MarsBased podcast - Life on Mars

Scaling a remote team: Lessons on trust, productivity, and firing | Building MarsBased #5

• MarsBased • Season 2 • Episode 110

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In this fifth episode of Building MarsBased, Àlex Rodriguez Bacardit reflects on nearly 12 years of operating as a remote-first company since 2014. Inspired by the 37signals philosophy, MarsBased was designed as a "hard remote" entity to optimize for productivity over mere presence, a model that forced the founders to defend their professional authority without a physical office during the early years.

To maintain human connection in a distributed team, the company established rituals like Martian Days, quarterly in-person meetings, and Martian Tapas, where team members showcase new skills or tools. A key principle in avoiding "second-class citizens" is ensuring that no major company decisions are made during informal hangouts in Barcelona, keeping the playing field level for everyone regardless of their location.

The MarsBased hiring strategy specifically filters for seniors, former entrepreneurs, or freelancers who are exceptional written communicators, as remote environments can feel isolating or "hostile" for those who lack experience in self-management. This professional maturity is supported by a streamlined tech stack, evolving from Basecamp to Linear, and a culture of 100% trust from day one, rather than a system of surveillance.

While remoteness brings challenges like the "loneliness slump" around month 12, the company remains 95% faithful to its original 2014 vision. By treating employees like adults and prioritizing quality over quantity, MarsBased continues to thrive as an independent, bootstrapped lifestyle business.

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🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/

SPEAKER_00:

Hello everybody, I'm Alex CEO and founder of Marspace, and in this episode of Building Marspace, episode number five, we're talking about remote. When we created Marspace in 2014, little did we know that the company was gonna live for well over 10 years. We're actually close to celebrating our 12th anniversary so far. In fact, we created Marspace as a remote first company because we had read a couple of books by the 37 Signal folks. One of them was remote, no office required, the other one was rework. These two books have proven to be fundamental and instrumental in the history of Mars Faced, but even more so in the creation of the company. When we were having the discussions about creating Mars Faced, that I already covered this topic in the first three episodes or four episodes of Building Mars-Faste. Jordi, Tabby, and I, the three co-founders, were meeting over dinner to conceptualize the kind of company that we wanted to create after having here and there collaborated and intertwined our careers all together, but never collaborated, the three of us at the same time. In early 2014, we decided to crystallize our relationship, our professional and personal relationship with a company. And thus Mars Faced was born. But because we knew that one of us, Jordi, lives two hours away from Barcelona, another one of us, that's me, was traveling quite a significant percentage of my personal time, well over 40%, maybe close to 50% of my time. I was not based in Barcelona. And we left the third co-founder, Xavi, as the only person who would be in Barcelona. So it wouldn't really have made a lot of sense to create a non-remote company. Inspired by the folks at Third Sound Signals and their books, we decided to put a question mark on each item that we were going through in the creation of the company. For instance, office. Do we really need an office? Email, do we really need emails in the company? Um, a handbook, do we need a handbook so early in the company? Do we need employees? Do we need lawyers? Do we need this? Do we need that? We decided to create Marspace with the bare minimum. And of course, having an office, knowing that only one of us or one and a half percent of the team would go to the office would make no sense whatsoever. Even less so considering that we have been best friends since childhood. So we know already how we work, how we operate, and that we wouldn't be misusing the trust that we have in each other. Therefore, an office wouldn't solve other problems that we could face in the company, like having no money, no clients, no team. But we didn't really need an office to start conceptualizing, having the kind of conversations that happen in an office in an early stage startup, maybe where you have to be creative, figure out who your buyer persona is, who your the who your target client is, who what your product is, how you're gonna monetize it, what's your roadmap, who are you gonna be pitching for as uh as uh as investors and stuff like that. We didn't need that. We already knew what we were going to do, build projects for other companies. And so for that, we had to optimize for productivity. And this is a very big distinction between creative companies and productive companies. I'm not saying that Mars Fate is not a creative company, but we always optimize more for productivity. Because at the end of the day, part of the designs, or if not all of the designs, are done by the clients or by external people that we have in our orbit. And we have the kind of work that we do