Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:06 Bringing everybody together is really tough. It's not impossible, but you have to kind of choose when you wanna do it and why you wanna do it very carefully because expecting everybody to, you know, when you have a flexible schedule and you have time zones and you have remote and hybrid work saying, all right, we all need to meet up at 9:00 AM DC time, whatever. For this like meeting and all hands or something like that, it better be important and it better be important to everybody or at least most of the people on the call.
Speaker 2 00:00:35 Welcome to the Remote Culture Club podcast. On this show we inspire and equip leaders to build remote culture that works. I'm your host Alex Dunn, and even though I've been leading remote organizations for over 10 years, I'm always learning more. It's really nice to have you here. And without further ado, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 00:01:03 One of the most common benefits people cite when they're building remote teams is that they're excited to be able to hire talent from all over the world, but managing an organization that has staff all over the world can introduce tremendous number of operational challenges. Um, in this episode, I talked to Vanessa Goas, who is the Chief Operating Officer at Development Gateway, and she's gonna walk us through sort of how she thinks about her role as an operational leader within a large global team and give us some, some tips and some stories about how to do it well and things that she's learned over the years, um, as she's grown a team from Tiny to pretty big and pretty consolidated in a city to global a.
Speaker 2 00:01:54 Um, so I am here with Vanessa Goaz from Development Gateway. She's the Chief Operating Officer and she is gonna talk to us a little bit about what it's like to be an operational leader in a remote team that has spread all over the world. We're gonna dig into various aspects of that and sort of how she sees, um, her work and what you might be able to take away in your own work. So Vanessa, do you wanna kick us off? What do you do at Development Gateway? Sort of how did you get into this work?
Speaker 1 00:02:19 Yeah, sure. I kind of got into this work a little bit by accident. So I was in grad school and I received a notice for an internship at Development Gateway. I googled them, found out they were doing things in the digital development space, and I was like, yeah, I like computers and I'm interested in development. Let me like give it a shot. I applied and I have not left for 15 years now, so I ended up getting into this particular position after many years kind of working with dg implementing projects and programs, but I was really interested in how our teams work together and how we can actually make DG like the best organization and, and do the best delivery we can via kind of both our implementation teams and also the back office side of things. So what I'm in charge of these days is I, I supervise and I manage our kind of three, three of our core teams, our programs team, which is our delivery side, our technical teams, our software developers, scrum masters designers, qa, and also our finance team, um, which finance and hr. So with them and with our C E O, Josh and together then with our engagement and partnership team, that's our, it's our whole of dg.
Speaker 2 00:03:33 So you sort of started outlining these programs. Can you say a little bit more about where is your team and sort of how is the team structured geographically and also maybe in other ways to sort of paint a picture of how the organization runs and is put together?
Speaker 1 00:03:47 Yeah, almost all of our teams are worldwide. Let's say we have hubs in four different places, but we do hire kind of everywhere. Our four hubs are in the US actually five hubs, I guess in the US in Dakar, Senegal, in Nairobi, Kenya, in Moldova, in Kau, and also in Cordoba, Argentina. So these hubs have developed some kind of combination of both organically and on purpose. For example, Cordoba and Kau, uh, where we have a lot of the members of our technical team. These are two cities that have big technical universities and produce like a lot of software developer, um, professionals. And basically we would hire one person there and the team kind of grew organically from there. Dakar and Nairobi of course are major hubs, um, in both East and West Africa for, for development. They're, you know, pretty central, have good infrastructure, good internet technology, which was used to be and still is pretty important for having a remote team and well connected, you know, in the region via, you know, airports and things like that.
Speaker 1 00:05:00 So our team, we have about 20 people in the United States and about 45 outside. Basically in the last like five years or so, we've been very intentionally growing the team outside of the US faster than the team in the us This is of course, I think, well, maybe not of course, maybe this isn't obvious to people, but since our work is, you know, highly concentrated in in Africa, we wanna be closer to the delivery and we wanna be hiring people that understand the context and have all this experience and you know, not be flying out an American, uh, to uh, to Africa every time we wanna do some work there. We still have our core US team and we still grow it, we still do grow it, but we've been really focused on growing where we're doing the delivery and so far that's been pretty successful for us.
Speaker 2 00:05:48 So I'm presuming it's always been remote in some way or another, or sort of how has that evolved over time?
