Ian Tien - Co-founder of Mattermost

How do you know when you’ve built a winning culture? More importantly, how do you know when you’ve succeeded in instilling your core values across the entire company?

We’re talking this week to Ian Tien, CEO at Mattermost, an enterprise messaging workspace for teams to collaborate securely and effectively. His career has taken him through various areas of the entertainment industry including founding Spinpunch, an independent game studio.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Transcript

Ian Tien: 0:00

Let's imagine in three to six months, I've totally screwed this up. Who would I talk to then?

Intro: 0:10

The founder formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created, and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show.

Todd Gallina: 0:37

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Really excited to have you. My name is Todd Galena, and with me is the Chief Technology Officer here at Trace3, Tony Olszak. Hey, Tony, how's it going? Hey, Todd, doing great. Thanks. How's it going? Everything is terrific. It was great to spend some time with you personally and a few other folks when you flew out here to the West Coast. Yeah, first socially distanced sporting event. Yeah, we were a couple of the lucky people that were able to go to a Dodger game. So there's a big rivalry out here on the West Coast between the World Championship Dodgers. And down south, we have the San Diego Padres, who also have a pretty good team. So some are comparing this rivalry between the Dodgers and the Padres to the classic rivalry between the Yankees and and the Boston Red Sox. We were all there, and I think you were the only kind of like true Dodger fan in the group.

Tony Olzak: 1:40

Yeah, of that group. Not in Dodger Stadium, for sure, but in that group. You know, some would argue that it can't really compare to a Yankees-Red Sox rivalry because I don't think the Padres have any championships, right?

Todd Gallina: 1:54

This is true. Now, I'm not a Padre fan, but no, you are absolutely right. It's hard to compare. But like, Talking about from pure talent-wise, both teams seem to have captured all the talent

Tony Olzak: 2:04

in baseball for some reason. Oh, yeah. Well, and this game was no exception. I mean, we saw how many home runs from Tatis? He had two. He had two. It was incredible. In one game, it was

Todd Gallina: 2:17

amazing. Well, and he had like two the game before, too. It was crazy. Yeah, a lot of talent on display and that whole series was pretty close. But anyways, it was just great to see you. We had a couple other folks from Trace3 there. And like Tony said, it was the first time we'd all been together as a group. It's just great to see some of the restrictions being lifted everywhere. Yeah, life is beginning to get a little bit back to normal. It was fun. For sure. Hey, so we have a guest today where I'm thrilled to have him on. And he's from Mattermost. And Mattermost was a company that was built on open source. And he's not one of the first guests that we've had on, for example, founder of Starburst, the founder of Cloudera, the founder of Heptio. They are all companies that were built on open source software. And I was wondering if you just could give our listeners a reset on what open source is.

Tony Olzak: 3:11

Yeah, open source can be a little confusing sometimes because it can be confused with free software that means something slightly different. But Essentially, what we're talking about is a project where the source code is available for you, thus the open source. And usually that is open then for people to take and modify or use in ways that they want. desire. And that could be anything from, hey, we want to use this open source software to solve for this problem inside our organization. We want to use it for testing. Maybe we want to modify it because there's a feature that we want. And, you know, it being an open source project means that people can modify it as they see fit, you know, things that new features that they want, new security things, compliance-related things that come down, or even bug fixes. Typically, open source communities then will pop up to support a large open source project and will commit those changes back. You don't necessarily have to commit changes back, though. So there are distinctions in how open source is run. And everyone's version of open source has slightly different rules to it, depending on what the the person who's putting it out there, how they want it used.

Todd Gallina: 4:29

So when you say anyone, you're talking about anyone who has access to the internet for the most part can get access to open source.

Tony Olzak: 4:36

Yeah, the source code is available, thus the open source. And if you've access to the internet, you can sign up for an open source project and you can gain access to the source code and begin your own testing with it.

Todd Gallina: 4:49

Okay, so then why would somebody start a company with the baseline being code that Anyone can grab and modify as they see pleased.

