Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:24:46 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:24:46] S2: Nobody [00:24:49] S0: likes their current performance management process. Every HR leader, it's actually their most hated process. It's like once or twice a year, they have to run this giant thing across the company that everyone hates, and they view it as largely performative as well. And so, when you're able to show up with I honestly think our approach is not 10x better. I think it's 100x better. The hard work of what needs to happen during the performance review process has already been done by our agent, Windmill. He's collected all the information that's needed and can actually put a manager in a position where they can produce a really high quality performance review at a fraction of the price, which employees love. And that is the important thing. And as we're talking to people, they see that from the feedback we get from customers. 93% of employees at a company that participate in our performance review process that use Windmill say it is the best performance review process they've ever been a part of.
00:25:53 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:25:53] S2: By the way, that's really saying something. I can't just state the obvious. That is saying something. If we... So so so again, Brian, fastest selling product you've ever built. If we step back, and I know none of us can predict the future. I had on my podcast a few weeks ago, the founder of ChainGuard, who talked a little bit about just... He said something that really stuck with me, and it it actually is really relevant to Windmill. Basically, it was like, you're not getting rid of engineers. If an engineer was like a a factory worker, now what's happening is the factory worker is now becoming the factory manager and overseeing the entire factory and basically able to get a far bigger purview. I in many ways think that's analogous to where the world could be in five to ten years and and and you just said it's like if today at Max you manage seven people, the two pizza pies I you know that we all have heard in our careers. If you can't, you know, feed your team with two pizzas, you have too many people. You just said it's flattening, right? People are finding all these incredible ways, but that doesn't mean you can't like not have someone report into someone. So what it means is managers are actually getting more people and and more purview, more work, more complexity. So it's almost like you must have a platform like this because how in the hell are you going to manage greater complexity and more people better? In the future, And I'm just trying to get a sense. You guys are really at the bleeding edge of how the role of people will be in the world going forward. And I would just love to get a sense of some of your predictions because again, you're... You've thought about this a lot more than I had. We are gonna have companies with more revenue with fewer people. I think that feels kind of like the bed everyone's making, but those people are gonna, as a result, have way more complexity. So what do you see that's obvious from your perch about how the world is trending over the next decade?
00:28:03 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:03] S0: So I think there's a lot of truth to that. Find the conversation around the number of people per company, think that's I clear. I think it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. I do believe smaller teams will be able to accomplish more, but if you take things out to their maximum, there are going to be companies that know how to leverage those people in phenomenal ways that dramatically increase their value. And so, I don't know. We'll see if companies get smaller not. [00:28:36] S2: That's a hot take. They're like, you're not... And by the way, that makes sense. Maybe companies don't get, you know, the the one person trillion dollar company.
00:28:36 · Alexa von Tobel, Brian Distelburger
[00:28:36] S2: That's a hot take. They're like, you're not... And by the way, that makes sense. Maybe companies don't get, you know, the the one person trillion dollar company. [00:28:45] S0: I think both things will be true is is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. There'll be some of those and we'll make a huge deal about them on X, but I think they'll also be enormous companies where the people are incredibly productive. Just some quick predictions. I think people will be making a lot more money individually than they are now. Wow. Because when you think about the yield of a company, the yield of people going up, their productivity going up, the yield of a company going up, companies should be making more money. Where do those dollars fall? Are they going go to the bottom line or back to shareholders? I actually think that we've seen nothing yet on the war for top talent. I think what's about to come is a whole other level Wow. Which is gonna benefit individual workers in a in a tremendous way. I'd also say the shape of companies, and this is sort of a odd point, so stay with me, is gonna change where when you think about like an org chart, it's basically like a triangle. I think it's possible we see different shapes for organizational hierarchy that are a little bit more circular in nature. If anyone... You can picture the pizza pie or like... I I like to think of a trivial pursuit, the piece with all the little ones that kinda slot in that you can, like, move around and reshape an organization that way that sort of moves outwards from the center.
00:28:45 · Brian Distelburger, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:45] S0: I think both things will be true is is basically what I'm saying. Yeah. There'll be some of those and we'll make a huge deal about them on X, but I think they'll also be enormous companies where the people are incredibly productive. Just some quick predictions. I think people will be making a lot more money individually than they are now. Wow. Because when you think about the yield of a company, the yield of people going up, their productivity going up, the yield of a company going up, companies should be making more money. Where do those dollars fall? Are they going go to the bottom line or back to shareholders? I actually think that we've seen nothing yet on the war for top talent. I think what's about to come is a whole other level Wow. Which is gonna benefit individual workers in a in a tremendous way. I'd also say the shape of companies, and this is sort of a odd point, so stay with me, is gonna change where when you think about like an org chart, it's basically like a triangle. I think it's possible we see different shapes for organizational hierarchy that are a little bit more circular in nature. If anyone... You can picture the pizza pie or like... I I like to think of a trivial pursuit, the piece with all the little ones that kinda slot in that you can, like, move around and reshape an organization that way that sort of moves outwards from the center. [00:30:09] S2: First of all, those are two really good hot takes that I've not heard from you yet. What else do you guys see that, you know, that... Like, what these organizations will evolve into?
00:30:19 · Max Shaw
[00:30:19] S3: On the compensation point and also the previous point I was making around personalization is I think every role and individual will get treated differently and in a much more personalized way. And and that'll factor into compensation. I think people will get paid more. I also think there's gonna be more dispersion. I don't think just because you're a software engineer level six, that means you're this specific thing. I think it's gonna be much more about your impact on the company, and that will dictate what responsibility you have, and it's not gonna be siloed. Hey, you're an engineer, you can only do engineering stuff. Everyone's gonna have kind of a unique role with an almost unique pay structure. And so I think a lot of it right now is based on kind of bands and industry standards because there's nothing else that's better. If you're able to better understand the impact of individuals at organizations, it seems inevitable to me that you're gonna make a lot of those decisions in a lot more of a personalized way. I like sports, and so the sports analogy is kind of obvious here where people... It's it's it's increasingly easy to understand people's impact on sports teams. And so they get paid drastically different amounts of money. And I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing for society, but I think it's gonna happen. And I think for people who have really have an outsized impact on their organization, you're gonna see some pretty crazy numbers out there. The other thing I would look at is... Obviously, I've talked a lot about engineering because that's where a lot of my background is. I think engineers have kind of already gone through this. They're probably, like, one to three years ahead of the rest of a lot of other white collar work in terms of this transition. Over the last two years, the way that engineering works has changed dramatically. It looks nothing like it did even twelve months ago. You're constantly seeing about how many lines of code were written by a person and blah blah blah. At the same time, I... The latest statistics I've seen is that engineering hiring is going up, not down. And it's a pretty simple reason to... Pretty simple explanation is that the value of each individual engineer is actually a lot higher. Right? If you can get a lot more done, why are you hiring less of them?