is more geared towards productivity, not so much for creativity. And remote companies are very, very good for optimizing for productivity. So going back to the early beginnings of Marspace, we actually didn't have that much of a conversation within ourselves. We sort of understood the three of us that we wouldn't have an office. We wouldn't need an office for a long time because the plan was to be the three of us as a company. We didn't conceptualize Marspace to start hiring people, growing a team, and whatnot. That would come as a natural and organic evolution of our business. But in the early ideas, we didn't have it. On the other hand, this conversation, we had it many, many times with our potential customers. Because when you're starting out and you don't have an office, you have to work twice or thrice as much to defend your authority, to defend your know-how, to defend that you're a real company. And oftentimes we're faced with the question of if you don't have an office, how do I know that you're a real company? Which is very, very dangerously similar to if you don't have an office, how do I know that your people are working? In the beginning, it was Jordi, Tubby, and I, and we were talking to clients or prospective clients. We knew that if somebody wanted to work with us, but he or she wanted us to go to their office to do the work, that wasn't a valid customer for Mars Faced. As time passed by and we had we started growing a team, this conversation sort of diluted because we already were confirmed or perceived as a bigger company. And I haven't had this conversation in many, many years, but I remember very vividly that the first two years it was a way of discarding prospective clients. And um when our team got closer to like eight, ten people who started having the faces on the website, we never got that question again. So working the three of us in the early days, it was very, very easy because we had already worked together. We knew how it worked, we had been doing projects here and there, and we knew that we uh any tool we used, any configuration we used, any platform we communicated through was going to be valid. We tried many of them, and I'm gonna be covering the communication stack a little bit later on. But we didn't know how to hire people remotely, and that was one of the first challenges we faced as a company, because as I mentioned at the beginning, the original idea of Marspace was to be the three of us. However, what happened is that very organically we started getting more business that we could actually complete as Marspace or we could actually cater to. And six months into the company, we hired our first employee, Xavi, who had previously worked at my former company. And uh, he had never worked remotely. And so we decided to spend one or two days a week going to a co-working space because he knew me, but he didn't know Xavi and Jordy with whom he was going to work. Xavi was doing the back end, Jordi was doing the front end, I was just doing sales and marketing and operations, and therefore I wasn't going to be, or I wasn't actually very involved in the day-to-day of the projects. I rarely got into code, I rarely got into like project meetings, because that was handled by Chavi and Jordi with the technical team. And I had been focusing on other areas of the company. And so we started doing one or two days a week in which we were going to a co-working space, not because we weren't wanted to test the waters, but because we wanted to get acquainted with that person, because we know that by working remotely, these kind of relationships and bonding tend to take more time than if they happen in person. In-person interactions are more intense, and they are, I would argue, better, make life easier if you want to consolidate a culture or some bonding, right? Some kind of bonding with the rest of the employees. Casual conversations happen in the water cooler, in the corridors, in and out of meetings, going for lunch together and stuff like that. And I am convinced of that because I've tried both things. However, there are ways to compensate for the remoteness. And we have consolidated a very, very strong and packed company culture throughout these 12 years that we have been operating. But in the early days, we didn't know any better than just like go to a working space for one or two days. Uh, we said this was going to be only something temporary. Let's do it for two, three months. He gets acquainted with us, and um we test the waters of how it is working with the first employee. And over, you know, when this is over, after two, three months, we switch off the co-working and we go back to working on it remotely. What happened is that not before these or before the three months had passed, we hired another person. And so we had to restart the counter. And we did three more months. But what happened again is every three months we kept hiring another and another and another person. So eventually we stayed for a few years doing the initial onboarding co-working of one day a week, one or two days a week, which turned into let's just meet for lunch, let's just meet for a day of co-working so that we can see each other. Because in the first five years, more or less everybody in the company was in Barcelona. It was around 2017, uh, that that was year three, that we started hiring people outside of Barcelona. And but at the beginning