Matt

Welcome to Podcast Awesome, where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the Font Awesome team. For me, come Awesome. I'm your host, Matt Johnson. In this podcast, we catch up with Font Awesome founders Dave Gandy and Travis Chase to talk about the kind of culture they've been striving to create at Font Awesome and how conventional hiring practices might be missing the mark.

0:00:50

Matt

When did you guys get a sense where you started to realize that maybe the hunch that you had could maybe work? Because it sounds like you've got three friends. When you go back to other conversations we've had, travis, Dave, and Rob are thinking about, hey, we're talented people. We know that the work environments we're in now are not ideal and have a kind of a vision for what work could look like together and sort of charting your own path there.

0:01:27

Matt

When did that start to feel like an actual reality? Instead of, wow, wouldn't it be cool if we could do such and such?

0:01:34

Travis

Yeah. We read a lot about from the 37 Signals blog, now known as Base Camp, and were inspired by a lot of their writing, and they would get a lot of criticism, that kind of stuff. They wrote books that kind of talked about how to do business and software differently than what was typically being done or spoken about or how you should do, say, fundraising or managing or grow your business or build software.

0:01:59

Travis

They came out very opinionated on how they could do something different. And personally, it really resonated because where I was working at the time, I was like, oh, man, this is the way you should do some things. Not that I agreed 100% with everything, but the core of what was there resonated so much and so kind of I think sometimes it's an overloaded term entrepreneur, but being an entrepreneur is having that audacity.

0:02:26

Travis

One of the things personally motivating was to say, I wonder if there could be two companies. And not that there are probably a ton of companies that run much like Base Camp and care about people. You don't get to hear about it very often. They were like the first because they were successful. They could talk about it, and people couldn't just discount what they were doing because they were successful in the eyes of businesses. They made money. They had customers, they had real products that people loved, and they made a lot of money, and then they did business differently. And so, well, maybe we have to maybe there's a different way to do it. And so for me, it was like, yeah, I want to see could there be two? Could we do two and it work? Or is that just they're just a unique company into the world?

0:03:07

Dave

Yeah, base Camp for me, and most of what they write to me is sense to it to look at the things that are obviously just nonsense. And what if you ran it a different way? For us? I think the question for me specifically was I was pretty sure I knew how to care about people and how to take care of a team and their emotional and mental health all along the way and make it something they got to enjoy doing.

0:03:31

Dave

And so for us, in a lot of ways, I think, Travis, we both have built software. We've run the gauntlet of delivering on a reliable basis software and design. We had the Font Awesome project itself as some proof that we might, in fact actually have a good idea of how to do user centric product design. And so really, the big question left over, I think, for us was can we make enough money to keep going? And so really, until that fauna sum Five Kickstarter hit, I don't think we had a solid yes yet. And so we've been profitable every year since the Phonosum Five Kickstarter. And so that's been nice to have something of an answer to that question, too. Can we run a business well enough?

0:04:07

Dave

Can we figure out how to make money off the stuff? We made all kinds of business nonsense. We really tried to talk the way humans talk. There are some words that no matter how you do it, there's no other word to replace it. And so you have to reuse a really stupid word. Entrepreneur is one of those. The way it sounds just sounds absurd. And I like that base camp has the word. I like to use the word starter. I think that's interesting, being precise in how you talk. You have to use jargon, and that's kind of what jargon really actually is. But we try to be as human as possible in what we do, and this comes down to every place. How do we talk to people right now? How do we talk to people when we're writing copy for our website, when we're writing the words that people are going to read, what do they sound like? Does it sound like a human wrote it, or does it sound like a marketer wrote it?

0:04:54

Dave

And how does that happen? How do we lose some of our humanity along the way? Being able to step back and feel that line of where is the humanity? Where are the people? I think is this thing that we've always really tried strongly to focus in on. The word for adding humanity to things is providing other people with dignity. The process of removing that is removing dignity. And I think that's such a fascinating idea that can we help bring dignity in some small way through software to what people make? And I think people hear all kind of some of the full stories to a lot of different stuff. I hope that it I hope that it does shake out in the end that way.

0:05:32

Dave

And also think I mean, time is a factor in this time. And luck, we don't discount luck in the whole equation and we get things wrong. We have to learn. And being able to say, hey, I've changed my mind. I'm going to do something different and do that. But I think so far in our journey pretty rewarding. When they say I can't work anywhere else, it seems like those applied principles of not only the actual work day, but also how you treat people and how you try to actually live out what you said you were. Going to do when we built this thing is so far proven to be a place that people really enjoy working, and it really doesn't feel like a job that way.

