Recorded on 02/2020 in London, UK. Tyk’s offices. COO James Hirst sat down with Remoter to share his message for leaders embarking remote/distributed team management. Tyk is an API (application program interface) management platform. As an open-source gateway, Tyk’s proprietary piece of software allows people to manage the gateway easily and at scale. Being remote out of necessity since day 1 meant they had to build the company with a remote ethos from the get-go and have only been working towards improvements ever since.
Recorded on 02/2020 in London, UK. Tyk’s offices. COO James Hirst sat down with Remoter to share his message for leaders embarking remote/distributed team management. Tyk is an API (application program interface) management platform. As an open-source gateway, Tyk’s proprietary piece of software allows people to manage the gateway easily and at scale. Being remote out of necessity since day 1 meant they had to build the company with a remote ethos from the get-go and have only been working towards improvements ever since.
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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 0:49
When I finished my interview with Tyk, I left the office thinking, James really knows his stuff. Even though Tyk hasn't been around for decades or anything, it's clear to me that managing a globally distributed team across all time zones would just expedite somebody's growth. James's story and path down remote starts a lot like Torre's CEO, Alexandra Torrenegra. They both built their businesses remote out of necessity. So yeah, tune in for a story about perseverance and trust, as well as self awareness on improvements that can be made.
Josephine Tse 1:23
Welcome to another episode of the Remoter Podcast. I'm Josephine and I'm currently in East London with my guest today, James Hirst, COO of Tyk. How're you doing today?
James Hirst 1:34
I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on the podcast.
Josephine Tse 1:36
No problem. Thank you for participating in the Remoter Project. I want to get started with a little introduction from you.
James Hirst 1:44
Ah myself. So I am co founder of Tyk. I'm a father of three kids. I live just down the road in East London and have done since I was a teenager now and I've been in small businesses in tech since I dropped out of university.
Josephine Tse 1:58
Where did you go for a little bit?
James Hirst 2:01
University College London and delighted my parents after three months when I realised I really didn't want to get into to being a lawyer or a barrister. So I dropped out, became a barman and eventually found myself supporting in tech support for dial up modems back in the day of connecting your computer to the Internet through a phone line. Did that for a while and joined a series of startups and eventually digital consultancies and now Tyk.
Josephine Tse 2:25
Nice, could you tell me a little bit about Tyk itself?
James Hirst 2:29
Okay, so Tyk is an API management platform. What that means is we have an open source gateway, anyone can grab online, you can go to GitHub, you can go to package cloud, you can pull it down as an Amazon AMI, and that sits in front of larger organisations or small sits in front of their API's and proxies the traffic, protects it, secures it, measures it. And on top of that, we have a proprietary piece of software, which is where the business comes in, and that allows people to manage the gateway more easily and at scale.
Josephine Tse 2:59
I'm curious, what got you guys started into this project?
James Hirst 3:02
So I met my co founder 10, 12 years ago, we actually joined the same digital consultancy on the same day and ended up working together for a couple of years doing big digital transformation projects, people like the United Nations and the National Health Service and so on. And my co founder, Martin is an inveterate hacker he loves to to build and test and learn. One of his side projects at the time was a load testing business, he wanted to see if he could compete with the big boys and build a side business. And it failed. He realised to actually get an advantage, he needed to use the latest tech and that meant building something that was microservice based, was built on containers, was multi cloud first. And there was no technology to allow him to do that. So he built his own API gateway and his own API management platform to do it. The load testing business ran for about a year as a side project, but didn't really go anywhere. He shutted the business and he open sourced the code he'd written for the API's thinking, well, you know, I learned something there and others will benefit from it. And over the next year or so, it really picked up momentum. A lot of organisations started using it to the point that really big Fortune 100 companies in the US were getting in touch saying, What's your enterprise pricing? How can I get consultancy on this? Can you do the installs? And he had to admit at that time, well, it's just me. It's a weekend hobby, but that obviously indicated, okay, there's there's uh, potential.
Josephine Tse 4:20
There's interest, yeah.
James Hirst 4:20
So, over a few beers, as the best ideas often come about, we put together a plan as to how to monetize this and how to take it to a bigger audience and a bigger market. We launched launched that back in April 2016 with no funding. We still had day jobs, and very quickly got traction, and that allowed us to get started.