it was Juan, it was Fran, then it was Pablo, it was Danny. So more people started joining from outside of Barcelona. And I said, we really don't want to have the impression that if you're in Barcelona, you go to the co-working space, and therefore you are a first-class citizen because you meet with the founders, you have lunch with them, uh, some things will be decided there and stuff like that. That was quite a turning point in the history of Mars based, not super significant outside or inside the company because it was much more of a statement of a thing that we were already doing well. We said, even though most of the people are in Barcelona, even though most of them meet once per week, nothing gets decided there. This way, we avoided the first-class citizen versus second-class citizen relationship that makes a lot of companies break, a lot of remote companies break, or hybrid companies break because they keep more priority in the in-person meetings, even though they say that on paper everybody's equal. No, it's not equal. Let me give you an example. In my former company, we were doing sort of a hybrid. I mean, the company was like in-person only, but some people were working remotely, some freelancers, some people who had like some condition, or maybe they had a special permission to work from home now and then. Most of the time, so because the company was office-centric, everything was decided there, everything was talking talk around there. And um what happened is sometimes we left the other people out. We're having a meeting, we would invite somebody remotely to the meeting. And if the the the connection was janky and we couldn't have like a clear communication, so like um you should drop off, we'll let you know of the outcome of the meeting afterwards. And sometimes that never happened. You know, we sent maybe we sent a recap of the meeting, maybe we didn't. And uh I remember that uh when we were going for beers afterwards, very rarely these people would get invited to to the afterworks. So that's why we wanted to avoid this kind of distinction between the remote versus non-remote, or in our case, everybody was remote, but some people were working in Barcelona and a few people were working outside of Barcelona. We wanted to avoid this. That's why, even though we continued with the co-working as a sort of like, let's just get together and that's it, with no other formal benefits other than to spend some time together, we came up with the idea of the Martian days. And that is very important because as a company that is engineered to be officeless from day one and will continue to be so, we had to come up with some ways to compensate this remoteness, right? Some people had already been working for a few years. That was that must have been so 2017, that's when we started getting more people from outside of Barcelona, and we said we should fly them in and do some kind of company days where they can be able to meet the team, bond with each other, maybe brainstorm and decide on stuff because it was it was a it was a way to force this human connection, and it felt 10 times more special, precisely because we're doing it three, four times a year. Instead of meeting every week, instead of having an all-hand session remotely and whatnot, we're just meeting three or four times a year, once per quarter, uh in person, and we saw immediately that this boosted the kind of relationships, the motivation, the ideas, the the level of the discussions or the feedback that we were given in those days was you know 10x better than what we would receive in between these meetings. And precisely as a remote working company, we have been uh investing a lot in these kind of initiatives. Over the course of years, not only did we come up with a Martian days, we also came up with a company retreat that we do once per year, in which we go for like four or five days to some destination altogether, and we spend like really, really good time. But we also have had other initiatives that have come and gone uh throughout the history of Mars Day. Some of them still stand. Like, for instance, every Friday, 10:30 a.m., we have a half an hour coffee break in which everybody in the company is invited to join, even the freelancers, and have some casual conversation around whatever. And that's where we also celebrate whether it's somebody's birthday, somebody's anniversary in the company, or some other celebration, like somebody has had a kit and they want to introduce it to the rest of the company, or other milestones like the company anniversary and whatnot, right? So this Friday slot is very, very important. In the other days of the week, we have had other initiatives. Like for instance, every Thursday around lunchtime, we have the Martian Tapas, which is kind of a showcase of something cool that you have built, something you've learned, something you want to show to the rest of the people. For half an hour, 45 minutes, you become the chef and you show your thing to the rest of the company. It can be something technical, it can be something around how you organize your day or your life, uh, or it can be a tool, it can be a new programming language, it can be something that you have built, a demo and stuff like that, or how you learn languages. It can be it can be technical or non-technical, and that's another space that we have conceptualized to compensate for the remoteness