0:06:12

Matt

Yeah. Dave, you got pretty strong opinions about hiring. We've talked about it a little bit before, and this is a piece of that. You guys get to a place where you have a really successful Kickstarter, and now you're starting to see like, hey, I think we might be able to make this work. You've got a couple of people on board and sort of seeing this vision come together and you start hiring more folks.

0:06:34

Matt

How do you think about hiring of the type of people that you hire? I know that there's like a big disdain for terms like the rock star, so and so or the “A Player”, or “Ninjas”. Yeah. Or the so and so Ninja. When you hear those terms, it feels a little sickening. 

Dave

Absolutely right. When companies tend to think of, like, RockSstars and A players, rock stars, because of the way they get treated by others, they feel enabled.

0:07:06

Dave

Not all of them, but the system that you create around that encourages childishness and really just stupid decisions. Right. And so typically, oftentimes the people that think of as the rock stars are the children causing all the problems that the adults then have to come into work and clean up. If you've got somebody who's high on Red Bull coding at 02:00, a.m. Gazelle hardware, whatever, because I'm a rock star, are typically causing more problems in the code base than they're solving by a great deal.

0:07:34

Dave

Instead, somebody else has to come in and clean up that mess. What if instead we hired adults? What if we hired adults and we treated them that way? Because the truth is, so many of what other companies define as rock stars are terrible employees. But so often a lot of the employees that other companies have deemed B and C players are actually just A players currently under bad management. Right. They have such a horrible process that doesn't recognize the reality of how ideas come about, how you go from idea all the way through to making this thing. And so they'll devalue certain parts of that and they won't recognize the true value of who this person is. I had a person on my team. She came in every morning at 06:00 A.m. And 07:00 A.m. And left at 03:00 P.m.. So she's there the same amount of time everybody else is. And she was an adult. She she had a family that she took care of. And for her, at that point in her life, work was something that helped enable the rest of her life.

0:08:26

Dave

And every time we got into the room to evaluate bonuses, one of the things that company used to talk about was they talked about headroom. Where could this person be? And let's be clear what that is. We are currently giving people money for what we imagine they could be, not what they're doing right now. Does that not sound unbelievably stupid? No. To spend our time doing this, so you're actually creating the culture of the rock stars. The people that we identify here, these are the people that can do these stupid things, not come in, reliably on time every day, and do their work wonderfully and to full completion. Right.

0:09:05

Dave

She also had this way of every single God, just the worst, most busy work, droning tasks that all of the high flyers all of the high flyers didn't want to do or weren't interested in doing first hand up. I'll do that. And you knew when she took a task, it was done and will be done all the way through, and you didn't have to worry about it at all. If that is not a high flyer, dear God, we do not know what we're doing in evaluating the work that people are doing. What if the people evaluating the work people were doing had some experience with that actual work?

0:09:41

Dave

What if people managing software were also ones who wrote software? What if my proxy as a manager for is this person doing their job? Was not how many hours is their ass in their seat? That's another thing that encourages the rock star mentality. That person is really, really there. They're so dedicated. Right? They're here so late at night. That's because they didn't do anything the rest of the day.

0:10:01

Dave

That's because they came in. They didn't do anything. They played all day on the foosball table, and they drink Red Bull all day. And now they got a deadline coming up, so they're rushing as fast as they can at 02:00 A.m. To get it done. That's what's actually going on. And somehow that gets interpreted as the person that we really need to keep around here, because they're really working hard. We need people in place who can actually evaluate the work product, who can look at it and know how it is.

0:10:26

Dave

I once described our company as an engineers who liked people. Right? They're engineers. Engineers. Right. They're engineers who love machines and are fascinated by them and how they work, and they don't really care about a whole lot else. Right. I did undergrad at MIT. That's most of the people there. But what if we could create a company full of engineers who liked people, right? And this goes back to the kind what you're oriented around and what you care most about it and the filter by which you look at all of those things. And if we're engineers who like people, what does that do? What does that also do to the work product along the way? What does that do to how we work together and how we can come into a room and have a lively discussion, really lively discussion with disagreement, and then we can all feel safe enough to basically to disagree and commit with what's there.

0:11:12

Matt

How do we do that?

0:11:13

Dave

I think there's also a piece when we talk about hiring, a lot of it's focused on resume or competency in whatever, say, language or tool. We really try to focus on a character fit. We always say we hire for character first. We're really trying to look at that person and see if they can work with the team, have similar values, and maybe they don't have the exact fit and competency that we're looking for. We think that can be learned most of anything in software design.