Tony Olzak: 5:02

Yeah, there's a few angles to having business models that include open source. Sometimes open source is created solely out of the goodness of someone's heart because they're solving a problem and they have a community that rises up behind helping to solve that problem as that project catches on. In other cases, if you are pursuing some kind of commercial angle, you may create an open source community around a project to get buy-in. to get a community of champions who are helping you to create new features, create the bug fixes and rise up. And then your business model around it then would be to create kind of like the enterprise support model around it. In a lot of cases, you start to scale your consumption of an open source project to a degree to where some organizations to consume it need enterprise support contracts, somebody to call for support, updates that are coming down. Maybe there's enterprise features that wrap around But you generally do it to create community, to create speed, to market, to create speed of the change and to have versus just your only your developers working on a problem. Maybe you've got a thousand people working on

Todd Gallina: 6:16

that problem. Makes sense. Makes sense. And then for the enterprise that purchases it or does business with one of these companies that were originally founded on open source, it kind of gives them maybe one throat to choke if they've got some problems to solve instead of trying to have their own people go out into the community and find solutions.

Tony Olzak: 6:35

In addition to that, you may find unique value propositions with an enterprise version of something that began as open source. If you look at all the Hadoop companies that launched years back, the Cloudera version or interpretation of that ends up being something different over time. Red Hat with Linux ends up being something different over time versus a true open source version of Linux versus what you get with Red Hat. And there's many more examples, but that's essentially how it works. I get it. Okay, that's

Todd Gallina: 7:05

super helpful, Tony. Appreciate it. Okay, so with that, I think maybe we should get to the gentleman who has done just that. Are you ready to bring on our guest? Let's do it. I'm excited. Okay, our guest is a two-time founder whose career has taken him through various areas of the entertainment industry, including founding Spin Punch, an independent game studio. His current company is Mattermost, which is an enterprise messaging workspace for teams that collaborate securely and effectively. They are located in Palo Alto, California, where we might add is not far from his alma mater, which is Stanford. Please welcome to the show, Ian Tien. Welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Ian Tien: 7:45

Excited to be here.

Tony Olzak: 7:47

Yeah. Good afternoon, Ian. It's been awesome to have you on today. We've been tracking you guys for a little while, and it's really exciting that you're able to make some time for us this afternoon. Yeah. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Well, hey, with that, let's dive right in. What can you tell us about Mattermost and why you started it?

Ian Tien: 8:04

Yeah, so Mattermost was really started from a need in the market and the need started with us. So we were a small video game company. We were running sort of a messaging app to like keep everyone in touch. And the messaging app that we had was from a startup and it got bought by a big company, which started neglecting it. And, you know, that app would have outages. It would lose our data. It was really frustrating because we lived on that application. We were a SaaS service. We were making 24 by 7, you know, games that people were playing. And if our games had downtime, we would lose money. So we couldn't have our messaging platform go down and us not be able to communicate. That was sort of like not acceptable. So we kind of wrote our own software and we started running it. We did about three versions. And at one point we sort of open sourced it. And, you know, it was really, reliable. We could run our own messaging. We really counted on it. And it turned out a lot of people out there were looking for the same thing. They're looking for a messaging platform that they could control. If they had an outage from a third party, that was really, really difficult. They themselves, like us, could control when they do roll-ups, when they do updates. And it was really important for this segment of the community that can't have outages. And it grew and it grew amazingly fast as an open source project. And we looked at our video games and we looked at like what the business could be for this open source messaging platform. And it was a really easy choice. So we've been doing this open source messaging collaboration ever since. We've got amazing customers out there that are using Mattermost sort of every day. And that reliability, that customization, that ability to see and control all of your data is so important. So that's how Matama started. It's really fulfilling that market need that we saw from an open source project that we started.

Tony Olzak: 9:51

Yeah, that's really interesting. And you've been a part of other startups that were booted up with a purpose before, but it sounds like this is one to where you had to do it for yourselves and it turned out to just be a need and then you were able to make the leap. I mean, is that a little gratifying in a different way to see your use case come to life when you didn't even mean to do it to begin with?

Ian Tien: 10:13

Yeah, it's amazing what happens when you listen to the market. You don't know how the future is going to unfold. And what you can do is you kind of put yourself in a position to understand what customers want, what people need. And if you can build that, if you can see a business model in that, and you can see a large market, you just go. And it's sort of like, it's this weird sort of market force. It almost feels like part of nature. And if you kind of go with it and align with those market forces, I think people can do incredible things and companies can do incredible things and you can build amazing software that gets really adopted. And that's what is one of the things that really excites me about open source, about building companies.

Tony Olzak: 10:50

Before we get to the rest of these questions, because you just touched on a couple of interesting things there, and I'm just really curious because we don't often have someone on like yourself who made something for, wasn't your intention, and then it turned into something else. At what point in time when you do so, do you go off and decide that you're going to take on outside clients? And then did you stop doing what you were doing before or did it just happen organically? How did you even get to that point?