and to have another slot, another another space in which we can discuss work but also non-work. We have had other initiatives that we have discontinued over the years. Uh, we had for three, four years we had a a musical contest, we had a drawing contest. I think I might have forgotten about some of this because some of these were shortly lived. But uh, we have always looked for ways to compensate for these, for this remoteness, right? And this evolves as the company evolves. And the I think it was around 2019 in which we figure out that we had more people outside of Barcelona than in Barcelona. And therefore, um other companies would have struggled with this fact. We didn't, because the company was not centered in Barcelona, was not centered around an office, and therefore we we didn't have any problems with this. And now let's discuss something very important like hiring the configuration of a team in a heart remote environment. A hard remote environment is when you don't have the option to go to an office. There are companies that are soft remote, which means they have an office, but you are not required, you're not obliged to go to the office. And heart remote is like, even though you want to go to the office, there's no fucking office, right? In our case, we uh we actually let people know because sometimes we hire people and they're like, oh yeah, I want to work with you guys, and I'm gonna be transferring to Barcelona. And and we always joke saying, like, yeah, just make sure that you don't do this to come to the office because there's no office. If you want to come to Barcelona, that's fine. We'll love having new people over. It's just there's you you will not find any office here. Um in the beginning, we we hired people throughout our personal networks. And I don't think there's there are too many distinctions between hiring for a remote company and a non-remote company with regards to the channels and stuff like that. Um but there are two or three things that you have to ascertain when you're hiring for a hard remote position, because it's very complicated. It is very complicated to hire, for instance, juniors versus seniors. For many, many years we do we didn't hire any non-senior person in the team. Why? Because a remote environment, a hard remote environment, is very hostile. Not because we are angry old dudes, it's because it's very easy to feel abandoned. It's very easy to fall prey to the imposter syndrome and not reach out to other people. Whereas in an office, I can be walking around the office and I see that somebody with a with a weird-looking face and they're worried or they look lost. You can tell by their faces. In a remote environment, you don't see this. In an office, maybe it's very easy to kind of like go and tap somebody on the shoulder. Maybe the person who's coaching you or the uh a more senior person is sitting right next to you and you can ask for questions. Or you can go to the water cooler and ask someone to help you out and stuff like that. Or somebody will come and say, hey, how's your first week in the office? And how's your first week into the company? Uh, do you need any help with anything? And this conversation happens a little bit more organically. Whereas in hard remote environments, you have to force this. That's why we, over the course of the years, we evolved how we how we hire. At the very beginning, we did hire only people we knew and we trusted, which was relatively easy. I would say that around the 10 first people that we hired came through personal networks, first secondhand recommendations, some freelancers we had worked with, some people that we knew and trusted, or that we had worked with in previous companies. We hired David Gomez from used to work with me at Vass. Javi Peret used to be uh with me at VAS. We hired the Artero brothers who had been working with Javi and Jordi in Green Data, and more and more examples. Or somebody that we had met at Ironhack, like in the case of Xavier Simon, where we taught Ruby and Rails and we got to know him. We saw him how he was working in the course, and we we decided to hire him. But there are two or three considerations as I mentioned that you have to ascertain when you are hiring for a hard remote position. One of them is they have to be good communicators. Writing well, it is very important because most of our conversations, most of our discussions and debates and internal considerations will happen in written form. And back in the day we're using Basecamp for this, but there's other companies use a lot of email. Um other companies only use Notion or Asana or Slack and stuff like that. In our case, at the beginning, we were using Trello for the project management and uh the tasks of the projects. Basecamp as the company-wide announcements and discussions and whatnot, and Slack for the chat. The second consideration that I think it made a clear difference in our hiring processes back in the early days is this person needs to have prior experience in remote working or as a freelancer. Because effectively speaking, it's more or less the same. If you've been a freelancer or if you've been an entrepreneur yourself, the agency ownership, communication levels, meeting deliveries and meeting expectations and managing and talking to non-technical people, that is something that rounds you up as a professional. And it was way more likely that it would be a