Josephine Tse 4:39
So I wanted to dig deeper into the whole open source movement that you guys are a part of and how that's a big that's a foundation of Tyk. Could you explain a little bit more of that?
James Hirst 4:52
Yeah, sure. And I that's probably central to a lot of the the discussion about being a remote first business and the culture we have here. You know, I described as the genesis of the business. And that was from a side project, it was it was hacking and learning and finding something that others found useful. And the only way we found that others found it useful was releasing as open source and letting people run with it and use it. For us, it was the community is finding this useful. The community is developing it. The community themselves are the users of the software are saying to us, these are the features we need. This is what we want to do. And even then coming to us and saying, can we actually get services from you? Can we buy more from you? Can you can you do this at scale? And so that was very much the genesis of it. And we ran with that in a way that allowed us to compete against really large organisations that we wouldn't have been able to do as a proprietary startup. We didn't want to start to look at raising funding, which would then necessarily change the objectives and the KPIs working. If you're working to what the community is asking for what the users are asking for. It keeps you honest about what's useful, it makes sure that you are quickly iterating and finding that phrase, of product market fit.
Josephine Tse 6:03
So I noticed you mumbled product market fit. Is that because what are your thoughts on that?
James Hirst 6:09
It's one of those phrases that is focused on a lot by investors, because you're looking at how quickly can you achieve a kind of hockey stick curve, how quickly can you get on a trajectory towards a unicorn? And that's not always the outcome for an organisation or startup, if that's what you're looking for, frankly, there's gonna go into a hedge fund, go and join financial institution if your objective is that financial return.
Josephine Tse 6:39
As you guys were growing and taking feedback from your users, and the community, what kind of got you started in growing your team remotely?
James Hirst 6:49
The fact we came from an open source project meant that feedback and users were everywhere. We hadn't had to go out on the road and knock on doors. As soon as you're doing that, your limit In your geographic reach. You look for the problems we solve and we pop up in Google, it didn't matter whether you're in Seoul, Korea, or whether you're in Singapore or you're in on West Coast US, we'd be there. One of the hurdles we had to overcome as my co founder, and his wife had just had a baby, and were moving to Auckland, in New Zealand. And we discussed it and said, well, that shouldn't stop us running a business. But when we hired our first engineer, it came out of the open source community. We were looking for someone who could add some functions and features. We saw someone who had made some really high quality contributions had some really good ideas on GitHub.
Josephine Tse 7:32
So they were already showing the work.
James Hirst 7:34
Exactly. They actually contributed to our project. They were using it for I think that a German airline at the time, okay, as a as a contractor, and we spoke to them and thought, okay, well, we could probably hire someone in Germany, but it turned out he was based in Paraguay. As we continue to hire we realised if we're looking for objectively the best person to provide code to provide marketing to provide operational support. How important is location? So, so why restrict the business when your users are globally?
Josephine Tse 8:03
Right. So basically, you guys, when you guys started, that's when you guys set the example for yourselves and realised it from day one, from the get go. So I am curious to know of your onboarding processes in all the different countries.
James Hirst 8:21
So that's, that's changing. It's changing over time. When it was obviously two or three of us, it was simple. The everyone logged on to Zoom and said, hey newbie, welcome to the team. And it was a fairly simple process. As we've grown. I mean, we're 70, 75 people now we've had to put in place some processes to make sure that the just the logistics of making that happen works. We started by ensuring that when someone joins on the first day that they have a buddy and that buddy can be anyone who is either geographically remote or close by, it doesn't really matter. And potentially not even in the same part of the business. It might... if you're an engineer joining, it might not be an engineer who your buddy is. And then alongside that, everything we do at Tyk, operate asynchronously and to operate collaboratively and remotely. So now that we're at scale 70+, we've actually hired in people to maintain and administer that, because it's such an important part of building remote businesses is finding the right people and bringing them into the business. It is not something that you can just add on as a process, it is has to be at the foundation of how the team builds.
Josephine Tse 9:25
We do that as well, I mean, when I joined my company, I was given the Trello board onboarding process. We also had a couple books to read as well. But that was my first time doing, like that kind of onboarding. On top of having to scale your onboarding processes, just due to the nature of the company right now, what other operations have you had to scale up?