Ian Tien: 11:17

Yeah, we had we were building our open source project and it was really clear that there were enterprises that wanted all these enterprise features that had that. Like we were a video game company, you know, small company, couple dozen people. They wanted, you know. Active Directory integration, we're like a dozen, like two dozen people, like we don't have an, what is an Active Directory? And we realized that, wow, there's enterprises that want these features that aren't in the product that we built for companies like us. And we found this business model, which is, okay, great, we're going to continue open sourcing this great software for sort of small teams. And when enterprises want these sort of big, complex, enterprise-y features, well, we can hire a team to go build that and we can charge enterprises, like they've got lots of budget, you know, we'll charge them to say, hey, we'll do these enterprise scenarios you want. And they want user management, they want They want compliance. They want e-discovery. They were like, we want you to integrate to Smarsh and Global Relay. We're like, what is that? We figured it out and we integrated with it and the customers were happy. And there's a lot of customers out there like that in the financial services space. We got in the public sector. We've got a lot of sort of, we're now on the US federal government's GSA schedule. So it's really easy to buy us for all these government organizations. And it's really just listening to the customer and hearing what they need and figuring out the right model where they have this very clear need. They have budget and they want you as a company to be successful. Like, how can we get you? We have this budget. How can we get you to make the thing that we want? And the beautiful thing about open source is you can have those conversations directly with the people that want you to go in a certain direction. So, you know, that's how Mattermost was kind of created. It was really understanding that there's these customers that have budget, that are in the enterprises, that have problems to solve, and they're searching constantly for solutions. And we just happen to be in that solution set. So that's really about listing the market and letting the market and your customers pull you into the opportunities.

Tony Olzak: 13:15

Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's amazing to see how you guys have grown and how you've captured a part of the market and a need that was just out there and just something that happened kind of organically. Before we dig into the rest of that stuff, we'd love to hear a little bit more around your background and your past. And... You know, specifically, when you look back through your background, I know you did a stint at Microsoft years back. At what point in time did you decide that you could start a successful company and go the startup route? Like, was there anything that happened or was there something in your background that made you feel like I can do this and then went off to do your own thing?

Ian Tien: 13:51

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that I was very lucky to go to graduate school here in Silicon Valley. And there's a saying about Silicon Valley, which is like, why are there so many startups? And the answer is most people in Silicon Valley know somebody who looks kind of average, who was part of some startup that was like massively successful. And they're like, well, if that person can do it.

Todd Gallina: 14:18

So true. So true. They made a whole HBO series based on that.

Ian Tien: 14:23

Yeah. And that's exactly right. It's like, well, that person can do it. Maybe I can do it. And, you know, we're in this amazing market right now where there's so much need from enterprises and there's so much transparency and openness that there's problems to be solved in the world that software and technology can solve. And it's just amazing to be able to step up and go solve those problems. So I think, you know, that's what really, yeah, that's what gave me sort of the confidence.

Todd Gallina: 14:49

So ultimately you're a problem solver. You're like, I can figure this out. I can, you know, people can get behind me and I can run with this. There's a leadership role. entrepreneurial piece that had to come with that as well. Some confidence, you know, not just looking around and seeing some other people, regular people, as you said, who've been successful at this. Was there a family background around that? Were you guided into maybe, you know, pursuing these types of endeavors?

Ian Tien: 15:13

Actually, yeah, my two grandfathers were business owners, although I don't know if that had as much influence. Like I didn't come from a family of a sort of startup family. I think it was really grad school. I think that grad school environment in the Silicon Valley was There are just so many people that are constantly thinking about the future and what's their role in it and how do they make a contribution. So I think that environment, being here in Silicon Valley, it's just kind of contagious, I think.

Todd Gallina: 15:40

Yeah, most people buy a car and out there, it's like most people just start a company. Have you started a company yet? Hey, so your background is in streaming, movies, and video games. And as you stated earlier, you kind of went down a path to fit a customer need, where you ended up in this kind of collaboration world, which in some ways is far more practical than the video game world, which is where you started. Is there a part of you that says, hey, I'm really excited by that world where we started, or was this always part of your plan?