cultural feat at Mars based if you if you had any of these three, right? So prior experience in remote, being an entrepreneur, or being a freelancer. Uh, most of the people that we hired in the first almost 10 years had one of these three. And the people who we hired outside of these considerations more likely than not didn't end up working uh in our company. Um, they started working once we got more people and we could build a little bit of structure. For instance, in 2019 or 2020, we came up with the idea of a buddy, having somebody that could mentor you into the company in your first weeks, having some sort of like a direct communication with somebody who is just working shoulder to shoulder with you, more experienced person, somebody has been in the company for long enough that they know the ins and outs of Marsface, how we work, our tools, methodologies, expectations, and whatnot. And this way we could start hiring lesser senior profiles, which in our case we've done only three times in the history of Marsface. And it worked very, very well, precisely because we waited until we were solid and consolidated enough and we had this structure, we had this methodology in place, we had the body system, and then we could actually give the attention and the sort of coaching and mentoring the younger and lesser senior profiles require in these kinds of environments. If we had done it before that, it wouldn't have worked. It's very, very difficult to coach and mentor lesser senior profiles in hard remote environments. Now, as for the tools, as I mentioned in the early beginnings of Marspace, we're using a combination of Slack, Basecamp, and Trello. Before that, we tried and tested many, many other options. We tried Teambox, we tried Asana, we tried HipChat, we tried the Google Suit, we tried other stuff. I don't even remember, but I do remember that Slack was the first one that kind of consolidated very, very rapidly from the early beginnings. I think that already in 2015 we were already using Slack. Maybe in 2014, uh for some time. I know we were running on Google Chat when it was only three of us, so that really doesn't count that much. Basecap was our single source of truth as a company until more or less 2020 or 2021, when we decided to replace it with linear. A single point of truth is where you saw all your discussions, all your long-form conversations, all your written interactions and records, something that you want there to be what's accessible, what is uh what is the right truth of the company. Um, if something happened on Slack, it had to be translated or transcribed to Basecamp. Otherwise, it was not the truth because Slack at the time we didn't pay for it, so therefore it was volatile. The track record and history would delete and we would lose track of certain decisions that we had made in the past. Therefore, everything had to go to Basecamp. We did the company-wide announcements, we did reporting, we had the conversations with clients, we had internal discussions, internal guidelines, and stuff like that. Everything happened on Basecamp. Around 2021, we migrated everything to Linear because we thought it was a company that, as a 20-odd people company, it was more befitting than actually Basecamp. Um, Basecamp is maybe more geared towards SMBs, and linear is more for technical teams. Even though we we like company culture Basecamp, we're really grateful for um giving us the inspiration to start Mars Days and work the way that we have been doing remotely and focusing on quality rather than quantity. Uh, we thought um we had overgrown, or we had outgrown Basecamp altogether. And then for other kinds of communications, so the technical part of the projects, we had been working with GitHub uh issues in the past and Trello. At a certain point, we moved to Jira. And at the same time that more or less we adopted linear for the communications, we also knew that, you know, it was a great tool. It was actually the best tool for tracking the progress of the task management and stuff like that. So for working remotely, these would be like the three pillars. The fourth pillar, and it hasn't to be discounted because it is really fundamental to working in a remote environment, is a credentials manager, namely OnePassword. That's the one that we have been using up until now. Of course, there are other cybersecurities like security um tools that we have used over the years, and that you have to have a VPN, you have to have like um a device management tool for remote overseeing the status of your of the laptops of the company, wiping out uh this if they have been compromised and forcing rotation of passwords and whatnot. But this is perhaps too much detail for for today, not really what we wanted to accomplish in this episode. I'm I wouldn't personally recommend our tools to every company out there. But chances are that if you're running a company like ours, linear is the best uh tool that we can use that you can use. It's a bit complicated to configure in the beginning. It's definitely a steep learning curve if it's your first time using it. And maybe you can feel like it's too much for a really small company. I would say that if you are less than, if you have fewer than 10 people, maybe it's not the right tool for you. I could be wrong. You could start with so smaller teams, maybe can start only using Basecamp. Now they've got a new tool called