Recorded on 03/2020 in Stuttgart, Germany at Tobias’s house. Tobias Günther, CEO of fournova, will be one of the stories that ‘goes against the grain.’ fournova is the company behind Tower, a Gitclient tool for developers all around the world. You have to listen further to find out what makes them ‘unconventional’ but being remote-first has allowed fournova to continually assess their needs AND decide to ‘go against the grain’ because that’s what they need to do their best work.
Recorded on 03/2020 in Stuttgart, Germany at Tobias’s house. Tobias Günther, CEO of fournova, will be one of the stories that ‘goes against the grain.’ fournova is the company behind Tower, a Gitclient tool for developers all around the world. You have to listen further to find out what makes them ‘unconventional’ but being remote-first has allowed fournova to continually assess their needs AND decide to ‘go against the grain’ because that’s what they need to do their best work.
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Josephine Tse 0:00
It's time for season two of the Remoter Podcast. I'm your host Josephine.
Josephine Tse 0:05
As a continuation from season one with Alex and Andres, I had the opportunity to interview some remote work leaders, ranging from companies, consultants, advocates and more to add to Remoter's stash of free resources and human-centred stories, enriching our educational platform about remote work. This podcast is sponsored by Torre, a new kind of professional network that automatically connects talent with opportunity. Founded by Alexander Torrenegra, our goal is to make work fulfilling for everyone find the job of your dreams by visiting torre.co. That's T O R R E dot C O.
Josephine Tse 0:44
A real minimal zen dude. That's the first impression I had of Tobias when I walked into his house, and I saw the books lined up against the shelves, on his wall and he offered me both lemon water and green tea upon arrival. I think Tobias's story goes against the grain of what you'd normally expect as growth for a remote company. And I think his reasonings why stem from his personal beliefs of being in tune with what his team needs.
Josephine Tse 1:21
Welcome to another episode of the Remoter Podcast, Josephine here again, and I am in Stuttgart. It's like 12 degrees celsius. And today I am with Tobias from fournova. Right now we're sitting in his dining room. He's got these four really cool posters of cities in the states and why these posters?
Tobias Günther 1:44
Good question. I can't answer why those cities but I like the colours. And I noticed it's going from thewest to the east.
Josephine Tse 1:53
Is it the same artist? It's got to be right.
Tobias Günther 1:55
I think so. I think so, yes.
Josephine Tse 1:57
Do you know who the artist is?
Tobias Günther 1:58
Oh, no. Okay. It was, a couple of years ago, there was a real run on these artsy little posters. And a lot of them popped up and just grabbed four of them.
Josephine Tse 2:10
So there's San Francisco, Grand Canyon National Park, Chicago and New York. I know Grand Canyon National Park isn't a city. It's just a national park. Have you been to any of these places?
Tobias Günther 2:21
I have been to all of them except for Chicago. That's still on the list.
Josephine Tse 2:26
Okay. I love Chicago. I lived there for a summer and so my my perception is completely skewed. Because I'm like, oh, great. Summers in Chicago are great, but then I avoid the winter like the plague.
Tobias Günther 2:40
Notorious winters in Chicago, I guess.
Josephine Tse 2:42
Yeah, it's as bad, I think it's as bad as Toronto, which I also avoid like the plague. So one day I hope- I've never been to the National Park, but I hope to go one day. Anyways, enough talk about these posters that the listeners can't see. Tobias, could you please introduce yourself for the listeners?
Tobias Günther 3:01
Yes, sure. My full name is Tobias Gunther, German name. I'm a CEO of fournova software GmbH in, based in Germany, but spread all over the world. fournova is the company behind currently one major product and that is Tower. And Tower is a GitClient for Mac and Windows. So GitClient essentially is a tool that helps developers work more easily with the Git version control system. This actually touches lives of developers all around the world, a lot of them in the US. So a little more than half of our users are from the US. And the rest is all over the world and companies big and small from Apple, Google and Microsoft to agencies and individual developers.
Josephine Tse 3:44
So for somebody who doesn't speak your language like me, is your product more so the type that is like people are aware that they're using it but don't think about that much or is your product more of the type where people are like hyper aware that okay, I am using Tower to do ABC.