Ian Tien: 16:14

Yeah, that's a great question. My entire career has really been in communities and sort of communication. So early days, you know, I was at Microsoft working on different products inside of Microsoft Office, but collaboration SharePoint was one of them. I moved on to what's now Outlook.com and OneDrive. So I was product management, program management across different products. They're all in collaboration. And, you know, when I went into sort of entertainment, there was a stint with backing from Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers for an entertainment startup that I I did video games, again, interactive entertainment. And then Mattermost, which is a lot of open source and communication, the thread across all of it is really connecting and a sense of belonging. And whether that's one-to-one over messaging or one-to-many, or that's through games and the communities around that, or through communities within the office environment, like the workplace environment, I think there's a thread. And there's certain things that are fundamental to human interactions. Like we want to work, we want to express ourselves, we want to communicate, we want to work in groups, we want to achieve things, we want to celebrate things. And I think that's been a constant through everything I've done. And I'm really excited just to take sort of different aspects of that human need to sort of communicate and express ourselves and belong. I think that's been a theme over my career.

Todd Gallina: 17:36

That's great. Let's talk a little bit about the funding, if you don't mind. So in 2019, you guys raised $20 million. And then shortly after that, it was only five months, you raised another $50 million. Was the plan always to get $70 million? Or did something happen in between those two rounds that you guys felt the need to kind of pour some lava on this thing?

Ian Tien: 17:57

Yeah, I think it's really the market demand, right? Like when we started, we probably raised a little bit later than we should have because we were profitable for quite a while. And that, you know, going from video games as a, the video games business we ran was not, you know, venture backed. It was originally started as just a HTML5 game engine. So it was a technical innovation. And then it became sort of a game studio and that was sort of profitable. And then it funded in large part, the early parts of Mattermost until Mattermost could fund itself. And, you know, we really didn't need a lot of capital. But when we took that round from Redpoint at 20 million, it really transformed the company. It really showed us the potential Thank you so much. So it's been excellent. And it's really listening to the market and saying, you know, what is the opportunity the market is opening up? That's how we think about jumping in

Todd Gallina: 19:15

sometimes. No, that makes a ton of sense. What do you do with the money? What are some of the first things that you make investments in?

Ian Tien: 19:23

Yeah, I think at every cycle, we have different plans. We think about the go-to-market side. We think of the product plans. What more capital lets you do is it lets you send a signal to market that, hey, this is a business that's at a certain level of maturity because people don't, you know, we don't publish our revenue numbers and all that sort of private information, but people can see the capital raised and it really signals a certain level of company. So, you know, there could be companies out there that, you know, haven't, you know, are just as big or bigger than us that haven't raised and people really haven't heard of. And there's not really this sort of, it excitement and signal out in the market. Whereas, hey, after we've raised a Series B at $50 million with amazing investors, the like the job applications just like flood in, right? Like we're just, so many people are applying to jobs. Like before we were like, oh, like hi, we're Mattermost. Let's talk about this. But after you've raised these sort of larger rounds, it becomes, you're still at a different level and people are really excited to apply and they feel like, hey, there's something happening here. So a lot of it is, one of the big benefits is Signal. And it's also the ability to sort of invest confidently in different areas of product and different areas that go to market. and to really invest in growth. So I think those are some things from sort of a self-funding business to a venture-backed business. Really, it comes down to sort of signal and then speed. You can do more if you have capital to work with and you can go faster.

Tony Olzak: 20:47

That makes a ton of sense. Signal and speed, I love it. Yeah, so speaking of signal and speed, obviously last year, COVID signaled a crazy shift in the world's You guys having a collaboration suite or a platform, how did that impact you guys?

Ian Tien: 21:07

I think when the pandemic hit and there was this en masse move to remote work, it created a lot of interest in different remote work technologies. And Matamoros was certainly in that set. And our segment of the market is for the folks that really need a building for that security and privacy, but can't have one. So There's certain segments of the market, which could be utility companies, could be defense organizations, could be certain manufacturing. There's a lot of regulations on the protection of certain data and certain information with these organizations. And traditionally, you have them in physical buildings. And when you can't, and you have to use these sort of third-party services to communicate and send information, that gets some segments of the market a little uncomfortable. And Mattermost is the closest you can get to being in a physical room in all the software that's out there. So what's unique about us is that you can have the choice of self-hosting the database, the application server, even the push notifications and the mobile applications. We're the only software out there that lets an enterprise take our mobile applications in iOS and Android, compile the code themselves with their own certificates, and put them onto mobile devices and have no third party see the information as it passes from the self-managed server over to the mobile applications and back again. So Mattermost is the closest you can possibly be to a physical room that you control for remote collaboration. And owning that segment of the market has been great for us. It's been a great accelerator of the technology and of the customer base.