Speaker 1 00:05:55 Yeah, that's a great question. So we've been, we've been hybrid remote worldwide since I started. So in 2007, and I think even prior to that it was the case. And so we've always had team members all over the world and only recently I think have we been starting to sort of concentrate the hubs like a little bit more intentionally, but as far as I can remember, we've always had this system
Speaker 2 00:06:18 Super interesting. But it must have changed. I mean obviously the technology available, even the kind of management practices that might now exist that didn't exist and the sort of models that you could sort of compare yourself to other organizations doing things in particular ways. Like has it changed or has it just kind of gotten a little bit bigger and a little bit smoother? Um, or have there been sort of big sort of step changes?
Speaker 1 00:06:43 Yeah, there have definitely been big step changes. I mean, maybe strangely, one of the biggest ones was when the fiber optic cable made it to Kenya. Uh, we used to have, you know, it was very difficult to communicate with that team. At one point we had installed, like, we had this whole like voiceover IP phone system. I remember you used to like dial the extension to have to call people and that was sometimes the only way you can get ahold of people. And even then it, it often didn't work. So, you know, like the idea of hosting like we do now, like an all team meeting with everybody on Zoom, every camera on sharing a presentation, doing it in real time. That was totally unheard of. Even let's say 10 to 15 years ago. It was very, it would've been very, very difficult for us.
Speaker 1 00:07:27 We did a lot of our communication over, um, an I R C chat server, which if you're not familiar is, you know, just text, there's no sharing of files, emojis, none of none of the above. So it was very, it's an ugly slack, I think it's super ugly and it was, you know, it felt often really transactional because it was really hard to make the connections. What was the moment to make good connections was when you would travel together. So we, it was very often that we would have three or four people from four different parts of the world meeting up in one place for a couple of weeks to do some work together. And that was when you made those like really strong connections. The hybrid, I mean, I, I think what happened with the pandemic has changed a lot of organizations and I think what it changed for us is a realization that even though we were doing remote work, I think reasonably well compared to a lot of organizations and the transition for us wasn't super difficult.
Speaker 1 00:08:24 It did allow us to kind of lean into a lot of what other organizations were learning a little bit more painfully about things like, you know, hybrid meeting facilitation and involving people in remote locations and how to get people kind of excited, um, when you're just joining happy hour after Zoom, happy hour, getting kind of tired of it. So I think we definitely, you know, taken a step in the right direction there. And then I think also the, the idea to start intentionally concentrating the teams in different hubs versus like hiring a little bit everywhere has been good because it's allowed the teams to kind of organically choose when they wanna come together, meet up, you know, we're developing some more like regional strategies, which we haven't been able to do in the past, but those are, those have probably been the biggest ones. I mean the, the improvement of internet across Africa has probably been the biggest thing for us. Um, that's been the, the most exciting change, but that's been a long time coming. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:09:22 And I mean, when you think about the benefits in terms of the work that you're doing, I mean, it sounds like proximity to, you know, the actual work is important. It sounds like, you know, you're able to recruit talent globally in a way that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do, um, if you were just hiring based on a particular city that people happen to live in. What are the other sort of benefits when you all think about remote work as a component of your strategy for other organizations who might be, uh, still in that kind of single location heavy, but like with some people in some places and they feel like haven't made that sort of shift to being like, actually we're a remote first organization and where you are is kind of tangential to what functions you can perform and sort of how you can participate within the team?
Speaker 1 00:10:03 Yeah, I think it allows us to hire really the best people, I think, because it allows them a level of flexibility that doesn't lock them into sort of a subset of options for jobs. So, you know, there's a lot of research and I think our inside surveys also show that it's been really beneficial for parents in particular to have this kind of arrangement because, you know, childcare is wild. Like it's a wild thing and it's unpredictable and raising a kid, it's not, it's not easy. And I think removing the stress of like having to be in a particular location every day at the same time, it, it makes a difference. You know, I, I think that's been probably the, the biggest thing that I've seen is just the availability of people to work when this option is available. It, it makes things more interesting, a diversity of opinions and experiences that you may not get if you're concentrated in, in person.
