0:00:12 - (Matt): Hey everybody. Welcome to a special edition of Podcast Awesome, where we're coming off of our most recent all company gathering. Some of you may know we affectionately called these the Snuggle out in Bentonville, Arkansas, where our home office is. And we had all the usual shenanigans, of course, karaoke, game nights, and of course eating delicious food. Maybe a little more than we'd care to admit.

0:00:39 - (Matt): But amidst all that fun, something pretty cool happened. I got to sit down with our very own Dave Gandy, Font Awesome's founder, to chat about something that's been on a lot of people's minds lately, and that is how do you build a company where people actually want to stick around? Dave and I had a few water cooler moments that turned into deeper conversations about culture, loyalty and what it means to lead a team of incredible human beings. Because fun fact, if you didn't know, in the tech world, the average time people stay around at a job is only about 18 months.

0:01:15 - (Matt): But at Font Awesome, nobody's left in the over 10 years the company's been in existence, which is pretty awesome. So in this three part series, we're going to dive into what we think makes Font Awesome's hiring philosophy a little bit unique and why it's so important to create a place where people love coming to work. All right, so let's get into it. All right. We are here with Dave Gandy and the 2024 Snuggle — October and having a great time. The usual, usual stuff and shenanigans. Eating good food, hanging out with our friends and co workers and occasionally getting some work done. Getting some stuff done, but mostly hanging out.

0:02:05 - (Matt): Star wars game nights, movies, good food, karaoke. Oh man, karaoke. This year you got, you're going to have to go next time. It was, it was pretty amazing.

0:02:16 - (Dave): Don't worry, everything was recorded for posterity and blackmail.

0:02:20 - (Matt): Yes, yes indeed. And I have to say, honestly, I have to blame Ed, that I have a Hookastank chorus stuck in my head since about midnight last night. Poorly sung, but yeah, good times. So we were just riffing a little bit ago, sitting around sort of water cooler moment, talking about, and we're really just kind of going to the seat of our pants here. We'd like to sort of discover as we go. It sounds like you've had some folks reach out to you and ask about maybe you should do some more content or writing around hiring.

0:03:04 - (Matt): And these are all corporate words but you know, like retention. How do you build a culture where people want to stay at a company long Term. Tell me a little bit about that and how that got you thinking about this.

0:03:17 - (Dave): Yeah, I think one of the most unique things about Font awesome as a company is that, you know, in tech, the average amount of time that people stay at a job is about 18 months, and that we are over about 10 and a half years into the company itself being founded and nobody's ever left. And so there's this notion in business that every time an employee turns over, you have to hire somebody else. There's all this added expense from bringing them up to speed on whatever they're going to be doing.

0:03:58 - (Dave): You've got to understand the company, how it gets worked on. You got to understand the internal processes, all of the complexities. You get to know the people, because people are always as integral in getting things done as any technology ever actually is. And the cost of that is enormous in organizations. And so at Fawn awesome, we have thinking about what the cost to our organization that that is. And the answer is, well, it's.

0:04:27 - (Dave): We have no idea because it's never happened. Right. Yeah. That nobody has ever left. And part of this is, you know, things that Travis and I have dealt with for a very long time. When I was in my. I was probably early 30s, I had been promoted to manage a software team. I was originally on the team, and then I was promoted to manage the team, and it was a team of seven people. And I eventually got. I got fired from that job because I would not help outsource the team. And it actually wasn't so much that I wouldn't help outsource the team, as it was that I made my boss look bad.

0:05:12 - (Dave): Really, really bad. Yeah.

0:05:15 - (Matt): And because you're challenging assumptions and saying we could probably do this a different way.

0:05:21 - (Dave): Yeah. And I was also, admittedly I was also young and didn't know how to go about doing with it. I just needed to have quit. I needed to have left. And you know, the funny thing is, too, this was after they gave me this big giant stock grant for your options grant for having done such a great job and being an outstanding performer at the company. And within less than a year, they fired me. And there were two individuals that within three months of me getting fired, they came to me, obviously outside of work now, and they wanted to let me know that they had left the company and that the only reason that they had worked there as long as they had was that they got to be on my team.