Tony Olzak: 22:48

Yeah, I got to imagine that the demand was just exponential last year. I mean, we're seeing all over the place as well. It's a common question that we're asked all the time around the future of work. And I actually would love to get your viewpoint on this. You mentioned earlier that Mattermost was invented to solve for a problem. Then it turned out that everyone had this problem, which you guys were then able to take it to market. With the amount of exposure that you were able to get last year with all this remote work forcing us and collaboration is all the rage right now. digital collaboration for remote workforces. Now that you've got access to all these people asking you for this, you've got to be getting some tremendous insights to where you guys go next. Just love to hear your kind of glimpse of the future of like, where do you take it from here?

Ian Tien: 23:33

Yeah, we're definitely gearing up for some announcements. I think one that's public right now is really just different use case and solutions within the collaboration market. And it's really looking at what our customers are doing with our software. And as opposed to making that custom, like dozens and dozens of times across different enterprise customers, we're doing what they're asking and taking that application, that functionality and building it in. So one of the number one things we see is the use of playbooks inside of our solution. What a playbook is, especially around a playbook is like, hey, you've got something you need to react to and you need, certain people in the organization or certain groups to come together and to execute that playbook quickly. Very often, it's something that is not always, but triggered off of some exception or sometimes a crisis. It could be an outage of your system. It could be a security breach. It could be some sort of service level agreement. It could be a compliance issue. And when that happens, you have to start the clock and then you have to have your checklists and you have to have the right people with the right information at the right time. The traditional place they come from is like, everyone jump on this conference call. And it literally could take hours. It could take days on a conference call to solve these things. And every time someone joins a conference call, they're like, okay, can someone bring me up to date? And that's

Todd Gallina: 24:51

so true.

Ian Tien: 24:52

So that's the kind of current world. And for us, it's like, well, I can use this messaging platform that's got these playbooks built in, that's got these checklists that automatically adds people based on the incident type. And you have this log, this history of everything. And when people join, there's an automatic feature to say, hey, here's the incident commander. Here's the person in charge. Here's a list of next actions that we're going to do. Here's the time to the next report and update. And you can get that so you don't have to repeat yourself every single time. So that's incident collaboration. That's a product that's integrated with Playbooks. And we're really excited to roll that out recently. And there's a whole sort of product line around these scenarios. Another one is around retrospectives. So after you've got the incident, how do you look back? And now that you have this trail of everything that happened, what could you do better? And what are the actions you want to take? And then how do you sort of track those actions and make sure that those get done? So we're taking the scenarios that people are sort of, you know, with sort of like, spitballs and glue, just trying to staple together and then making them come out of the box and fully supported and really support these very common escalations and workflows. So that's one example of what's coming. And this year, we're excited to announce a lot more.

Todd Gallina: 26:07

Are you sure you don't want to break one of those announcements on this very podcast?

Ian Tien: 26:14

Thank you. Thank you for the offer. I'll have to check with our marketing team.

Tony Olzak: 26:19

Nice try, Todd. Close mouth, don't get fed, right? Shifting gears for a second. And maybe this story for you is a little bit different. You know, we hear a lot about how community is created in Silicon Valley. But when you were going through founding, creating your founding team, for Mattermost, you were already doing another company and you guys already had a team. How did you go about picking the founding team that became where you guys are today? And did it change at all since you pivoted the company and kind of went in another direction?

Ian Tien: 26:55

Yeah, I think we have a lot of folks from the video game company. I mean, people are going to sort of self-select in and self-select out. And I don't know if there was, it was a little bit more organic. I don't think there was sort of like hard criteria. It's like, hey, this is where we're going. And, you know, people, you folks feel like you're staying, like you really like the games and you folks feel like you kind I kind of want to do this piece over here. So it was kind of organic and natural. And it's funny because depending on who you are, they're kind of the same thing. So as a developer, the things that you love are sort of... Your dream as a developer is to work on video games that your friends play and then to work on open source technology. So I think both of those, for a lot of the folks that were in early, you get to do both. And I think that's one thing that the early folks enjoyed and certainly I did.

Todd Gallina: 27:41

A lot of folks talk about their founding team on this podcast, as you just mentioned, which is great. I'm curious about where someone like you goes for mentorship. I don't know if it's your board members that you select or if it's just someone in your personal life.