Speaker 1 00:11:06 And I also think that some kind of side effect of hybrid and remote work that we've had over the years is you really get to know people on a personal level. And I there that can be like a little toxic. Like I, I don't wanna, you know, be like we're a family and all, no, we're still, we're still a job. It's still a place of employment. Um, you still have your own life and your own family. But in difficult work, which we do complicated work, something that we really value is we really like one another. Our colleagues are like interesting and fun and great to work with. And being able to make also that kind of personal connection when appropriate I think is important. So like really literally calling into somebody's home in the middle of the day where you might have their cat in front of you or their kid, you know, screaming behind them, whatever, it's, it improves that personal connection I think.
Speaker 2 00:11:57 Yeah, totally. Um, I love a good cat snap. I feel like there's the sort of interpersonal aspect of it being beneficial and the sort of personal aspect and there's also the sort of organizational leadership sort of way that you can, the opportunities available to you as someone who's in charge of an organization and sort of thinking strategically about what's on offer. I'm wondering sort of what the flip side of that is. So when you, when you work in this way, when you plan in this way, when you kind of think strategically in this way as a leader of an organization like this, what's challenging sort of thinking about that leadership role and kind of trying to manage effectively across all these time zones, which maybe I'm hinting at one problem that I think is probably, uh, an issue.
Speaker 1 00:12:38 <laugh>. Yeah, I mean, bringing everybody together is really tough. It's not impossible, but you have to kind of choose when you wanna do it and why you wanna do it very carefully because expecting everybody to, you know, when you have a flexible schedule and you have time zones and you have remote and hybrid work saying, all right, we all need to meet up at 9:00 AM DC time, whatever for this like meeting and all hands or something like that, it better be important and it better be important to everybody or at least most of the people on the call. I mean, so that's one thing I think that's just changed our perspective of when everybody needs to be brought together, when we can do things in chunks, how we communicate out, whether it's like in the moment or asynchronously dropping a slack announcement in the, in the announcements channel.
Speaker 1 00:13:29 I think also there is something to be said about FaceTime across these teams and with whom and how often and for what purpose. So, you know, we're kind of on the tail end of completing a number of visits across our hubs from many members of our leadership team. And it's been good to get the feedback about where these things have been meaningful and in what ways for people. I mean, part of it is just team building and having a good time, but a lot of part of it is sending out communication or communicating things in a way that even though we may have communicated them before in a newsletter, all hands are an announcement. Being able to do it in person and have like that back and forth, you know, where you don't have to wait for me to complete my thought. I can like feel your body language that you're like not understanding something or you want more, you know, that's been, it's been important to have that balance. So I think, you know, as you hinted at there, it's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of really great things at, at this moment for us at least. We, we are not like a hundred percent remote that you'll never meet your colleagues. Like that's not, that hasn't worked for us quite yet, but I think we found, you know, a good balance in that.
Speaker 2 00:14:42 Yeah, I wonder if that would work for anyone if, I mean, I think with any level of complexity of a mission, 'cause I feel like you have like the, the texture and the context and the richness that you get when you spend time in person. It fuels you for remote work for a long time. But I just can't really imagine, I mean, I'm sure some people have managed to do it, but it feels like a, an unnecessary sacrifice. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:15:08 I, I agree with you. And I mean, it's hard because I am remote. I mean, I am the, I am an office of one in Miami. No, none of my colleagues work anywhere near me. So, uh, and at the same time, you know, I'm working really closely with our team on what do our kind of, what does hybrid work look like? What are our remote work policies, what's the future for us going to look like? And I don't wanna be the one to be like, yeah, we have to go back because I'm not going back. Where am I gonna go? So, but at the same time I'm reading all of these different things, reading, reading and a lot of people, um, I don't know if you use this app called like fishbowl, a lot of people wanna be like a hundred percent remote, like never meet their colleagues. And I'm like, uh, it feels like a, a little risky to me. Um, but you know, to each their own I suppose, but maybe not for us.
Speaker 2 00:15:51 Yeah, I'm sure there's a bird, bird of a feather kind of thing. Like now people can find those people, uh, and maybe we're just not those people. <laugh>. <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:15:59 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:16:00 That's super interesting. I mean, I think, I mean, I'm curious 'cause you obviously are in a position where you're meant to be setting policies for the organization, sort of learning and listening from what people need and then creating enough of the sort of at least sort of consistency that people can kind of lean into without it feeling constrictive in terms of how policies are developed. You mentioned a remote policy, but I imagine just operationally finance policies, technology development policies, there must be just like policies out the wazoo that you have to deal with. And I'm wondering sort of in a remote space, it's obviously very different in terms of the cycle of developing those things and it's also harder to, for example, I imagine listen as to whether people are comfortable with them, understand them, you know, are okay with them, don't like secretly resent them deeply. <laugh> <laugh>. Um, so how do you as a, as a, you know, someone who's responsible for the operations of the organization, how do you think about policy development in a remote environment?