Tobias Günther 4:00
Yeah, it's it's probably the latter. Actually, most people today or most developers today will use Git as their version control system. It's been very, very popular in the last couple of years. And it's the de facto standard, you could say. And there's a couple of ways to use this system. One way is to use it via the command line, which means black window white, white letters and a lot of abstract typing.
Josephine Tse 4:25
Oh, like the terminal?
Tobias Günther 4:26
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Josephine Tse 4:28
Like the hackers in the movie.
Tobias Günther 4:31
That's it, exactly, exactly like that. So this is, this is, of course popular amongst developers. But it doesn't always lend itself to be the most productive way to use Git and version control. So we're an alternative or Tower is an alternative to make it more visual to make it more easy and to make you in the end more productive and, and help you avoid errors. That's the main thing for people.
Josephine Tse 4:57
So how did this idea even come about? Were you struggling with your productivity and you were like, I want to look at something more visually pleasing to do this work.
Tobias Günther 5:06
Yeah, that's that's a that's a good description actually. So when we scroll all the way back, I started a web agency 16 years ago already, and we've always been quite a technical agency back then. So we started using Git - these were only days for Git. And I'm not the most technical person in the world. So I have a background, but I'm not 100% technical. We always knew we wanted to create a product not just design and technical client work, but also a product. And this seemed like the perfect occasion actually. So we created the first, or one of the first graphical user interfaces for Git back then.
Josephine Tse 5:49
Did you ever see yourself where you are today, which is remote?
Tobias Günther 5:53
Hm. No, definitely not. This was more of an accident, to be honest. A good one. I would say today a very fortunate one. But we hadn't planned that. One person in the Berlin office, my co founder, Julian there, he wanted to go on travelling the world for half a year.
Josephine Tse 6:12
Okay.
Tobias Günther 6:12
It didn't make sense to keep the Berlin office because it was just one or two people there. And then in Stuttgart, something similar happened. The other co founder, I have Alex, our CTO, we moved apart in terms of geography, we wanted to keep the company together, of course. And that meant going remote.
Josephine Tse 6:30
Like a lot of companies actually, that I talked with, it's out of necessity, you stumbled upon it. So you guys have been transitioned for how many years now?
Tobias Günther 6:41
I think we made the switch in 2015. So we've been fully remote around five years, I would say.
Josephine Tse 6:48
A reason why I think your story is very interesting is because usually the natural path for people I've talked to is to scale and grow. But what I've noticed is that you guys you have chosen to stay smaller with a smaller team. And I was wondering what your thought process was for that.
Tobias Günther 7:08
So it's, it's a couple of things actually. So one thing is we are bootstrapped. And that's a driving force for us because it, it allows us to have the maximum amount of freedom actually, in our decisions, we are not having any VC breathing down our necks. And that comes with a price, I would say.
Josephine Tse 7:27
Of course.
Tobias Günther 7:28
And the price being you can just grow in any direction you want to grow. The second aspect, we want to actually stay as small as possible to do the job we want to do and need to do, because we want to be close with the people we work with. And if you're 100 people, that's not possible anymore. I don't say that culture is not possible in such a scenario. That's that's a different thing. But it's much much harder and it's a different game and it's a different way to work with people. And we like to know them as well as possible. So we're actually trying to stay as small as possible and hire very, very slowly.
Josephine Tse 8:09
Got it. What are some things that you are doing as the leader of your team to build these relationships?
Tobias Günther 8:17
I think one of the biggest things is that we have peer one on ones. Every other week, we reserve half an hour on the calendar, and we mix and match people to people on the team. And they have a conversation for half an hour and in a very specific format. So there's 10 minutes where that Person A goes and talks while Person B is just listening, not interrupting, not asking questions, just listening. This is swapped for the second 10 minutes, and then in a third 10 minutes, it's an open conversation. It's not easy to do, right. It is quite taxing on people but it pays dividends.
Josephine Tse 8:57
Would you say taxing because of the way it's structured?
Tobias Günther 9:00
Yes, yes, yes. It's it's meant to be a conversation exercise actually.
Josephine Tse 9:05
Exercise. Yeah. Where have you... where did you pick that up from?
Tobias Günther 9:08
I am with another 10% of my life. I'm a meditation teacher.
