have time to answer.” It makes me wonder what the workday might look like when you can’t just walk over to your colleagues desk to ask them a question, can't  schedule meetings with them more than twice/week, or can’t have them available on Slack for more than an hour a day. Will this be the end of collaboration as we know it? Or will this simply increase resilience in the workplace by forcing employees to source answers themselves?

Job @Jobvo

If your remote culture relies on endless video calls, it’s not a remote culture.

Upskilling as the New Free Lunch

I ask Simon about where upskilling fits into the culture at GSoft. Ironically, Simon mentions Patty McCord, the HR executive famous for developing the Netflix culture alongside CEO Reed Hastings (tldr: Netflix company culture runs like a pro-sports team rather than a family). Simon is aligned with this approach, noting that upskilling and growth is something they used to let happen organically and/or led by individual employees. His mentality was that people will learn through new projects and life experiences connected to work. But about two years ago this all changed, “it's more intentional now,” he says. He adds that with the growth of the business they realized that they had to develop their managers, that “cultural management had to be more than just improvising.” GSoft now has a dedicated team for learning and development, designed to help managers develop both hard and human skills; everything from managing a budget to giving real time critical feedback to their team members. 

I ask Simon about the change in approach. Why make the investment in L&D? Why now? 

SDB:We're trying all the time to push and build new products so development is happening organically through day-to-day work. It helps that people are motivated to build new skills on top of what they already know, but it is not always obvious how to help employees upskill and re-skill in tech. I am not even sure it is a priority in tech but we’re trying to get better at it, getting clear about growth paths and the learning and developments that’s associated with new leadership opportunities. This is the kind of upskilling I’m happy to invest in, something that benefits both the individual and the business. Developing better leaders has not only made our managers feel more fulfilled, it has helped the business get better results. It's just a win-win situation.

Simon also highlights upskilling as a new (mandatory) perk at the office. Much like the free lunch and snacks companies started offering ten years ago. These things started as an enticement for new hires but over time it just became the status quo. Simon believes this will be true of upskilling.

3M Post-Its ≠ Innovation

Simon could not be more excited about the pandemic. OK WAIT, let me rephrase that. Simon is one of those people who sees the pandemic as an opportunity to rethink how we’ve been doing things. He was getting bored with the way things were. When I ask him if he’s worried about innovation suffering if team members are no longer in the same (physical) room, he talks about the fact that innovation isn’t about being in a room with a group of colleagues and a bunch of 3M Post-its. It is about providing a space to think creatively. 

So how is Simon, in this time of so much uncertainty,  thinking about maintaining existing products and business while trying to innovate for the new world of work?

SDB:We are not beholden to the legacy of the business. We’re not just a business trying to milk the cow. We are artists that like to build great tools. There's going to be a lot of stuff to build, for example, around video conferencing tools to make them more than just… video conferences. Look at Microsoft for example and what they’ve released around the reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning. There will be games that can be integrated, features for a richer conversation. It is also a time to not just innovate for our customers but for ourselves. That is part of what going remote is about, the internal innovation. By pushing ourselves to the limits, I strongly believe that we will be a better company by innovating way more than we've ever been in the past.

I took a lot away from my conversation with Simon. Not just on going remote-first and not just how to build culture, but how to lead through empathy — a common human skill that will continue to increase as a valuable future of work skill.

What will stick with me:

• Remain humble; 

• Remain flexible; 

• Crave change;

• There is no one way to re-skill employees; and 

• The best route is not always the most obvious one. 

Thanks Simon!