Speaker 1 00:16:54 It's a really good question. So we've, we've established over the years sort of a organizational culture of agility and testing and quick feedback. It's how we implement, but it's also how we do things internally. So with a lot of, I'll give you, um, a very like small but maybe meaningful example. We got new laptops last fall. We have an office space that people can use, but people don't have to come. So how do we do distribution? How do we do upgrades? How do we do all this? It used to be everybody was there. So we would sit everybody down in a room and we would do it all together and okay, so we had to come up with like a whole new thing just for laptop distribution last fall. And it was very much like a, this is what we're gonna try. I can't tell you it's perfect, but it seems good enough and it's gonna work for 90% of you and for 10% of you, it might be slightly inconvenient, but at, at the moment where we are, this is how we're gonna do things.
Speaker 1 00:17:55 We, people have responded pretty well to that kind of perspective. There's a bit of a, a radical transparency that we've been doing from the leadership of being really clear when we're waiting into a space that has no, has no antecedents, like we don't know, we don't know what we're doing all of the time. This is a, a brand new situation. We've never done it before. We used to, I think, not hide it, but maybe like not lean into telling everybody, all right, we don't know what we're doing. But now we're a little bit more, we're a little bit more upfront and be like, look, we've never done this before. It's first time we're doing it. We think that these could be the failure points, but we're not sure. And this I think has opened up people also to be a little more, more upfront with their feedback and useful feedback.
Speaker 1 00:18:40 Not just like, I don't like it, but like this is maybe what we could do next time. This is how it, you know, wasn't great for me. It's like actually constructive. So this culture that we've developed, I think it's been really useful so far. 'cause we've put into place a couple of things that we've had to change because they fell flat. You know, we're trying, we're like piloting meeting free Fridays right now in a week we're gonna send out a survey, pulse survey to see how it went. So we're just kind of going just basically how our culture of how we implement we're doing, our culture of how we do policies and stuff internally, get a little bit of, you know, get some information ahead of time to see what the problem is, come up with some solutions, road test them, set a deadline for when we're gonna find out if they worked or not and then roll them back if we need to or make them wider if we, if we can.
Speaker 2 00:19:27 That's super interesting and I feel like a piece there that you didn't speak to directly, but I imagine is a huge component is the communication of all of that. And I'm wondering sort of when you're rolling something out organization wide, you know, are you sending, like how do you do it? Do you do it in all hands? Are you doing it in an email to everyone? Are you like seeding it by kind of emailing like a couple key people that you know are gonna kind of spread the news? Like how do you, how do you think about comms around policy?
Speaker 1 00:19:54 Yeah, all of the above. Like we <laugh> because everybody's definitely getting, they're absorbing information in different ways. I mean, I would love to believe that every time I send an announcement on Slack that everybody's like reading every word very carefully, but I know better and my ego's not so, so, uh, fragile that I, I can't accept that. So, you know, we have like an internal newsletter. We do quarterly all's hands, so they're not always timely enough. We will send out emails, we'll send Slack announcements. And the thing about seeding information, I absolutely do that. We have these kind of representatives that we have between our staff and consultants. I will seed them information and ask them to pass it along. I'll ask all the supervisors to also remind folks pretty consistently of like what new things are. But it definitely does take, it does take some effort. I mean, there's some change management that has to happen. The communication is a major part of it. I think. Uh, we had hoped that in the beginning that, you know, you could just send out one email and that would be it, but it's just not the case. And I'd rather, I'd rather people understand it and get it than be right about, you know, one form of communication. It's not, it's not too much effort to, to send it a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 2 00:21:01 That's super interesting. Another quick super niche question. How do you manage documentation around your policies? Like where do people go to get questions answered?