Ian Tien: 27:56

That's a great question. I definitely go to folks for advice. And the sort of algorithm that I have is like, okay, let's imagine in three to six months, I've totally screwed this up. Who would I talk to then? And then instead of waiting three to six months, I try to talk to them now. And part of that is going to B-School. We've got a lot of classmates that end up going in different industries. I think the investors, talking about the advantages being the VCs, the investors help a ton. They can really introduce you to the folks in their network, advisors in the network. There's going to be execs. There's going to be EIRs. There's going to be just folks that are super interested in helping people companies at our stage or whatever stage it is, because they've seen it before and because they've helped a lot of these other companies. And, you know, those are the folks that we go to. I mean, there's a fantastic, one example is Adam Gross, who was the former CEO of Heroku. He's, you know, you'll see him doing a lot of talks on heavy bit he's definitely helping he definitely helped us a ton in the in the early days and he's absolutely wonderful so you know dev marketing from he was you know ceo of heroku he did developer marketing at salesforce he did marketing at dropbox just like amazing guy so those are some examples really just and we were introduced um to adam from from redpoint and tamash tunga is there uh who led the series a amazing just wonderful wonderful people so Lots of people in the network, whether it's from grad school or investors or sort of the Bay Area community. And then how I prioritize it is like, well, what's the thing I'm working on right now? And who would I want to talk to in the future and just talk to them now?

Tony Olzak: 29:31

Yeah, it feels like all the more reason for going somewhere if you're going to be in the startup community where there is community. You mentioned the participating communities earlier. We've heard that quite a bit. Hey, over distributed worlds, how's this changed? Do you still congregate in places like Silicon Valley? And it sounds like where you are and the network that you've built has been an advantage for you.

Ian Tien: 29:52

Yeah, I think geography, at least in my experience, you know, sample of one has been really useful. I think, you know, just being able to go to like, there's certain places that people just show up, right? There's like that Coupa Cafe off University Avenue and like everyone's there and everyone knows the meat there. And then, you know, within that sort of like 10 mile blast radius, there's just like the places that people always go. So I think that's that community that in such a sort of condensed area is pretty amazing.

Tony Olzak: 30:18

So when you're in a community like that, and a lot of people who are trying to accomplish the same kinds of things are congregating in this area. And I think there's some kind of almost like foundational understood concepts of the kinds of places they want to work and how they want to work. Did you actually have to go out and purposefully create any rules for developing your culture? Or was it something that was pretty easy based upon where you guys were coming from and just the people that you're surrounded with?

Ian Tien: 30:46

I'd say culture was super important for us. One thing that's a little different is that we're a remote company, even though like I'm based in Silicon Valley, like my exec team is distributed and the whole company is distributed. It's been like that since the very beginning. And because of that, there's a culture that's innate, which is very high trust. Like there's not a lot of supervision. There's not a lot of oversight. It's not like someone's, you know, pair coding next to you, right? Like the people that work really well in our environment, which is all remote, are people who have that sort of intrinsic drive, right? They're going to get things done. They're going to figure things out. And they don't really need that other structure to the most part, right? They're just very independent. And that's been sort of innate to our culture. What we've had to add to our culture is like, okay, well, what are our principles? And the reason is because we don't all want to be working different ways. We don't have the same expectations and we want to make decisions the same way. So we've got sort of five core values. It's around customer obsession. It's around high impact. It's around self-awareness. It's about earning trust. And it's about ownership. And you can apply those sort of five principles to different examples. It's like, hey, we want to change this label thing over here, right? And it's not about, oh, I don't want to jump on the call and talk about that label. I'm going to say, okay, I think the principle is earn trust, right? So as long as it earns trust and the label is clear and people know what it says, then go ahead and make that change, that label or that title or whatever it is. And it's having that That set of principles that are all consistent across your organization lets you move a lot faster, creates shared expectations. And I think that is, for us, the most important thing about culture is make sure you've got those principles, those core values really clear, everyone's saying them. And I think the most important thing about core values is that you repeat them until they're really boring.

Tony Olzak: 32:36

Yeah.

Ian Tien: 32:37

And if you're in every all hands meeting and you're saying it over and over again and people's eyes glaze over, then it's working.

Tony Olzak: 32:46

Must earn trust. Must earn trust.

Todd Gallina: 32:50

At Trace3, we call that everyone's the chief reminding officer. Ian, tell me a little bit about the self-awareness pillar. That one kind of caught my attention.