0:06:05 - (Dave): And the thing that was always easy for me to understand was how do you manage down? How do you create teams that get things done well and effectively, but also enjoy what they're doing, enjoy getting to work with each other, and also get to work on the things that they want to be learning, right? Because we so often think of people at our. On our team as a cog, right? They have this function. This is what they do. What can you do for me? This is how most of the world, I think, sees the world.

0:06:38 - (Dave): What can you do for me? Right? And as long as we see people in that way, people in a transactional nature, people will respond in a transactional nature. The nature of loyalty is actually quite trivial. Sane humans respond to loyalty with loyalty. It's very. It's this company. Loyalty is relatively trivial. And it's. You have to actually be loyal to that person first. This is how loyalty always works. This is how it's built.

0:07:08 - (Dave): Same for trust, same for a whole bunch of other things. Very, very much like this. But if you can first care about who this employee is, not as an employee, not what they do for you, not on this team, how well they execute. So for the sake of you. But if you first care for them as a human being, right? And here's the question, right? What does it cost every month for you to care about them as a human?

0:07:36 - (Dave): From a budgetary perspective, it's zero, right? But from a personal perspective, at some point it's going to cost something because that's the nature of relationships, that's the nature of caring about somebody else first, is that at some point maybe you end up sticking up for them because they're in a tough spot, because you've gotten to know them as a human being and you care about them first as a human, what's going on in their life, who they are as a person, right?

0:08:03 - (Dave): There was an organization I'd volunteered with for years, and it was time for me to move on. And the person who ran this organization in, you know, saying basically was like, you know, saying goodbye and telling me all of the things they were going to miss about me. But they were things that I did for them and for the organization, not me. They weren't going to miss me. They weren't communicating. They were going to miss me. They were going to miss all of the boxes that I checked for them.

0:08:35 - (Dave): And I don't think that's what they actually meant, right? I don't. Because I said, I know this person. I don't think that's what really meant. But boy, did it seem that way, right? Boy, was it. I really had to, like, move out of my reptile brain into the, like, trying to talk through and give the benefit of the doubt, because it really seemed like the only thing they cared about me was what I did for them.

0:08:54 - (Matt): And they're sort of like, you have these conversations that are sort of detached from real life. Like, you people just think in different categories of, like, oh, well, we're in a work mode, and therefore this person's value is, you did this, this, and this on our team, rather than thank you for the good energy and vibe that you bring and you make a difference. You know, it's like we don't. We don't have conversations that are normal, you know?

0:09:19 - (Dave): Well, and this is actually. This is actually a funny thing if in the hiring process, we only ever care about your capability, and we never care enough to know who this person is or get to know them, we probably aren't really optimizing for what it's like to work with them.

0:09:32 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:09:33 - (Dave): But what if we could instead care more about who this person actually is in the hiring process? Their character, how much fun they are to be around the whole package of them as a human. And secondarily, can they do the job? How well can they do that job? That if we can turn it that direction. It's interesting what happens to the person because in Silicon Valley right now, people talk about, you know, A players, B players, C players.

0:10:05 - (Matt): Right. Stars and the ninjas. We always joke about that.

0:10:08 - (Dave): Right, right. When it turns out, I don't think those are static things. Right, Right. The question of who am I as a person isn't a static thing. And so when you think about someone, and of course, the A player and C player and B player is completely measured in what they can do for you. And in some perspectives, rightfully so. Because at the end of the day, this isn't a family. Right. This is a. This is a business transaction. Right.

0:10:36 - (Dave): At the end of the day, somebody's getting paid to do a job, and it's not less than that. But what if it could be more than that?

0:10:44 - (Matt): Right.

0:10:45 - (Dave): What if you could care about the person as a human first in the end? And there's this weird thing that happens. There's this very, very weird things that happen because it turns out that there's a large portion that people might identify as something like a C player in Silicon Valley that is actually just an A player under horrible management.

0:11:04 - (Matt): Right, Right.

0:11:05 - (Dave): We've set up an environment for people where we constrain them so tightly. Right. Where we hire someone, presumably for their capability, and then we Treat them like a child. Like, they can't execute on these things like an adult. And so one of our, one of the big principles here is that we hire adults and then treat them that way. And that one of the other thing is if when it comes to decision making, so often someone else decides they need control over decisions and it turns out that does the opposite of empowerment. Right. This doesn't help someone be able to come up and make a decision. What it makes them believe is, oh, I don't get to make decisions.