Speaker 1 00:21:09 Yeah, we are not doing great here. I mean we, we, so everything used to be like in Google Drive, which turned out to be a total disaster because just finding, I don't know, maybe I'm the only one, but finding things in Google Drive is like impossible and people will edit things without meaning to. Yeah. So
Speaker 2 00:21:31 It's like an open text search. I just have to remember the unique word.
Speaker 1 00:21:34 Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:35 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:21:36 So we've been making, and we started last fall, we made like a Google site for like our employee handbook as a test to see. And so far things have kind of been working well. So we're thinking of migrating maybe everything to Google sites, but I've been making like some indices of like key policies, just like one document to rule them all with all the links. It's not so much better than our current system <laugh>, but we need to improve. And we have, we have a double challenge, which is that we have a number of long-term consultants. We are now starting to use PEOs also, and we have staff in the United States. So we have kind of three different versions of everything, the version that applies to staff, the version that applies to staff outside of the US and the version that applies to consultants. So that also is just a bit of a nightmare, but we're now is the right point for us to do it. I think the best advice I got from somebody was to get ahead of it before it becomes a, a total nightmare. And we're, we're in a position where we're, you know, growing a little bit on the cusp of probably growing a lot and uh, now is the time.
Speaker 2 00:22:48 That's super interesting. Can you explain what a p e O is for people who might not be familiar? Yeah, because it's a kind of power move, I think in remote employment. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:22:56 So you may not realize, but um, you can only hire staff members in countries that you have legal entities in. And most organizations maybe have one, maybe have a couple, uh, outside of the us. Um, but we only have one, we're only in the United States. And one of the limitations between, um, staff and consultants is that consultants can't become supervisors. They can't do certain like, represent the organization in certain ways. It's kind of a, just a bit of a fine line. And the ideal situation would be that, you know, we have everybody with the same ability to take the same career path within our organization and have, you know, the same, the same futures possibilities ahead of them. So what we've done in the past is hire everybody outside of the US as a consultant. Everybody's on a a three-year, um, contract. Many of our consultants have been with us for more than 10 or 15 years, which is amazing.
Speaker 1 00:23:53 So we really, you know, want this option. And A P E O P E O is a, is a professional employment organization, I think. And they are essentially, they're a company that you hire to hire your employee for you and then they lend them back to you. So it's the, it's a perfectly legal, it sounds kind of weird, but it's a perfectly legal way of hiring staff outside of the United States without forming a, a legal entity in that country. So they take care of like taxes, compliance, hr, all of that. And we've had now one team member, um, convert from consultant to staff this way and we've opened it up to our whole team as an option. Some are investigating it for some the consultancy life is, is good for them and for others they're looking into it. But it, it now makes rules like, you know, we used to manage one list of holidays, the US holiday list. Now I have to also know the Romanian holiday list. Like this is, so this is a bit of a, a new venture for us, but it's been really exciting. Um, something that we've been wanting to do for some time and kind of, we talked to a lot of different organizations to find out how they did it and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 00:25:03 Yeah, totally game changing. Yeah, and I think the way that you're thinking equitably about career path is really interesting. 'cause I think most organizations I've spoken with that use PEOs think of it as kind of a binary, like you're, you've either got a con you're on a consulting contract, which you know, to be clear, a lot of times the individuals on those consulting contracts prefer those to employment contracts. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which is another kind of strange thing that I know I found surprising when we started doing those in a former organization. But I think there's so many more dimensions to that question of staff or consultant. It also creates, I mean, as you said, kind of several versions of the same policy but also different ways that you're able to communicate to people. There's also sort of strange kind of restrictions. Um, and I think it's particular to some, some of it's particular, I think to nonprofit law in the US which is incredibly stringent.
Speaker 2 00:25:57 And I presume that some of this stuff doesn't exist, um, in the sort of <laugh> private sector, which it probably should. 'cause I think most of the things that we realized were constraints. We were like, oh, that's like very reasonable <laugh>. That's a constraint. And I wish actually there was more enforcement and also that the private sector was held to these standards <laugh>. But that's a really, yeah, that's just really an interesting way. Um, I hadn't thought about it in terms of career path, I think until actually I spoke to Josh about this a while ago and I think it's really cool that you all are thinking about it, um, in those ways. Cool. Well I have, let me find a, so if somebody was getting into this role, like it's a pretty complicated thing. Like essentially running an organization is hard, running a large organization is difficult.
