All Hands

If you’re a founder or startup employee who isn’t leveraging AI: you’re falling behind.

Christina Cacioppo (CEO and Co-founder of Vanta) and Mario Gabriele (CEO and Founder of The Generalist) are hosting a tactical discussion on how to build a breakout startup in the AI era.

It’s a live (and free) fireside chat on June 26th. Some of the topics they’ll cover:

I’ve already cleared my calendar to attend (say “what’s up” in the chat). It’s rare to get actionable frameworks and hard-earned lessons from those who are in the thick of it.

By far the most common question that other founders ask me: how do you run a fully remote company?

Especially now that beehiiv is made up of roughly 100 employees located around the world (🤯).

Part of the answer is the people. We intentionally vet and hire high agency people who thrive with autonomy.

Part of the answer is the processes. We have been entirely remote from day one, and have built the company accordingly.

Part of the answer is communication. All of the best leaders at the company repeat and over-communicate everything with a ridiculous amount of detail.

Our (twice weekly) all hands meetings are the perfect encapsulation of all three. We host one on Monday to kick off the week, then one on Friday to wrap it. I’ll come back and share more on this in a minute.

But the work actually starts on Sunday (for me at least). I spend a couple hours each Sunday outlining all of the top initiatives, gathering the relevant context, and communicating how all of the moving pieces fit together. I refer to this as the Sunday email… and they’re pretty hefty.

The goal is to remove any ambiguity as to what the priorities are and ensure that everyone is unblocked and can hit the ground running on Monday.

There are a few different components to the email…

Anyway, that’s how I spend my Sundays.

And that’s what sets the stage for our Monday all hands, which is 60 minutes. The first 45 minutes we collectively run through the Weekly Success List one by one — the stakeholders of each initiative give a status update and share additional context.

We spend the last 15 minutes with a product demo or a presentation. This gives people the opportunity to share what they’re working on with the rest of the team.

We have our second all hands of the week on Fridays, which has recently evolved.

Remember above, how each person submits their #1 top priority of the week? I used to pull up the Google Sheet of responses and one by one we would run down the list as people gave their update as to whether or not they accomplished their goal.

From the outside that may seem absurd, but I loved it for a few reasons:

We did that each Friday up until we had about 90 employees, where it eventually broke down. It ended up being a bit too much context, and we had to rush through everyone’s update. Basically we went a mile wide and an inch deep.

So about a month ago we created a similar, but more effective format that I think is a million times better.

I still pull up the Google Sheet of responses, but I group the responses by team. And rather than every single person giving an update, I’ll choose a few people per team at random to speak in-depth about their week.

This allows each person to provide more context rather than rushing through their update. It almost feels like a podcast episode, because I’ll ask follow up questions and dig deeper while the entire company follows along.

We do that for the first 45 minutes, then save the last 15 minutes to review the Weekly Success List and see where we landed on the week.

The all hands are just one of the many things we do to keep this remote company chugging along.

Like I said: people, processes, and communication.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/all-hands

Sometimes I’m so locked in that I feel like I’m working out of a flying saucer hovering over Tokyo. Thanks for bringing that feeling to life Jake 🫡

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