James Hirst 9:44
Scaling a remote businesses is a tricky one. It brings so many benefits and so many advantages and when it's running smoothly, I think it's a real competitive advantage. However, you have to be alert constantly to the changes nature of the organisation. So we started to put in more formal internal communications in a way that having a regular Town Hall broadcast, having regular updates from different teams in text form for people to read as well.
James Hirst 10:14
The other thing we found is really important is consideration of inclusivity around timezone and geography. So as you scale the team out, it's inevitable that there will become certain hubs where there are more than one person and there's a real danger that you, as you bring people into the business, the understanding is to get something done, I need to have a meeting. And sometimes that's the case, but those meetings can be exclusionary, and that is a that's a dangerous precedent to set. So we pushed very hard against that and tried to advocate for defaulting to using Zoom as the default state for a meeting. Even if you can have it all in one place, then make sure there is an invite for others to join remotely. And the other side is is around communication, the written word versus a voice and that requires a lot of discipline around decisions that are taken and being put into an asynchronous format.
Josephine Tse 11:08
So also making your brainstorms and your communications more asynchronous. Would you say that helps with making your employees more autonomous?
James Hirst 11:17
Absolutely. One of the things that that discipline does is it enforces a degree of inclusivity. So by enforcing asynchronous contributions, it means anyone can contribute. Anyone can look at that proposal and say, I've got an idea. I can, I can add a question. I can add a query, you make sure that they can contribute. If you look at it purely as a way of avoiding having to get office rent, or, or as a way of hiring for different pay scales, then absolutely missing the biggest advantage of this, which is spending time, effort and focus on how do you communicate? How do you make decisions, how do you bring the best people in to contribute to that?
Josephine Tse 11:57
I don't know if you get this question a lot, but I'm wondering, how else do you guys make sure that the remote client management is going?
James Hirst 12:05
We're very proud of the way that we do work with our customers. And that's a result of from a very small scale having people available 24/7 365. But partly it's our focus on kind of radical responsibility for team members. And one of the big concerns of having a remote business is that is it going to take 24 hours additional to get decision made? Because I've just woken up, my line manager was in a prior timezone. So I'll raise a question. I won't get it until I wake up the next day because they won't get until they wake up. And that that's a real concern. So one of the things as a remote business is ensuring people understand that the rules of engagement so that they can respond to a customer and feel confident that they have your full support to just go ahead and do what needs to be done. We want to push that responsibility down to people wherever they are, but that really does need clear rules of engagement and clear objectives for everyone.
Josephine Tse 13:02
Made from the top?
James Hirst 13:03
Well, yeah, from the top, clear communication from the top, clear support that that will be there. We're getting into the world of OKRs as we scale so that you can clearly define those and bring some transparency to them. Those specific objectives are being set by the teams themselves and being ratified by by a leadership team. But the real key thing for us is making sure people have the comfort and knowledge and confidence that if they go ahead and do this, there isn't gonna be a court martial afterwards. Hey, that was the rules of engagement. That was the objective, it went, well, it went badly doesn't matter. I think that's where we outperform others who don't have that kind of credo who have a much more formal command and control response because a client problem or an internal problem just gets passed up and down the line and nothing gets done until it's gone all the way up until someone says, okay, I'll take responsibility and it passes all the way back down the line.
Josephine Tse 13:55
When you said that, pass it all the way up and pass it all the way down... I just immediately thought about like my past experiences, where we may be sitting there waiting for some sort of approval for hours when we know like it will probably be approved. But you still have to wait.
James Hirst 14:11
And that waiting is not driven, you know, no organisation would mandate that and it comes almost out of a dysfunction and a fear that cause a court martial.
Josephine Tse 14:21
Something to the client, client's going to like leave or something but you know, I totally understand that. It's kind of like flashbacks.