Ian Tien: 32:59

Yeah. So self-awareness is like, everything is so much easier if you're self-aware. We have an annual review process and there's self-reflections. There's a lot of sort of opportunities for feedback. And I'll give you one example of sort of self-awareness is that you're always asking for feedback. The best leaders are, right? It's like checking in with the team and self-awareness creates comfort. It's like, well, here's what I'm good at. Here's what I'm not good at. Everybody, right? So everyone knows. And then You know, as you have conversations, you don't have that anxiety of like, oh, you know, like imposter syndrome and those different pieces. Like these are like three areas that, you know, I've got gaps and I'm going to work on this one over here. But these over these two over here, I'm just going to I'm going to have team members who are better on that than I am. So then you've got clarity, you've got a plan, and then you have this culture feedback where you ask for it. You acknowledge it, you accept it, you can act on it, and it just makes everything flow. And one example concretely of how that goes is we have a template for meetings, right? So like, what is the purpose of the meeting? What are the intended outcomes? Who are the required attendees? And filling out the template really simply, at the end of the template, there's actually a section for feedback. And very often we'll pause sort of five minutes before the end of that meeting and say, okay, three questions in the feedback form. One, were the intended outcomes of this meeting achieved in your opinion, and then sort of likes and wishes. And then when you write that out and you pause and you give everyone time and everyone fills it out, it's just amazing what you learn from that piece of feedback. And you create this environment where self-awareness is a value. So then people accept, okay, well, self-awareness is a value and the meeting owner is asking for feedback. I'm actually going to give real feedback. And sometimes it'll just be like, oh, it'll be like complete blind spots. I think I was in one. They're sort of like, oh, if we're doing this, then how come we're not doing this? And it's like, it's a complete blind spot for everyone in the meeting. It's like, oh gosh, we totally should be doing that. And creating an environment where that's safe and like it's the CEO's meeting and someone who's like two or three levels down adds a piece of feedback that changes the direction of where we're going. That's a really good culture to have. It's especially important when you're remote because in the room, like when you're in a physical room, you can read the body language. You can see someone if they're feeling uncomfortable all meeting and they really want to say something. You can't, you don't have that remote. So you have to create these opportunities for people to share feedback. And only with that feedback can you have self-awareness because you can't create it from within yourself. So that's one. This was a couple of examples of how we think about self-awareness and some of the concrete mechanisms and then some of the value that we get out of it.

Tony Olzak: 35:33

So Ian, when you won, that was great. We have so many people asking us right now how they improve the way they work remotely. I mean, everything from the technology to things like you just laid out. Are those things that you guys are building back into your platform to go help facilitate that? Or is there other piece of advice that you would give to people who are trying to succeed in a distributed workforce kind of era that we've all found ourselves plunged into?

Ian Tien: 36:00

I don't know if there's general advice. I would say that I think that different organizations are at different maturity levels in terms of their sort of excellence at remote work. And, you know, there's a journey to go through. I think having open conversations with the best is probably with organizations that are sort of like one step ahead of you and not like, you know, not 10 steps, but like close to you, but just a little further ahead and you can learn things. And then there's going to be lots of material out there for it. I guess one mechanism that I could share that I found really valuable is this concept of remote listening tours. So in organizations, and I actually got this off of one of my board members, Ali Raghani, who was a CFO at Pixar and a COO at Twitter, amazing guy. And he showed me like remote listening tours. And this is kind of from the culture that he came from. And we've got a remote version of it. So the physical version is a leader, an executive, the CEO would do skip level sort of conversations around a table. And the context would be sets like, look, this is just listening. And I'm going to ask for likes and wishes, like one like, one wish from everyone around the table, just open feedback. What's one thing that you see the company doing as a like that you'd like to see us do more about? What's one thing you wish we might change or do differently? And the leader would just take notes, just type the notes. And the context was, and then at the end of the meeting, the leader would repeat back the notes to everyone in the table and just like, did I get it right? Is there more? And it's just taking those notes and those notes would do. And this was certainly the context of the start of the meeting is they would be shared at the executive level so that we could, it's a listening tour. So everyone just sort of listen. Like sometimes people get worried. It's like, oh, you put the exec or the leader in front of these, these down in the organization, there's going to be anxiety and like, they're going to expect all this stuff. But it's just, you know, if you set the context right, it's just listening. You can get a lot of, you know, eyeopening information that, that is not filtered. There's no filters between, and you can kind of share it out. So I think those remote, and in a remote environment, that's like around a table. In a remote environment, there's almost like no reason you shouldn't do it, right? It's like, it takes zero time. I spend 30 minutes a week doing remote listening tours with different groups across the company. And in those 30 minutes, something like 25 minutes-ish, like, you know, I just type, I just listen, I get to build connection, and I get to share things out. And I learn so much, our exec team learns so much from those listening tours. It's really powerful. And it also helps you connect. You know, there's folks that are new to our company and they're like, oh my God, the CEO just listening to us. Like, what's that like? And they show up in a group for listening tours and they're like, wow, this is so new. And, you know, the other sort of five or six people are like, hi Ian, like they've done it before. So it's a great way to connect. It's a great way to listen. And in a remote environment for like, you know, 25 minutes a week, there's almost like no excuse not to do it. So that's one thing that I think for execs running remote organizations is, That's something to consider.