Josephine Tse 9:13
I feel like you'd meditate. You look like someone who'd meditate. However, everybody's trying to meditate now. And so. I don't know if there's a look to it. I mean, I'm trying to meditate as well, but okay, because like, yeah, that's something I was wondering. Yes, a lot of companies have tried to do these Donut Chats or trying to like integrate an app and do something. But another side of that is like, what if it is too forced? Have you gotten feedback about anything like that about how it feels like it's too much of a structure?
Tobias Günther 9:42
Yeah, we're in debate about that. Okay. So we're very much in sync that having deep conversations, not just chit chat with a random group of people, but really with one other person face to face is really bringing a lot of value. The format is debatable and probably also interchangeable to some extent. But you need to make sure that in the little time you have, especially remotely you make the most of it. And that's not an easy task. And I think that's, that's where that structure comes in pretty nicely.
Josephine Tse 10:19
I want to know what remote work is to you guys, but as a collective.
Tobias Günther 10:24
I think remote work is is not a coincidence for us by now. And it's not something that people would be willing to give up.
Josephine Tse 10:34
A lot of people say, it's just like you, you taste this life, and it's hard to turn back. And I mean, clearly, you've made that change mindset five years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about the failures and the lessons learned while you guys were in transition?
Tobias Günther 10:53
Holding on to people too strongly, or wanting to control is definitely one thing I am guilty of or was guilty of.
Josephine Tse 11:02
What do you mean by wanting to control?
Tobias Günther 11:05
With remote, you have to trust more you have to be more relaxed on when people do work and don't work, how would they work and when they're available and when not. And this is something that that I had to learn also, because I was used to seeing people coming in at nine leaving at five or something like that. And that was my way of knowing if people did their work or not, which, of course, is a bad way of looking at things. But that's what I was used to do. So this was definitely one area where I had to learn. Another is is the whole area of communication, let's say remote management, because that works a lot different than than it does in a co-located environment.
Josephine Tse 11:51
Touching on communications, what were some of the things that you as the leader had to switch your mindset on?
Tobias Günther 12:00
So one thing we started, I guess, around the time when we made the switch to remote was making proper one on ones, management one on ones. This is nothing that is exclusive to remote teams, of course. But as a small company I don't, or I don't see many small companies that do proper one on ones meaning not about status. It's not about the status report with your with your team. But it's more about stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. How are people, do they get that remote thing? Can they work productively? Are they happy? Also some kind of mind shift or shift in mindset. So this was one thing that really helped in keeping the team together and understanding what what happened in the team, especially in a remote setup. Because if you're a small team, and you're co-located, you wouldn't have to have one on ones because you just bump into people, you have lunch with them, you meet them at the water cooler. So you stay in some kind of touch with people anyways. But being remote, that doesn't happen. And then you have to think, how can I make this work? And this is something that really helped me get a better grip of what's going on and what what's wrong in the culture or in the communication.
Josephine Tse 13:29
What were some, what are some examples of feedback that people gave you?
Tobias Günther 13:33
About those one on ones?
Josephine Tse 13:35
During those one on ones.
Tobias Günther 13:37
Okay. So one thing that came up, I think, two or three years ago, was the whole area of communication, how we do that in the team, what tools we use, more specifically, that people were feeling stressed. And that's that's an interesting thing to hear from people if you are working remotely.
Josephine Tse 13:55
So technically, why would you be stressed?
Tobias Günther 13:57
Yes, that's true. Yeah. Okay. God, yes. Which is of course not the question I would ask because I understand, but it's it surprised me a little bit because actually, you have all the flexibility in the world- in the world. But well, we identified a couple of things that really weren't ideal for a remote team.
Josephine Tse 14:16
Were not ideal.
Tobias Günther 14:17
Yes.
Josephine Tse 14:18
And what were they?
Tobias Günther 14:19
Synchronous communication is one of the biggest problem.
Josephine Tse 14:22
Okay.
Tobias Günther 14:23
So one big example and something we changed one and a half or two years ago, was we moved away from Slack.
Josephine Tse 14:31
Oh, you moved away from Slack.
Tobias Günther 14:32
We moved away from Slack.
Josephine Tse 14:33
Wow, tell me more about this. Because nobody says that.