James Hirst 14:28
This you know, without sounding too kind of messianic about this is something really important. It is central to being remote because I heard someone define culture about how those how decisions get made when the boss is not in the room. Okay, so the culture of the business is what's going on when the person who normally is in charge isn't there. If you dig into that as a remote business, that's what happens every day because, you know, in a traditional office based setting, then you've got a manager sat there who's looking over the desk because they know that they're in at 9am they're in at 9am. They're not in at 9am, that's not so good. Yeah, that's the first level of control is applied, presenteeism. Next level of control is passing things up and down. Am I seeing oh, can I see what's over your shoulder? What are you doing? What are you working on at the moment? Okay, that's interesting. Okay. Maybe you should go this way. Maybe you should go that way, essentially being simply by being present in that way, setting the expectation that if you have a question, you throw it up the line and ask, and that doesn't scale remotely. You can't do that because we're not in the room. We don't monitor- we go to the point even of having unlimited paid annual leave complete, flexible working hours. And we ask people to organise that time their working day organise their working week and months and annual vacations with their colleagues direct. Yeah. And that requires a degree of trust and responsibility. That is so important. I think that's why larger organisations still have this thing of oh well we will allow you to work from home one day a week. It's that fear that the whole we can't control you and we don't trust you.
Josephine Tse 15:57
Like when people are given more flexibility and more, I guess autonomy, you just take responsibility of it. And there are ways to centre that a little more like for us, when we want to take vacation or whatever, we have a Slack channel, and we just write I'm going to be taking my vacation on these days and if there's anything let me know and usually it's fine.
James Hirst 16:19
The issue of course, you have to consider is that not everybody treasures that level of autonomy and not everybody treasures that level of responsibility. At different stages in your career, different and different personality types. Some people prefer frankly, to have less of the responsibility and focus more on the craft and and so that is something that we try to, we try to interview for and assess for when we're bringing people into the team is, will you thrive in this or will you actually find it quite difficult? Will you find it quite uncomfortable to have to decide which of these things to work on?
Josephine Tse 16:51
You having, you know, been in this company for over five years now... yeah, doing the math. Do you have any advice for people who are trying to potentially start the same thing that you guys are embarking on right now, things that you wish somebody had told you while you were in the position?
James Hirst 17:10
Yeah, I think one of the things that we got right just by necessity and circumstances, we were remote ourselves as founders. I think if the founders are not operating remote, but everyone else is, then that is not going to work and is not going to scale because you end up with a two-tier system, where there's the office where the decisions get made, and then there's everybody else. And that isn't healthy. The fact that our CEO and the chap who wrote the software from the very first and and saw the opportunity is in Auckland, and is many many hours remote from any of his colleagues really sets the agenda. If you yourself don't see the benefit of being remote and wouldn't operate remote, I would consider why you would want everyone else doing, so that'd be my starting point.
James Hirst 17:56
Next one, I think we were too slow probably to formalise the asynchronous documentation, asynchronous decision making, and I think it wasn't until it became too chaotic and too problematic with too many people shouting just around that, that we instituted, I would say that actually if if this, if you know, you're going down this path, then right away, figure out, how do we allow people to contribute? And how do we set expectations around the pace of those decisions and the communication of those decisions? Because that's a real point of friction. Otherwise, I think the third one, and if anyone has an answer to I'd love to hear it because it's still a problem for others.
Josephine Tse 18:33
Oh, yeah?
James Hirst 18:33
We work 24/7 365 or the company does, because people are in every time zone. And we have some very motivated, very committed people are doing really great things within the business. And it's really difficult to find a way to contribute and enthusiastically when you want to contribute, but also to lock out of that and shut off and get your own time. It's tempting to think, oh, that discussion that was still going on. I wonder if anyone's pick that up over in Singapore. I'm just gonna log on and look on Slack now and it's nine at night or it's five in the morning. And, and suddenly you realise, oh, hang on my Slack usage just, you know, the only time it's not on is when I'm asleep. And that is that's dysfunctional, and we're trying various things, but we still haven't got an answer that is both, you are responsible for your own time, you are able to contribute and flex your working hours and work how you want. But also, please look after yourself. Yeah, please turn this off. You should be going out and having fun on a Saturday afternoon and not really worry about what's there. Yeah. And that's a really difficult thing to strike because you want... you want people to enthusiastically contribute and sometimes people do want to do a stint of really engaging and trying to get something over the line.
James Hirst 19:42
You don't want people being notified and alerted 24/7 365 and feel like there's a constant deluge of noise. And we haven't quite found the answer to that. And we've spoken to many people when we spend time with GitHub, we spent time with smaller companies who are all remote and spoken to them and it does seem to be a I guess part of modern life is the information overload the always on the fact you've got a device in your pocket. And we're not quite ready to go the other way, the-the French government way of mandating turning off emails at weekends and evenings.