0:11:48 - (Dave): And so they even stop thinking about what the decision should be.

0:11:51 - (Matt): Right.

0:11:52 - (Dave): They stop solving problems on their own.

0:11:54 - (Matt): There's no sense of possibility because they don't have any freedom.

0:11:57 - (Dave): No. There's no autonomy.

0:11:58 - (Matt): Right.

0:11:59 - (Dave): There's no autonomy. And there's this funny thing about satisfaction in life on how much just giving someone autonomy to make choices, how deeply satisfying for people that that actually is. And so the more that we take out of their hands, the more that we also explicitly or implicitly are teaching them, you can't do this. You aren't capable of doing.

0:12:28 - (Matt): Well. It's almost, it's almost like starting when you hire somebody, it's starting the whole relationship with a total lack of trust.

0:12:37 - (Dave): Yes.

0:12:38 - (Matt): Like, you're just starting with like, well, this person is going to take advantage of the situation, therefore we need to clamp down. We need to like, track all their time, make sure that their butt is in the seat and we have to control their output. And. And that's just all lack of trust, right?

0:12:53 - (Dave): It is. There's a natural result of line managers not actually having technical expertise. And that's that they cannot judge who is doing a good job. And so they use. And since they're. We need, we need to feel certainty in life. And so a lot of people find these proxies because they can't judge how good is the work product. Instead, what they can't. There are things that they can measure, like how often is someone's butt in their seat?

0:13:30 - (Dave): Right. Is this person, wow, look at this dedication. They're staying so late at night, right? Well, yeah, they're also coming in really late in the morning when nobody. When they can't collaborate with anybody. Right. When everybody's. They are largely at night. You don't do your best work, you tend to you. Right. There are some people who work very, very well in that mode. Sure. But a lot of times what happens is you have what are basically children coming in, making messes at night for the adults to come in and clean up. The next morning.

0:14:03 - (Dave): Right. That's really what happens so often. And so instead of hiring children, let's hire adults and then let's treat them that way. Right. So there's a level of. And it's so funny because those are the very people, those children are the very people that the companies I was at thought these were the high flyers, the big potential, the big possibility because.

0:14:26 - (Matt): They'Re willing to like, really commit.

0:14:28 - (Dave): Yeah. Look at that dedication.

0:14:29 - (Matt): Yeah. The long hours.

0:14:30 - (Dave): You mean the people that just don't have a life full of things that they, that they are doing outside of work. And so you, you, you take this person's lack of. Lack of other things to do and, and, and ascribe loyalty to that. They're probably. There's a good chance that they're not there because they're so driven at work is. There's a. As an equal chance that they're just not. They don't really have somewhere else to be necessarily. Right. Because they haven't built those relationships. They haven't prioritized their relationships in life.

0:15:00 - (Dave): We are strong believers that company culture comes from everything someone is outside of work that they bring with them. And so if you've got a company full of people who work 16 hour days, you have no culture. It's just cash. That's not culture. And so we very strongly believe that this, everything you bring with you, that is all of you that you bring to work. And we think that there should, there should absolutely be strong lines between work at home, but there shouldn't be a home self and a work self.

0:15:37 - (Matt): Right.

0:15:38 - (Dave): Right. It's just you. If so, then we're. There's something else that we're presenting that isn't our full self. And we, we hire people because we want to be around them. Right. We want, we want, we want you good jokes and bad jokes and awkwardness and tiredness and you're going through in life. That's hard right now. Right. Like there are so many things in life that are so much more important than the job.

0:16:09 - (Dave): Right. Every single person in our lives is so much, so much more important than the job itself. The reason why we started Font awesome, it wasn't to make the best icons in the world, which I think we do, by the way, but it was, it was to work with the best human beings we knew. And you can't raise funding off of that, that's for sure. But I can tell you what you sure as hell can do is create a freaking awesome company out of that, because at the very Very core of that is looking for great human beings who are also highly, highly capable.

0:16:51 - (Matt): Right.

0:16:51 - (Dave): Because.

0:16:53 - (Matt): So you're saying like, hire, we've talked about this before, but it's. You hire for character first and of course, the skill. And there needs to be baseline. Can they do the job?

0:17:02 - (Dave): Yeah.