Tobias Günther 14:36
Yes, I'm aware of that. We're a few people do say so. So So Slack is is everybody knows Slack. It's a it's a messenger or a chat application. And the thing is, chat, mostly is a very synchronous form of communication, meaning I type something. yeah, and I expect to get an answer right away almost because I see a green light for you, Josephine, and I know you are online, whatever that means. And that's where the problem begins. It's very easy to feel stressed that you have to interrupt your own workflow and answer and help those people. So a couple of things wrong with that, in our opinion. And we switched away from that to a tool called Twist. There are a couple of different tools by now - Twist is from the people of that make ToDoist, that task manager. And they themselves are a big advocate of remote work, or I think 60 people working all over the world. So they scratch their own itch with that, I think, and what's what Twist does differently is, first of all, they don't have that status indicator. There is no green or red or whatever light that indicates if you're there or not. You could set that to a way in Slack. Sure, you could do that. But then it's just not necessary or not useful anymore and Twist did away with that light, completely. The other thing is that Twist and other tools in that area have also a focus around threads. So there is that chatty thing with people, individuals or groups. But there's also a way to use threads threaded conversations that have a subject that have a limited topic, let's say, and that makes it very, very easy to understand, is this topic concerning me or not? So Slack has some kind of threading too?
Josephine Tse 16:38
They do have threads.
Tobias Günther 16:39
Yeah.
Josephine Tse 16:39
You can thread from a message.
Tobias Günther 16:42
Yeah, yeah. And our experience was that this doesn't make it much easier. In Twist, you really you can think of it as your email inbox, actually.
Josephine Tse 16:51
Yeah, I was gonna say doesn't that just mirror emails, which is what people try to actually get away from, too?
Tobias Günther 16:57
Yeah, that's true in some way that's true. It's very close to the way we work with emails. But then again, email has a couple of downsides. That's true. But in the end, it has a huge set of upsides also, and one is its threaded, so you have to really clear information about what that conversation is. And if it concerns me, if I have to get into that or not, or if it concerns me, is now the right time to do that. In a chat where multiple topics are mixed, it's really, really hard to keep an eye on things. That's when you get back after a week of travels or vacation, and you have a high unread count in your Slack. You never know what is important and what isn't, what's concerning you and what isn't. And that's those are the things that asynchronous chat applications do a lot better.
Josephine Tse 17:52
Have people rebutted what you have said because, I can think about things like, you know if it's important, they would tag you on Slack, @ you and you can customize Slack to work for you. Okay, so given those like, I guess those would be the top rebuttals that I'm thinking of off the top of my head just being like, you know, just mute the channels that you're not in or things like that and customize the notifications for you with that, like, have you guys tried that with Slack?
Tobias Günther 18:22
Yeah, yeah, we have, and it brings you part of the way actually, okay, problems are a couple, I would say the first thing is, you expect people to make configurations that make it better. And that is really difficult to do for many people. So you would have to document that as a process. Everybody has to tone down Slack in that way or another to make it work. And I think that's a, that's a bad basis for using a tool. With other tools like Twist, you already have a sensible default where you can work from?
Tobias Günther 19:02
I think the basic model, accepting that it should be more asynchronous and synchronous is really the the mind shift that you have to make in a lot of areas. And team chat is a very big area. The other half maybe when we don't talk about the tool itself, is the expectations that we have. I would really say this is the other half or maybe the other 60% even. The expectation was unclear for people. So do I have to respond right away because I am online? Do I have to do that, which means I would have to interrupt my work right and get distracted. And this is the thing that creates stress for people. So the other thing we did apart from switching tools was to document, to explicitly document what expectations people should have in these situations. So we really wrote down in our intranet, we don't expect you to respond right away. It's okay to open up Twist or email once or twice a day, and then respond, what messages you have, and then go on with your day.
Josephine Tse 20:09
We have things like that as well, like, I think it's like 24 hours, and you don't have to respond right away to Slack. But in the next 24 hours, if someone WhatsApps you, then it's more urgent. And to that, like you shouldn't be abusing your WhatsApp privileges.
Tobias Günther 20:26
Yeah.
Josephine Tse 20:26
But if someone does that, then you know, it's maybe a little bit more urgent. So we've got something like that in place. So I totally understand what you mean by like setting the expectations. What would you say was the biggest habit, habit change that you guys had to go through when switching to asynchronous other than the trust and the expectations? I guess for yourself? What was one thing that you found to be very difficult moving that way?