Josephine Tse 20:10
I did not know they did that.
James Hirst 20:12
Yeah, there is that there is a right to turn, turn your work communications off, and you can be prosecuted for bending that, however, and that's great if you're all located in Paris and Lyon, but if your colleagues are in Singapore, they want to send an email. So how do you reconcile that and answers on a postcard to us please, if you have them.
Josephine Tse 20:33
You heard it here first, listeners. Do you find yourself not being able to shut off as well?
James Hirst 20:38
Yes, to a degree. I mean, I think that's, that's probably endemic for all founders. Because, you know, you're constantly worried that you know, is everything going okay? Am I doing enough, is the team okay? So you're constantly checking in on things and second guessing, but I do find that there are there are projects, there are programmes at work, there are teams doing things I want to be involved in and they are in every timezone.
Josephine Tse 21:00
Right.
James Hirst 21:01
I want to catch up with them. And one of the things we do as founders is we do try to travel infrequently, but ensure that we do spend time in each of those regions so that we we are in the same time zone as people at different times of the year. But yeah, it really is difficult. I find it's easier at weekends, but during the week, of what point do I disengage?
Josephine Tse 21:20
And that's a double edged sword of having your globally distributed team. Yeah. So I talked to somebody who also was COO of a company, and he was trying to very, he was trying to do that as well. He was talking about enforcing, like, no emails and Slack on the weekends. And it was just like a starting point. Because he was like, I found out that, you know, if you don't say it, in a more strict tone, people will just kind of push it away. But he was trying to figure out a way to shut off more and make sure people were spending time with the family and friends. And because like eventually it's going to lead to some kind of burnout. There's no clear solution just because of everybody's working style and how they are as a person.
James Hirst 22:02
Yeah, yes. And one thing that we do know is that people find it easier to have a strict rule of abstinence rather than self regulation and moderation. It's, it's easy to say, turn it off and then turn it on at this time. And that's the rule versus well just look after yourself. Don't... yeah. But is the timezone is the issue because you, you want the freedom to flex. And actually, some of our team really prized that. They like the ability that they can get up early in the morning, work with the team in a different region, shut off for a few hours, go do something else, go to the gym, or you can hang out with a family, and then maybe pick something else up in the afternoon, just adjust their day around it. And so you can't mandate the chatting emails off at those times for that. So yeah, autonomy and responsibility versus command and control. Those two things don't sit comfortably with an always on communication stream.
Josephine Tse 22:53
I think the person that I was speaking with he didn't really have the timezone thing either. So with his team being different from places in Europe, but not anywhere else...
James Hirst 23:04
He should sign up to the French government approach. Very command and control.
Josephine Tse 23:08
And to wrap it all up. So first of all, thank you so much for speaking with me for over an hour now on another episode of the Remoter Podcast. But to wrap it up, I want to know if you think that Tyk's story, mission, values etc will encourage other people or listeners, other companies to explore the world of remote.
James Hirst 23:32
Yeah, I would, I would hope so I would think that the key things for us are that we didn't need to go out and impress VCs to get started. We didn't need to go out and seek funding to build a sizeable team who competing with really big names in tech, we didn't need to be hiring people in one location. In fact, we got an advantage from just throwing the doors and the hiring open to anyone anywhere. And importantly, not only that starting point, not only does it allow us to get started in a way that would have been prohibitive if we'd all been in one location. But I'm a big believer that the quality of what we do and the engagement of what we do and the fact that our team are so motivated and have such strong affinity with what we're doing because of how we work, that we can out-compete those other firms. So anyone who's looking at an idea or something, they want to get started and feels that they have these blockers of, I need money for rent, I need money for the office space, I need money to bring these people and I've got to go and pitch to these people. And frankly, I'm going to come up to a kind of a you know, Donald Trump style character who's going to shout me down, that that those shouldn't be blockers. There are other ways of doing it. And remote is a key part of it, if you think you can make that work.
Josephine Tse 24:43
So thank you very much for joining us today. I do hope that the message resonates with people. I mean, that's the whole point of the entire series, but I do hope at least it can open one person's eyes to the benefits and also the hardships that you have to go through when just on whether or not to go remote or start your company remote. Thank you so much.
James Hirst 25:04
That's been great. Thanks. Enjoyed talking to you.
Josephine Tse 25:10
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?