0:17:03 - (Matt): But if you're hiring for character first, it's sort of like. And it's a good fit for the company, culture fit and all that, all that other stuff is going to fall into place. Because if, if you are starting from that place of lack of trust and somebody feels like a cog and they, they feel stifled and they're, they, they're afraid of, step out of line, how in the world is that person gonna, like, innovate, make decisions, be creative, move things forward. But if you start with, okay, this is a person of character, we know they can do the job, they have the skills, and we know that they can get the job done, and we're gonna give them autonomy. I mean, imagine when you are really trying to create an environment like that. And that's, I mean, that's really.

0:17:50 - (Dave): And I think, and I think this is. There are different kinds of work environments. Right? There are work environments that really require a lot of hard work. There are also environments where it's a highly creative craft where you need a certain environment to be your best. And a lot of times people will try to mix the two. Where we try to mix a world where it's hard work, hard work, hard work. When the reality of it is highly creative people, they need different things to work on. They want their brain to be constantly on new and interesting things.

0:18:31 - (Dave): And so there's this compromise that we make between the work the company needs done. That's going to be what's the best design for customers and what is going to keep someone engaged at work. Right, right. And not just in their mind, but also like in their, in their heart, in their, like in their creativity to keep them captivated on what they're doing. So there, There are two ways that engineers solve problems.

0:19:01 - (Dave): I saw this a lot at mit. There are two ways. They solve problems in the way that they find most interesting, or they solve a problem in the way that gets the job done best. One is self oriented. What am I most interested in doing? The other is people oriented. What do they need? What's going to help them best? And the reason why, academically, I was average on my best days at mit, but I could run circles around the people there when it came to engineering was because I was oriented on what solved the problem the best. And the truth is the best problems are often boring.

0:19:48 - (Dave): The best way to solve a problem is often very boring. It's very straightforward and it's not as interesting a lot of times. And so you. But you also do want to be working on interesting problems, solving problems in interesting ways to you. And this is part of the reason why we have a four week split where we're, you know, we're changing up the schedule a little bit. We've got a four week split and a one week cooldown. Those cooldowns are where you can solve interesting problems to you. Right.

0:20:18 - (Dave): And this is all a part of those happen to usually be things that are around professional growth too. I want to learn these things because I want my skills to stay up to date because I. Or just because I really wanted to learn this thing. And I stayed focused here for these four weeks so that we could all ship on time together. I got to be focused on the customer, focused on this group that we're doing this together with and being a part of this team and caring about what that team needs.

0:20:43 - (Dave): And now I've got time to care about what I need. I've got time to care about and work on what's interesting to me. And this is, and this is how highly creative individuals absolutely need to work. But if whoever's managing you has never actually done creative work, right.

0:20:59 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:20:59 - (Dave): They have no idea that this is what's required. They have no idea how people work best. They have no idea what it's like to get the right three people in a room to brainstorm. Right. And where everybody walks out of the room and are certain this is better than I could have done on my own. Right. That's how you know that stuff's going on. Because. And also the funny thing is those discussions, those brainstorming sessions are as much about who you keep out of the room also.

0:21:24 - (Dave): Right. There are some people who have a great, great gift for discernment, for finding what's wrong with problems who may have no capability in wonder and invention.

0:21:34 - (Matt): Right.

0:21:35 - (Dave): And if they're not aware of that process, they're not aware of. We're not ready for the discernment yet. If they don't understand this process is one of the. This was the job I got fired from. This is my manager. He was really, really, really good at poking holes in ideas. Part of the reason why he had that job, he was actually great at it. But what we finally learned was while something is still baking before it's fully fleshed out. You cannot share it with him. Could you? He'll just say no, no, no, no. Right.

0:22:00 - (Dave): Because even he, at a billion dollar tech company had no idea how innovation happened. No idea, right. Yeah, he managed an engineering team of probably, I don't know, 150, 200 people, maybe 300 people. And he had no idea how innovation actually happened. It's kind of amazing. And so consequently, he also didn't know how creative work happened. He didn't know how to set up an environment where people who were highly creative individuals could be where they were allowed to be. No, it's my work, my work, my work, my work. Which. That's the job, right? That is what the job. That's why you get paid. That's why we. That, that's why this works, right? That is the trade here.

0:22:42 - (Dave): Your. My time for the company's money. That's the trade. But ultimately, if we understand how people in our line of work think, how they get work done best, this completely changes how they're able to respond. And the normal rule of thumb that we have at Funawesome, the normal thing that we have noticed at Funawesome, is that if someone works, it usually takes about two years of someone working here before all of the damage from a previous job.