Fitzy for Tanban-like projects, which can be um interesting for you. And for the chat, Slack, even though we all have a complicated relationship with Slack, at least it's not Microsoft Teams. Um, but there are millions of other tools that you can use out there. Our clients have used Monday, ClickApp, Asana, Jira, Notion, and stuff like that. We don't have a documentation portal like Notion. We do all of our documentation is either on GitHub, on our employee handbook. We have our technical guides like accessibility guidelines, SEO, Robian Rails, Active Records, stuff like that. Or if it's something internal, we have it on Linear because you can also have that. Yeah, we can use other tools, but the truth is as a small company, we have been very frugal with this, and most of the stuff we have built on top of linear. For instance, the hiring process of Marspace is type form tied to the website, and then it dumps all the stuff into linear. So we've got a project that's called hiring, and every candidate has got their own card, and we can come in there. We have their CVs there, we have their uh cover letter and stuff like that. Same for sales, every new sales opportunity that qualifies, then I create a card on the sales board of Linear and stuff like that. So other companies will be spending more on a CRM, we don't have a CRM. On an ERP, we don't have an ERP. On documentation, we have it in these two or three tools, more or less. Um, you can be more specific, that's in our case. We prefer to have fewer tools and use them better. So let's talk about the uh less foundless part of being a remote company, because I mean, even though that we have been advocating for remote work and Marspace is a hard work, a hard remote company, we know that remote comes with some things that can leave you with a bittersweet taste. For instance, the remote worker loneliness. In month 12 to 15, more or less, in the career of somebody who's been working remotely, it starts to kick in this solitude, this feeling of I don't see other people, this glooming sense of am I doing the right thing? I feel alone, I don't feel seen, I don't have enough interaction, right? That's why we add more space. We suggest our employees to go every now and then to meet other people in a working environment that is going to working space once per week, or maybe uh work one hour per day from a local cafeteria so that you can see other people around you. You can even have some conversations, and not only work happens at home, and you also have got your family at home, and you don't you don't do anything outside of work and family. That's why we compensate also with the Martian days, the uh the conversations that we have in the in the Martian tapas or the virtual coffee or the annual treat and whatnot, but you should also do something on your own, because otherwise you will start having this sort of solitude and loneliness, and it will affect your mood and therefore your performance. The second thing is, and that is a quite a thorny subject, um, but I want to cover it here is how do you know that somebody is not performing? And that's a question I get a lot from people who have got an office. Um, how you know the dreadful question of how do you know that your people are working if you don't see them? You know, it's it's understandable, but for me it's a really stupid question because I've been working in offices for long enough to see that people don't work in offices, even though they are seen. So if people don't want to work, they will not work, irrespective of whether they are in an office or they are at home. What's more, for me it's worse having somebody who doesn't work and is seen, like they know it consciously, knowing that they are being seen. It's it's a worse symptom of having a seek company, right? In the case of companies like Marspace, we are not exempt of people who are underperforming. And we have had a couple of episodes in which some of our employees stopped performing, or somebody we had hired, they didn't perform. We see it right away. We see it right away because we see that they don't deliver stuff. I know it's very difficult to see the personal side of it because, for instance, in an office you get to see the faces of the people. And if you see uh like somebody who's you know covering their faces with their hands all the time, they just you see an anxious person, something's going wrong with them. If they don't mask it, it's very easy to spot right away. But maybe because it's that easy to spot, you don't really take it that much. You probably have got too many people, you don't go into that corner of the office where that person is. So, more or less I would say that the chances are even. In a company like Marsface, if a person chooses not to appear or not to uh turn on the camera in the company meetings, you will not see this. You will not see they are stressed, you will not see like an upset face or sad stuff like that. It's much more complicated. Therefore, that's why we have the one-on-ones, we have casual conversations that also happen outside of work. At any point in time, you can just like message somebody and say, hey, can we chat for a bit? And sure, that will happen. That uh you will see it there. But as for the performance, if you see that somebody hasn't delivered for a week their task, you're gonna talk to them. If they haven't done it for a second week, you're gonna have a serious shock. And that's when we see that something is going wrong. There are other factors that tell us that that somebody is actually either on the way out or they are not motivated. For instance, when we see that somebody takes too much advantage of the flexibility that we have, that is usually a sign that everything is more important than work. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. We have had um, maybe we had a person in the past that because of our flexible working policy of you can work whatever time of the day, just let us know when you're working, when you're not on the status channel on Slack. If you see somebody who's like overactive on these kinds of things, like today I'm gonna be working in the evening because in the morning I have a special workout at the gym. Okay. Then the next day comes and says, like, today I'm just gonna be working a couple hours. I will make up in the weekend for the for the lost hours because I have to babysit my knees. Okay. Then the next day is helping a friend with a uh moving out. Then the next every day there's a special thing that disrupts their routine that that person is clearly not doing their job. That person is, you don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe they make up for the lost time and the evening, but you know they're not giving you the best hours because they are prioritizing everything over work. Everything and anything that comes their way, they say yes to. And work is a thing that they can push aside and live for later. If that happens, you know that this person might be on their way out, or they they require a complicated or a serious conversation with them. Another thing that might happen is we actually some companies use monetary tools. We don't use monetary tools in Marseille's. We really don't want to enforce this. We it goes against our principles of privacy and trust. We trust you. We give you 100% of the trust. Trust is nothing that you have to earn in this company. You start with 100% of the trust, but you can lose it. And because we treat you as an adult, we expect you to behave as an adult, which is what happens. I've been in the companies in which people were being treated like children, and therefore what happened is people were behaving like children, most of them. In our case, you start with 100% of the trust, and you can lose your trust. You can regain it back. We know that people ebb and flow, motivation, longevity of the company, uh, personal stuff. We really don't care. Um, but I know that if a person is losing trust gradually and then every time more and more and more, you know, there's a certain point it's kind of like a breaking point. It doesn't go back. There's um there was an occasion recently in which we accidentally found out that somebody was misusing our tools, was working for another company without our permission. And he was also telling us that he had been working for us on the status channels or reporting on the tools, but the analytics of some of the tools that we were using, and we found out because we were doing a report for the end of the year, uh, we accidentally came across the evidence that he wasn't working on our projects. So therefore, that person was fired immediately. And that's something that was very harsh for us. It was very harsh for that person. But in a trust environment like Marspace, if you lose a trust, if you lose it completely, you'll never gonna get uh get it back. So we have had these nasty experiences throughout the years, people who didn't perform, people who had like big motivation dips, or misusing our trust, you will uh encounter this as well. But you also encounter this in non-remote companies. So I don't think it's that different. Maybe the difference here is you have to be more on top of stuff, more on top of the people, just doing more text on them, don't leave them, just hire and employ them and just leave them for good uh to do their own thing, right? You have to take care of your people. We take care of our people and more space, and that's why sometimes we have to terminate the uh collaboration with somebody so that we can protect the rest of the team from the effects of having somebody who's not doing their job correctly and is therefore impacting the company as a whole, but also the individuals. And with that, just um a wrap-up. We haven't changed that much. I have been reflecting uh on the evolution of remote and Marspace, and I would say it's 95% of what we envisioned when we created the company in 2014. So we haven't changed much. That is one of the best feedbacks that our employees give us. They stay in the company for so long because the company doesn't change. We don't change our principles back and forth. We don't use remote andor we give benefits and then we take them back, like other companies have done with remote. When 2020 they were forced to do remote and then uh they grew so much. But 2022 they started laying off people. And now, after 2022, until now, they've been doing undercover layoffs by. By having mandatory return to office policies and reverting and scaling back the the benefits of working at their companies. We don't want to do that. We're not that kind of company. That's one of the benefits of being a bootstrap, independent, lifestyle business like Mars based. And so with that being said, I'll leave you and I'll see you in the next episode.