Tony Olzak: 38:47

That's a great story. I would love to explore a little bit more around, you've mentioned how you guys are open source a few times. What I'd love to know about from the open source perspective is how much contribution do you get from the community? And by the community participating, has that created any interesting advantages or ideas that you guys take a look at?

Ian Tien: 39:08

Yeah, thanks for the question. We have over a thousand people contributing to Mattermost. We're translated in over 16 languages. And the community, open source community has a material impact on our software and we love it. And those are folks that contribute with new ideas. Those are a thousand plus people who contribute to the actual product, like the code changes. And beyond that, there's a bigger community that contributes ideas and feedback and thoughts. So absolutely, it is fundamental to our business and our customer base. And in terms of, you know, the business model, to get a little technical, if you compare sort of like the open source go to market with the sort of conventional enterprise SaaS go to market, they're very different. Enterprise SaaS is kind of brutal, right? Like differentiation lasts maybe six to nine months before the competitor gets the exact same thing. You go and you tell your message and it's whatever your category is, it's not that different from anyone else. And then when you spend on sales and marketing, because your messages are identical, you're really just bidding up keywords and putting out content that is, you know, over time, you know, not that distinguished. So your customer acquisition costs are very high and your differentiation is very low in enterprise SaaS B2B sort of over time, just because everyone has capital deployed to getting engineers and marketers and sales folks. The open source go-to-market, the one that we're in, the type is called open core. So you've got an open source project that continues to be free and amazing, and you've got an enterprise licensed product that is the commercial business. That is really powerful because what happens is the bigger open source project gets, the more value you deliver for free, the bigger the opportunity to for those customers to upgrade to the enterprise version for the folks that need it and you go in through if you want to go to enterprise you skip everything you your open source license so anyone can use your mit license binary really easy to install anyone can use you one line docker install and no legal review because it's an open source license no privacy you know where's my data go because you get to retain all your data so we get to get we get to enter the enterprise no gatekeepers, deliver value, grow our brand, and we're in there already. And when it's time to consider our commercial offerings, the values of that, the enterprise has already gotten so much value for free from the open source. When they think about the enterprise, it's so much closer to being purchased and adopted and rolled out. So very different go-to-market. It's completely different. And we're really excited about that open core piece. You look at HashiCorp, you look at GitLab, you look at Mattermost. These are examples of that sort of new way of delivering value in these enterprises through open source.

Tony Olzak: 41:59

Yeah, it's very clever. I mean, watching that kind of grassroots effort where you're organically building following inside a company and then they get to a point where, you know, they kind of trigger some kind of scalability or controls and then they decide they want some like enterprise support. It's very clever. I love seeing what you guys are doing.

Todd Gallina: 42:17

Thank you. Hey, Ian, this has been great. We've learned a ton. Hey, before we wrap it up, is there anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Ian Tien: 42:27

Yeah, I think we got a pretty good conversation. If anyone's interested in the remote listening tours, you can just Google remote listening tours. There's a blog post about how you can run one. I'll kind of share that as one extra follow up if anyone's interested.

Todd Gallina: 42:41

Yeah, the remote listening tours are brilliant. And I think a lot of people are going to want to hop on that. This has been great, Ian. We really appreciate you hopping

Ian Tien: 42:50

on. Well, thank you so much, Todd and Tony. This has been really enjoyable. And yeah, appreciate the opportunity to talk to you guys today.

Tony Olzak: 42:58

Yeah, thanks so much, Ian. It was great having you.

Outro: 43:05

Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast. Until

Intro: 43:38

next time.