0:23:14 - (Dave): They're finally emotionally free of the, you know, it's not really ptsd. People will call it that. Right. Colloquially. But like the damage, right? The like, okay, when's the other shoe gonna drop? You're looking for the, like the beat down, right?

0:23:28 - (Matt): I can attest to that myself, personally. Yeah.

0:23:31 - (Dave): And it impacts so much of how you make choices.

0:23:33 - (Matt): Right.

0:23:33 - (Dave): You're not thinking about what's really gonna be best for this thing and advocating for it. And with people who are reasonable at a rumor like, all right, there's risk here, but yeah, go for it. That sounds really cool. Let's try that. Let's see what happens. And instead you've got some, you know, typically people, I was one time told that a manager, the definition of a manager is someone who mitigates risk.

0:23:58 - (Dave): Risk and innovation. Unpack that all the risk and innovation are synonyms, right? It is, admittedly, yes, absolutely. A manager's job to make wise choices.

0:24:07 - (Matt): Sure.

0:24:08 - (Dave): A piece of that is mitigate risk. But if all you do is mitigate risk, risk and innovation are synonyms. You are fundamentally only keeping great things from happening. If that's the case.

0:24:19 - (Matt): Right.

0:24:20 - (Dave): You might keep nothing terrible from happening, but you keep nothing great from happening either. Right.

0:24:25 - (Matt): Because your whole job is saying no.

0:24:27 - (Dave): You feel like your whole job is saying no. Right. It's not about being wise, it's not about taking careful risks. Because that same culture that you have where somebody's going to get the beat down if they ever make a mistake, guess where they came from. It came from the next phase up.

0:24:41 - (Matt): Yeah.

0:24:42 - (Dave): So you know, if anybody makes a mistake further down, they're going to get the beat down. And what you create is you create this culture of taking the ball of shit that's rolling at you, stepping to the side and pushing it on a little bit harder. Yeah, right, right. When great management is not someone that takes problems and accelerate them toward the bottom, which is so often what management looks like.

0:25:06 - (Matt): Right, right.

0:25:07 - (Dave): So often somebody's getting pressured from the top because they've got to have this thing. And we think the way that we motivate people is by scaring them and threatening them and like, hey, we got.

0:25:16 - (Matt): We got a lot to get done. You're the guy that needs to make this happen.

0:25:19 - (Dave): We think the best way to motivate people is by saying, I'm going to steal, I'm going to take your basic needs. Right. Your paycheck. I'm going to take that and get rid of it. When the way that people work best and the way that people are phenomenally productive is. Maslow's hierarchy is not perfect, but it's really, really great way to think about these things. Right. This, that the highest peak up here is self actualization, as someone can become more of who they want to become.

0:25:41 - (Dave): The more involved in this process, the more you get of them. Right. And everything that it's our job to do as people. Managers. Right? As people managers as people whose job it is to guide work. Right. To help decide to make the choices that are good for the team and good for the company so that we can all have jobs and we can keep working together in a stable way. Right. Like that responsibility. Because someone else being responsible for somebody else's paycheck is serious business.

0:26:08 - (Dave): Right. That's very, very serious business. But to be in this role, it turns out that we can unlock so much if we stay focused on who someone wants to be.

0:26:22 - (Matt): And that's our wrap for part one of our chat with Dave Gandy on building a company culture that's not just about getting the job done, but about truly enjoying who you work with and feeling valued as a human being. And we've got two more episodes coming your way, so make sure to tune in for that. For more insights from Dave and as always, podcast awesome is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson.

0:26:50 - (Matt): And we're not always good at self promotion here, but you know, if this was helpful to you at all, why don't you just copy the link and send it to a friend right now and say, hey, I think you might like Podcast awesome and this episode in particular. And if you like the musical vibes of the Podcast awesome theme song, you might be curious to know that that was composed by Ronnie Martin. And if you're impressed with how silky smooth my voice sounds on Podcast awesome, you're gonna want to check in with Chris Ends at Lemon Productions because he puts that extra special sauce on the audio, which we really appreciate.

0:27:28 - (Matt): So if you need podcasting help, definitely reach out to Chris. He's your guy.