Tobias Günther 20:55
Hmm yeah. I think a couple of things first, learning to to write, learning to write in a way that gives people context most of, most importantly. So it's it's easy to to say, or to write in in Slack or Twist or whatever, I have a problem. Can we talk?
Josephine Tse 21:16
Yes.
Tobias Günther 21:17
Wow, this is this this can be huge. So I'm stressing out probably, and knowing that I might get the other person on the line the next day only? This can be quite taxing actually. So give context, what is this thing about and how urgent is it really? So really describing what do you want to talk to me about and when do we have to do that? This is something- giving context and understanding that because it's so easy to to misunderstand in written communication, especially in those short forums that text and and Twist and Slack. So learning to write was was a big thing. Expectations probably was the biggest thing thing for for all of the team, I guess, making the switch from away from Skype because we heavily rely on on video meetings. Of course we want to see people. And I don't know about Skype these days. It's been a while since we moved away. So I don't want to be too hard on Skype. But we had, it was pretty tedious. And that improved a lot when we moved to Zoom which...
Josephine Tse 22:26
Oh yeah.
Tobias Günther 22:26
... many remote teams use nowadays. And I can't stress enough how important it is to have a high quality video call with your colleagues because that's the that's the lifeblood that's that's the one communication form where you see and hear people and this has to be fluent and and easy. Otherwise it's get really tedious.
Josephine Tse 22:48
I know it's just like a you've got a lot of static. You're not off mute. You're still muted. Can you hear me? Hello? Yeah, yeah, I've uh, I've gone through some on that, I mean, where the conversation was just like Hello. Hi. Hello, can you hear me? Do you want to reconnect again? So, because I want I wanted to actually talk segue that into you as a leader, you had mentioned that 10% of the time you said you're a meditation teacher. What else has working remotely opened up for you in terms of hobbies and things outside your career?
Tobias Günther 23:22
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Wonderful question. So if you take a peek at my desk, or at the the area where I work in the other room, you'll see there is a yoga mat on the floor. Ah, I'm not a yoga teacher I have my yoga skills are pretty, pretty ridiculous. But I like to be flexible in terms of what I do for my health. Let's say like that. So I can, I can meditate whenever I want. I can, I can do a little yoga routine whenever I feel the need for it. I can take walks and so it's it's a lot about being flexible and having a good pace actually.
Josephine Tse 24:01
No perfect time to do things like that when you're trying to stay at home anyway so. And I know we can talk about yoga for or what we want to do outside working remotely for many, many hours. But I just wanted to wrap up and say, thank you so much for giving us your time giving Remoter Project your participation and sharing your maybe unconventional story of fournovas history, you know, not scaling, keeping things tight knit and close, not using Slack. I mean, I think people I think that would be an interesting perspective to hear. So before we end off for the episode, I just want to ask you a question that I've been asking, you know, every interviewee that I've talked to, and that is, if you think your companies or your story, your mission and your company's values, will encourage listeners or hopefully more leaders, more decision makers to make this transition to this remote world.
Tobias Günther 24:57
I hope so, and I think so because the advantages, I hope are apparent or have been apparent in our conversation. And I think it's it has so much potential for people, especially for companies also for organizations, but especially for people. Maybe one last thing, one one aspect of why we made that switch that we haven't talked about -when we try to hire new people, it's pretty difficult because in terms of technology we are, we're desktop developing, right? So this is really rare. You don't find somebody in Stuttgart or in Berlin, you really have to have a bigger net a bigger audience. So this is one thing and we're picky in terms of cultural fit. This, this whole remote thing opens your, your company, your team up to people from all over the world that might be a wonderful fit for you in terms of their personality of how they look at life and at work. You have that option and can grow it seem like that. That's wonderful.
Josephine Tse 26:06
Remoter Podcast season two is recorded, produced and edited by Josephine Tse. It is mixed and mastered by Stephen Stepanic and Vanesa Monroy. Graphics and visuals by Valentina Castillo. The music track used is Skip by OBOY from SoundStripe. Follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget, we've recently made our Founding and Growing Remotely online course completely accessible and listed on our site. Visit us at remoter.com, that's R E M O T E R dot com for more relevant content. Follow us on social media @remoterproject to stay up to date with our latest initiatives and collaborations with other remote first companies around the world. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about each episode, so feel free to tag us on socials anytime. And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling, so what part will you play in shaping the future of work?