Speaker 2 00:26:39 Running a grant seeking, and I think you all also do service delivery like within the context of not grants is difficult. Uh, being a senior leader in an organization is difficult. Being an operational leader, I think <laugh> comes with all kinds of nuances and complexity and it's like just forever you're learning stuff and it's difficult. Plus having to sort of lead and shape an organization that is global and also deal with the remote element, like, it just sounds like a lot, but I presume that there's a lot more people that are either considering this kind of a role or maybe you're a more junior in the kind of operations roles within, um, these types of organizations or just wanna know what you think about how one should consider this position. So if, if you were talking to somebody that was like, I'm applying for this job and I'm a little bit scared. 'cause being a c e o O of a large organization that works globally on these kinds of issues is tricky and scary. <laugh>, what would you suggest? Like how did you get comfortable with the amount of change and the amount of, I don't know, like you must constantly be like dealing with so much detail but also having to be agile and I don't know, tell us how do, like, how do you approach it mentally? How have you grown into your capacity to be able to do this?
Speaker 1 00:27:48 Yeah, and I think something that you and I have talked about is actually talking to other people in this situation and just, just finding out that you're not alone and you're not crazy. Like you all of these problems, you know, they have some like little uniqueness to your organization, but they're really, really shared amongst a lot of other people. And there's ideas out there, there's a lot of people kind of struggling with the same things. And I think forming your community, like that's, that's the first thing I would recommend because just knowing that somebody else out there is struggling with the same thing as you, it can really calm, calm some of those nerves. I think because it is like overwhelming. I, I think at first you have to really give yourself space and every week and every day for the unknown. I mean, I, I mentally set aside a third to a half of my week for things that I don't know are gonna happen because since you're dealing with new things that you couldn't even imagine happening, um, before they happen.
Speaker 1 00:28:49 So you just have to give yourself like that room. I think also one thing that's been useful for me is just putting away my ego of thinking that what I do is gonna be right the first time. E even if you research it for eons and you think you've talked to everybody, like you're gonna eventually do something that does not land and that's totally okay. I mean, either it's the right thing to do and people just don't like it and you might have to just live with that or you did the wrong thing, like you blew it. That's okay. You know, you're gonna be doing so many things that eventually one thing is not gonna land. So I think that was a useful realization for me. And then I think the last realization for me was that no matter how many times in different ways you communicate something, you cannot predict how one person is going to receive that.
Speaker 1 00:29:38 And there have been many things which in my mind were like crystal clear, like totally low stakes, not a thing. And then somebody just took it the worst possible way, like in a way that just hit them really personally. And it's, it's not a thing maybe you could have prevented against. And what's important is that you care about the people and you care about the organization, spend some time with them, walk them through it, talk them through it, hear out their concerns. They've probably dealt with something or been through something that you have never been through or aren't aware of and it's just gonna improve what you do in the future. So I think yeah, drop you, you're gonna be doing so many things. Your fingers are gonna be in so many parts of the organization, eventually something's gonna blow up in your face. It's just a numbers game. So <laugh> just, you know, keep rolling with it, keep trying to improve, just listen to people, hear them out. People have great ideas and you are, you know, impacting the way they work, their benefits, their schedules, everything. So hear them out because they're gonna have good ideas for how they wanna be, you know, doing their work. And you're gonna have good ideas from the organization side and you're gonna meet somewhere in between.
Speaker 2 00:30:50 That is such good advice. I wish someone had told me that like 10 years ago. Yeah, me too. That's really good. Yeah, me too. <laugh>, I really, no, I really, I mean that that idea that like, you are not even gonna make a mistake, but like things are not gonna necessarily go how you anticipate. And the purpose is not to perfectly anticipate the purpose is to be flexible and listen so that when whatever you're doing, you know, you're in a position where you can adapt based on what other people actually are experiencing rather than what you thought they would <laugh>. Yeah. Because I think there's, there's such desire for artifice because you're like, I'm trying to construct the perfect thing and I'm invested, so invested, but when it comes to people, there is no perfect thing. I think is the main Yeah. Takeaway. Yeah. Cool. Okay, well thank you for coming. This was great. Um, and I am guessing lots of people are googling lots of new terms and ideas. Uh, and that was exactly the point and I really appreciate you coming. Yeah, thanks
Speaker 1 00:31:40 For having me.