0:11:46

Travis

It can be learned with time. It's just being able to, as a company, say, you know what? We're fine giving you that time. That costs money that maybe other companies aren't willing to spend because they want to just get and keep going, going to build more and more and more and more. And we're like, well, we can take the time to do it right, because the person fit is there.

0:12:05

Dave

Well, this is very much like this is what Southwest Airlines does. Southwest Airlines doesn't hire for your experience as a flight attendant. They hire for personality. They hire for what that default neutral is for you, and they believe that they can train the rest. We're probably the closest to thinking about it that way. Yeah, it's really fun to work here. It's really fun to work around people who value humor and who will speak up in order to make sure to deliver that punchline that you're sitting on. Go ahead and say it.

0:12:35

Matt

Yeah. You've said before, too, that most companies will hire for skill or competency first and then fire for issues of character, and that it's completely backwards. Right? 

Dave

It is. Right. This goes back to just running a company with common sense. In a lot of ways, that is how people tend to get fired. They did something, so we fired them. And what if we hired firing for behavior? What if you were hired for the same thing?

0:13:00

Dave

A standard interview process will not get this. Even when you put three people through eight interviews in a day, technical interviews all, oh, my goodness. Again, if you're doing that, you're just doing it wrong. If you know what you're doing engineering wise, you can get a really good signal for what somebody knows relatively quickly on the design or the engineering side. If you know it well, you can suss it out pretty well, pretty quick. But the real question is, and the reason for taking longer is not about asking more skill or experience questions.

0:13:34

Dave

It's about seeing how somebody is going to react under natural circumstances that occur when you work together. So outside of the people that we've actually worked with before personally, that we already know the answer to this, for everybody that we hire, we want to spend some time working on a project with you. And we get the opportunity cost there, right? We get that when people are really, really in demand professionally, they may not want to take the time to spend 20 hours on a side project to see if it's a good fit. We get that this is time where we learn something and they learn something in a much clearer way is these the people I want to live my life with for a while? I want to wake up and go and to hang out with these people and build stuff with these people. The very people who are willing to have that question answered because they care about it are the right people we want to be working with anyway. We're willing to worry about that risk.

0:14:19

Dave

But what that does is when we get to work with people on a real project, there's just natural things that occur, right? There's going to be disagreement that occurs. How do we do that? There are people that will if you don't agree with them immediately, they will just make fun of you. They will just ridicule you or they will totally climb up and not talk. And we also know that some of these things, some of these ways of reacting are ways that people have learned to cope in a normal job. So how do you try to get past that too? How do you give the patience and not see, AHA, AHA, they failed, this is done right. But how do you like well, how do you try to get both of you to the place where you know each other well enough, where you can feel some level of trust to let some of those walls down? And be able to tackle an idea for its own sake, rather than worrying about a whole bunch of organizational stuff or politics or whatever else. It seems like that's where the human centered hiring for character, the character comes to the top and you're like, AHA, this person can be a human being. They can work out differences, they can be a kind person, make the idea what's important rather than feeling attacked. That's right. In order to be somebody who is a learner that implicitly requires you to say and know of yourself that I don't know already, I don't already know everything. And that is fundamentally a humility question more than anything else. How does this play out as you're learning? How does it play out in your work and how does it play out? Lots of places, because we know that that's one of the most important things in working together with other people who disagree with you on a team. You've got to have this idea that maybe I don't know everything right. And maybe for people like Travis, who are unfortunately right more often than they should be yes.

0:15:53

Dave

To be that person and still have the humility, to be like, I don't know, I'm going to be maniacally reasonable right now. I'm going to acknowledge reality. And this is the other thing, too. There's a way of looking at what we'd like to think of character or the way we use that word when we say that word. There's a lot of things it could mean. What we mean when we say it is that the way character develops is when who you think you are, who you say you are, who you actually are, and who you want to be as those things become the same thing.

0:16:20

Dave

That's one way to think about character. There's a self awareness required. There's a desire to be better than you are right now. There's a whole bunch of that that all together requires an awful lot of I don't know, but I want to get better.

0:16:36

Matt

Well, amen to that. We all could use a little more humility, and we really could use more humility in the workplace. So thanks again to Dave and to Travis for coming on the show today. And, you know, the usual drill here. If you've liked what you've heard, please subscribe, tell your friends, give us a rating, give us a thumbs up, all that good stuff. This podcast was edited and produced by yours truly, Matt Johnson. The fun, Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin, and audio editing was completed by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions.