My guest today is Andrej Berlin who is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Work a decentralized design studio. In this episode, we discuss the following: - What got Andrej Berlin interested in the field of design - Why Andrej Berlin started Deep Work - How Andrej Berlin met his cofounder - Why Andrej Berlin is building a decentralized design studio - Problems Andrej Berlin faced when following the traditional design agency framework - Why Andrej Berlin created a design process for all the freelancers to follow - How Andrej Berlin created a buddy system to ensure quality control over the design work - Andrej Berlin's approach to resolving community disputes - How Andrej Berlin keeps a pulse on the community health - How Andrej Berlin applies game design to community building - How much do freelance designers at Deep Work make - Andrej Berlin thoughts on experimenting with a potential token launch and blockchain - Why Andrej Berlin stands for a meritocracy based model - How to contact Andrej Berlin For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show
Andrej Berlin is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Work. He has been involved in the design of over 100 different products and services from open source teams, start-ups, enterprises and fortune 500 companies. He is an advocate for mental and physical health and considers work as an integral part of a meaningful life.
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Namaste and welcome. I am Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to the design MBA which is a real-life MBA program for designers. You will learn how to launch a side hustle and level up your design careers from the interviews rock star designers.
Jayneil Dalal: Today, we have an amazing guest, Andrej Berlin. Andrej is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Work. He has been involved in the design of over 100 different products and services from open source teams, startups, enterprises and Fortune 500 companies. he is an advocate for mental and physical health and considers work an integral part of a meaningful life. So, now, if you're a designer listening to this episode right now and you're thinking about “Well, how can I actually, you know, get involved and get some real life experience working on design projects, go over to Deep Work Studio, get involved in their Discord community and then you can actually shadow on projects, you can participate in projects and the best part is you actually get paid for learning and getting better at design.
So, without further ado, Andrej, welcome to the show, man. Super excited to have you.
Andrej Berlin: Thank you so much, yeah. Also, very excited. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jayneil: Awesome. So, really quickly, I just want to know were you always interested in design? How did you first get involved in the field of design?
Andrej: Wow! That's a great question. I actually never considered myself a designer and my story is actually quite junky. So, it goes in a lot of different directions. I started studying Math and Psychology and I was actually interested in performing magic and that brought me to Math and Psychology but I didn't do that for a long time because it was very intense and I needed some time to do other things. So, I went into film, studied film, got a little bit experience in design there and then went actually back into Psychology and Computer Science and then did that for about a year and then I got an offer from a friend of a friend to join their agency startup that was focusing on UX design and I was “That's quite interesting because it actually combines user experience and Psychology but also it is a little bit heavy on Computer Science because I need to understand the technology and I’m going to get paid for it. So, that seems a good thing to do.” And I tried that. And ever since then, I was kind of in that path and evolving more and more in doing design although I would say I’m actually very hesitant to do visual design work myself. So, I’m more concerned with problem solving rather than visual design.
Jayneil: Got it. And then you're working at this company. Did you always have this itch to do your own thing? What actually led to just you leaving that company and then now starting Deep Work Studio?
Andrej: Yeah, that's also an interesting question. I think I was always trying to solve small incremental problems. And before I joined the agency, I was traveling around and I was in different countries and I met a Russian girl in Sri Lanka, kind of fell in love with her and …
Jayneil: Wow!
Andrej: Then I had this problem of “She lives there, I’m in Germany but I don't have a job that allows me to actually survive anywhere else. So, I need to figure out a way to make money elsewhere.” And I met people along the way who were translators and they were like “Hey, this is how I make my money” and I have a base in Belgium but I also travel around and do translation work. When I started working at the agency, most of it was like “Okay, I’m going to do UX design. That's possible remotely. It needs only a computer” but then also it was very exciting and there was this part about doing workshops together and they were super-efficient. So, the amount of knowledge exchange you get in a workshop is insane. And from there, I was constantly trying to figure out how to do that remotely because it just seemed to be super valuable. And at some point, we just disagreed. So, the guys were like “We're not interested in online work.” That was like late 2017 and I was “How can you not see this?”
Jayneil: You were definitely in the future, yeah.
Andrej: Yeah, I left because of this kind of misalignment and started exploring further how I can make that happen. And so, that actually led to Deep Work.
Jayneil: And then how did you meet your co-founder Charlie?
Andrej: I met him at a conference stealing T-shirts … well, not stealing but taking T-shirts from a design stand at the conference. I was actually just brought along over a couple of months by another blockchain team that were like “We need to UX design and he can do UX design.” I’m like “Okay, whatever. I’m just going to come along.” So, I flew around on different conferences trying to kind of pick up as much as I can. And at Defcon 4, I think, in Prague, I wanted to get to this side event because I didn't get any main event tickets and I went in, was super intimidated by the amount of people. So, I went out again and then I met a guy who I met several months before and he was like “You should go in there. It's fun.” And I was like “Okay. Well, now, that must be something.” And then I went back in and then I started talking to Charlie and he was like “We should definitely start working together” and that was the start of what we then started building together as an agency and now it has become Deep Work.
Jayneil: Wow! It's always fascinating for me to hear stories of how people eventually meet their co-founders or other people they collaborate with and this is just … and Charlie is also based with you in Berlin, I’m assuming?
Andrej: No, he's actually in Spain in Ibiza. He lives on the calm side of the island.
Jayneil: Oh my God! I was like “Ibiza! Oh my God! That must be so cool!”
Andrej: Yeah, it's actually very pleasant where he lives, very nice weather, very nice people. And it was kind of funny because most people I worked with or didn't work with, I’ve never seen in person and Charlie, I met once at that conference and then not at all for a year or so.
Jayneil: Oh my God!
Andrej: And we did everything online.
Jayneil: It's very interesting for me to see because a lot of us are used to the old school way of working which is, okay, I meet Andrej in person. We work together in person. You come over for dinner or we go out for dinner. We kind of bond in person and that leads to building that trust but it's so interesting that you met this person one time at the conference and all the interactions later on have been virtual like online and you were able to build that trust. It's now the new thing is building trust over the internet.
Andrej: That's a very tough one. And it's not been easy. So, it's not like we met once and then we were best friends and it was super cool. It was more because we saw value in each other's skill sets and were like “We could start something together that's greater than the both of us.” And we came from completely different places. We were from completely different mental places. We both had like health issues that were inhibiting us and keeping us out of balance and working together actually kept us going. So, we were like … there is actually no way of stopping this because what we're working on it has to continue and we went through a lot of really intense like, I wouldn't say fights, but arguments and clarifications. So, it was very, very tense but eventually things just get solved as we both learned about ourselves and each other and other people as well through building stuff together online. Trust is a very difficult part online in general.
Jayneil: Yeah. And when there's money involved, it gets even difficult like if you're just collaborating with someone on a project just that or talking, it's a different story but when it's money involved, when it's like you're starting a company, definitely it raises the stakes.
Andrej: Yeah, totally, but I also think that money can be an interesting tool for building trust. And I think that's kind of the tendency of most organizations now, especially with blockchain software is that we can create interfaces for humans to become incentivized to be more truthful and making predictions about their own performance because if they meet these predictions in the future, they get rewarded, and if they don't, then they don't get rewarded. And so, its kind of incentivizes people to just be nicer to each other, I guess.
Jayneil: So, this is really interesting that you bring up this point because what you have created with Deep Work is one of the first or pioneering studios is actually decentralized. And for those people wondering what I mean by decentralized, it's just meaning that it's not in a centralized location. It’s people, contributors from all around the world that can contribute to Deep Work, they can take part in Deep Work, help out. And what I’m curious to know is that why not just start a typical design agency, hire employees full time on staff, just grow more. Why did you go down this route of making it decentralized?
Andrej: It's a good question. I think, actually, it's inevitable. So, from my perspective at least, it was an inevitable process because it was based on a lot of kind of errors and progressions. So, my definition of decentralized is actually … so, there's different ways to kind of look at it but it's not that there is never an authority and there are organizations that try to be just like “We don't have a CEO. We just like anarchy” and it becomes anarchy, it doesn't really work. Decentralization is actually kind of, from my perspective, a particular step in the process of scaling off an organization. So, you always start, as yourself, as a freelancer with your own business and then you maybe you have a couple of people because you start getting more clients and more jobs, so you have to find an intern or find some support in other areas and you have this small team. And then if you go further beyond that and you actually establish yourself as part of something that just is so unique and so required by the market that you have to create … like you have to multiply yourself somehow.
Jayneil: Yes.
Andrej: Traditionally, you would just hire people in. You would hire people for HR, you will have a Financial Department, you will have Marketing because you can't make all these decisions yourself. It just becomes way too big. And decentralization comes in basically at this stage where we can now use tools, software, to basically distribute the decision mode to all the individuals from you as the founder or as the leader and you still have like … you make your decisions that you need to make but you're distributing the kind of decisions that everybody else can make across the whole network of people. And so, that basically eliminates any managerial layer. The reason why this works is actually simply because you can write software, as I mentioned earlier, that can compensate people for these tasks that are very specific to the outcome. So, you can compensate people for like exactly the tasks that an HR person would do but you assign that to a freelancer that is now … you can't do that. You can quality control someone else now – “If you do it well, you get paid” – or doing marketing, you're talking about … you're finding a referral “Okay, cool. You get like 6% referral bonus” and because there's a lot of these small decisions, you're basically designing a software that automates all of these decision-making processes so that they're kind of like distributed across the network of your individuals. And so, the values in that are many. So, if that's done right, you're actually getting as close to meritocracy as you can. You're also enabling a network of freelancers where people can do work if they want to but they also don't need to if they don't want to and you kind of even creating the decision making in these things.
Jayneil: It's like the gig economy with Uber and Lyft. The appeal was that you set your own schedule. If you want to drive today, you drive; if you don't want to, you don't do it. It's totally … and you're not hiring all these full-time people.
Andrej: There's another thing. Yes, I mean, that's definitely a bonus. And another thing that's also very valuable about that is that not only do you get paid for doing the work and you just are completely fully sustainable but you also, at the same time, maintain a profit share of the organization. And that's relatively unique because that's normally something that's only possible with a traditional business where you have equity because you have people on salary, on payroll and you have the documentation of who's where, what do people do, they get bonuses but here you have the combination of full freedom of what they want to do and, at the same time, a stake in the organization and that stake also incentivizes them to do the best thing they can for the organization because that increases the percentage of their share.
Jayneil: And I think this is something I definitely want to dig in further, the profit sharing and stuff in a bit, but before that, you said there were progressions and errors that kind of led you to this decentralized model. So, I want to know like what other models did you experiment with and why did they not work or what was your take away from it?
Andrej: Yeah. I mean, it's been a lot of incremental steps. So, obviously, I started off as a freelancer and that's super lonely, at least it was to me, and meeting Charlie and kind of starting the business with him was not like I was … I saw him and I was like “We definitely need to collaborate” but it was that I learned before that having a partner is something that's actually very, very helpful if you're starting basically anything. It's very helpful to have another human or ideally a whole network of people. So, we were freelancing together then and that was great and we basically hired a couple of people to help us. And the problem with hiring was that there was sometimes there were projects and sometimes there were no projects and sometimes we’d just like sit around and paying this guy and he's like “What am I supposed to do? What am I going to do?” And I’m like “I don't know. Just come up with something. You just get paid for it anyway.” That was just a bit tricky because he didn't know what to do but he felt he had to and I didn't know what to tell him because we just didn't have any projects. So, then we said “Okay, let's just only work with freelancers. That keeps us flexible.” And then it was like “Okay. So, how do we use equity part because people who work with us right now are actually very helpful in building what we want to build in the future and we want to compensate them?” And that was like “Okay, we'll have to figure it out but that's maybe for later, we'll find out.” A bigger more pressing issue was that we would have projects and we schedule freelancers and they would basically tell us they can do that job – “I’m a good user researcher. I can do the interviews, write the report” and then we were like “Okay, cool. So, you're going to do a good job.” And we went on that project and they just didn't do it or they did it to quality of work that was so far below what our standard was that we actually kind of felt really bad for the client. And that becomes tricky because then you have who promise stuff and you're like “How are you supposed to double check them?” because you have to, you're spending tons of time on quality assessing every single person and hiring them and it's not sustainable. And so, that then led us to kind of setting up this this buddy system where we basically had people to actually work on the projects first and prove that they can do it and then when they've done it … and they didn't take any responsibility but when they'd done it, they would get a badge in Discord or we put them on a list and then like “Okay, you're an expert. You can do it. I trust you with this.” So, that was kind of the next stage. And then …
Jayneil: So, right there where you have the buddy system where if you just hire freelancers and you see their work and you think they're going to deliver but then for some reason you've got a client project, they don't deliver, it looks bad for you, for the studio but now you're like “You have to prove yourself before you're given that responsibility.” So, doesn't that again, to your point, make scaling a little bit difficult because even if let's say an expert comes in, they have good experience but you're “No, you got to prove yourself first” and they might be “No, I don't want to prove myself. This is my work. Take it or leave it.”
Andrej: Yeah, we had that. We went through a lot of different cases. It's very difficult to kind of explain all of them because each of these little tiny things where someone was like “I know I’m good. I don't have to adhere to your idea. Let me just do the work.” And they were like “Okay, it didn't work out.” Another project. So, it was never that bad because from that point on, we could always kind of save the outcome but, yeah, they were these cases. Then there was another case where someone … and then we started “Okay, we have a specific process, our design process. We're just going to write it out like step by step like that’ll be like exactly as it says here.” It's online. You can look it up on our knowledge base. And people would come in and were like … they were designing and then they didn't finish in time and we were like “Well, why did that not work out?” And they're like “I don't know.” So, we looked at how they worked and they just didn't follow the process and they're like … and then their argument was like “Yeah, it's just I have my own process” and it's like “Okay but it's not going to work out then.” And so, that led us to kind of really have to stick to this whole process step by step and actually kind of get compensated only when you actually follow that process. And that gets evolved over time in general anyway. Sorry, I don't know if that answers …
Jayneil: It does. It does. I’m trying to understand how do you take that risk in the first few times where you had all these people that just didn't want to follow the process because they're like “I’m a designer. Why should I follow that process?” I mean, it's pretty simple.
Andrej: Right.
Jayneil: But then you have a client who's paying for this work and then at the end of one week or two weeks, the work is not done. So, how did you manage that expectation with a client? Did you just have to like tell the client like it's going to be okay or did you have to step in personally and finish the project? How did you minimize damage control?
Andrej: Yeah, that was mostly the latter. So, this buddy system is basically set up in a way that there is a range of vetted experts. So, we started off with Charlie and me. We kind of vetted ourselves like “Okay, we can do these things and we can finish a project.” And then we started meeting new people and meeting really amazing user researchers, amazing product designers, freelancers and we were like “You do the job actually better than I would do.” And so, that's like you get the expert badge and now you're part of that vetted list. And then these people are also … like everybody who's an expert basically takes responsibility of a successful outcome. And whenever someone else comes in and kind of supports the experts on the project, they split the tasks. So, expert does their own list of tasks. The collaborator, that's what I call them, they do another set of tasks that's on their proximal zone of development and they agree on that. They work through the project. And then after the project, they revalue it. So, the expert always takes responsibility of a finished outcome, they always watch and they get a bonus for mentoring kind of a payment bonus. And then after the project, they evaluate the collaborator, they tell him “Okay, you did like four out of these five things, you did well. Great. You get badges for all of these four things.” And then next time, it's because they would have these badges, someone would work with them and they were like “Okay. So, you have been attested that you can do these things so that now I trust that you can also do these things and also I can look at which project you have worked on in the past and also ask the other person who's worked with you in the past who gave you feedback.” So, that creates more trust than just saying like “Hey, here's my CV” or like “Here's my LinkedIn profile.”
Jayneil: It's like proof of work like you're showing that you can do the work rather than just saying you can do it. And in traditional organizations, when we have performance reviews, let's say that you're my boss and you give me a performance rating, let's say it's not a good rating, you're like “Oh, mediocre rating.” And I’m not happy and I can go to HR and HR will step in and try to listen to both sides of the story. There's all this drama that comes up. In the model you described, let's say that you are the expert and I worked with you in a project and you said “Jayneil, out of five things you did three things and here's the skill for these.” And let's say I disagree with that. I say that “You know what? I think I did four of these things, not three.” So, when there's a dispute in the assessment from the expert for the buddy in that system, do you have to get involved, do they bring it up to you or just it's like it is what it is?
Andrej: There's generally always a role of an evaluator. And that goes also for payments. And that's not my idea. That's an idea of or at least I found it first in the software called Colony. You should check it out. It's there I found it. I really like it how it's very well designed. It's incredibly well designed. And essentially you have that one-to-one collaboration. And if there's a dispute, you can almost create a little market on who's right and involve more people into it. Again, this is not part of Deep Work but it will be because it is a fundamental part of how negotiations work or should work. Then you also invite a third entity that would evaluate that relationship. And it's not like that's the default case. The default case is that we assume that everything goes well but in case someone disagrees, there is always the ability to dispute it and to actually kind of open up that case to the community who would be rewarded for making the right decision on who is right here. And the same goes for also the badges and payments, especially if someone is doing something that's sketchy, that can always be disputed.
Jayneil: And have you had to personally step in to resolve any of these disputes or so far just involving the community has resolved it so far?
Andrej: I mean, no … Well, it's both. I mean, I currently just be … I’m involved in everything at the moment because it helps me figure out where the problems are and whose fault it is. And if it's our fault, improve it and compensate the client or compensate the person who has found damage. And there's been a lot of cases where nobody really was able to figure out why someone is unhappy or why something doesn't seem right and I had to step in and analyze how it's done or like who did what and where there was an error. And I’m really glad that I’m keeping track of everything and leaving everything transparent up to the case studies where you can really follow through which work has been done by whom. And it's not to point the finger at them and shame them. It's just a very useful tool for conflict resolution and it's not going to be like super public forever. That's not the ideal because people also want to have their privacy but it's very important to have that data as a tool to reaching consensus and to finding the learning. And I try to kind of … sometimes conflicts are negative or they seem something that's very heating but the resolution of those is always … like the harder the conflict, the bigger the conflict, the bigger is the learning. And that's what you want. That's what you want to get from any conflict is never ignore that. Try to figure it out to the last detail.
Jayneil: That is amazing. So, it almost feels like right now as you're scaling this system at Deep Work, you probably are juggling between both, you're doing client work as well as getting involved in all these processes and setting up a system to make sure that the whole thing runs smoothly.
Andrej: Yeah, it's tough. I would say I’m separating my attention. So, I constantly track which kind of role I have in which kind of decision and kind of take note of that. And that then formalizes my decisions about how the system is built. So, when I started working out this collaborator expert, I was just like “So, I’m an expert on this but how would I support Charlie with product design like where would I start? So, now I’m the collaborator. Okay. So, these roles work but then who makes sure that the project succeeds?” It's “Okay, the creative director.” – “Okay. So, I’m also the creative director because creative director does these things.” And so, slowly kind of start to disintegrating it but I also have to be in the system and observe what's going on because only when you're at the front, you also see what other people are doing and where are the people kind of failing on the systems, on the boundaries that you've set. And that's also very, very important to keep track of. So, I always talk as much as I can to everybody if I have the slightest feeling that something is not fair or could create friction. It's tough because it's emotionally very tough but it also helps building something that's extremely resilient, I hope, at least.
Jayneil: You've truly decentralized the whole HR process, the hiring process, the traditional mentorship process. When I went to your Discord and I saw these badges that you're giving to people like collaborator and then the skills they can get, it's almost like in a traditional organization you come in as an associate or junior designer, then you get promoted to a designer, then a senior designer, then lead, then manager. That's the traditional path and you can kind of know about it. So, you've kind of replicated the same model here that someone can come as a collaborator, just shadow on a project and they may have designs because, they may not, maybe they want to learn but there's a path if they keep on working on projects, get good reviews from experts, they can actually eventually one day go to that expert level.
Andrej: Yeah. And we had a couple of people who already kind of passed this or several people who went through the entire journey. And I think, to me, the interesting or I guess the exciting part is that the system really incentivizes or it favors those who are really motivated and who see meaning and doing their work and enjoy doing it. And if it's not fun for you to do design work, then the system is just not going to favor you. And that means that you'll have to probably find something else or you'll have to figure out what to do in order to learn better. So, it might sound a little bit robotic but it's actually very humane. So, it's all humans but they are trying to kind of get the best out of each other and progress them. And so, for projects generally, you can always shadow them, you can just always observe the process and learn from it. The documentation that we're evolving constantly also is open to read and I actually encourage to try it out yourself on projects like hobby projects. You can just like read through or even watch YouTube videos that I’ve recorded. It's a little cringy for me but I don't …
Jayneil: You’ve gamified the whole thing. You’ve gamified the whole career progression. So, in a game, if you die or something, you start a little bit backwards, you get some penalty. So, if someone starts out and maybe in the first few projects or so they don't do well, in a traditional organization, that means that you get put on performance plan; if you keep doing that, you get fired. What is the equivalent of that here?
Andrej: So, you can't get fired. And this is something that I also take … I kind of enjoy that as a side effect of the design, which is if you don't do well … So, it's completely normal to overestimate yourself. So, that was my assumption. And I think there are a lot of reasons for why that happens to people. They work in closed environments where the only feedback they get is from managers who might not have the skill. So, they either tell them “You did everything great” or they tell them “What is this?” but they don't really understand the granularity of the design work. And it makes it very difficult to actually interpret the feedback that you're getting as the truth where the ideal scenario is that you do design work and then the whole world sees it and then the whole world resonates to you … I mean, ideally, the whole world but it's … you can't predict who's going to do that. And they reflect to you what have you done well and what have you not done well based on experience from someone who knows what they're talking about. So, that's what we wanted to do. And so, that was the assumption like you will overestimate yourself. And there have been people who were just “I can do everything” and they come in and they're like “I don't think so.” And it’s fine because then your expert that you worked with just tells you “Look, this is what your level is, this is what you did well, but let's try again with the next project” and you just basically get to start over and there you already know what your level is, at least for Deep Work, you know what you're capable of. So, next time you go like “I’m just going to do only this thing and maybe a little bit of the next thing and I’m just going to … okay, I know the documentation is there. I’m just going to review that and ask some people some questions if I really understand it.” And then it's almost “Okay, we got your check, we got your balance” or how do you say it? “We figured out your baseline.” That's what I want to say.
Jayneil: And I think that's genius because you're setting them up for success because when you have honestly given them that “Hey, you thought you were at level 7 but honestly, you're at level 4. So, let's start out there,” it kind of minimizes the chances of failure again because now we can understand “Okay, now you're level 4. Maybe now you go to level …”, every point is just honest critical feedback for the person to improve.
Andrej: Right.
Jayneil: And I’m kind of curious, from these people or collaborators or experts, if they work on a project, let's say, for a week, I’m assuming with your new design process, usually the projects last for a week, which includes Hyper Sprint. What can they expect in terms of payment like what are the usual payments or payouts you've given to them?
Andrej: Yeah, good question. So, it really depends on several different factors. And we actually have a calculator on our website so you can kind of check because it also depends on how much time they would have, which role they would take. So, let's say for Hyper Sprint we have like three days of workshop facilitation, three days of product design, the product designers also take part in workshops and then we have about two days for user researchers. And so, generally, at the moment, facilitators for the three days get around … I think it should be around 3000 US Dollars, probably 2700 Euros or something, the product designers who do all the six days, so they participate in the three workshops and do three days of product design based on the process, that's about 5000 US Dollars and user researchers are about 1700 US Dollars for running user interviews and then summarizing them. Again, it depends because there is also a mentoring bonus. So, if you're an expert you get extra pay for mentoring but then also you don't get paid for the tasks you completely delegate. So, that's a little bit complicated as well but there is a calculator for that too. I also should mention that we don't work longer than four hours a day. So, the working days are actually four hours but there are things like Discord activity or being on a short call to introduce yourself or to meet your buddy or something.
Jayneil: This is mind-blowing, the way you're using finance as an instrument to incentivize the right things.
Andrej: There's also another thing that I should probably mention at this point, which is that we currently do have something like kind of this profit share which I was talking about earlier. So, in addition to the rate or not rate, what do you call it, fee, salary … it's not a salary but your payment for the project, the one-off payment, you also receive recurring profit share in Deep Work. And that's kind of a model that we've been also iterating on quite a lot but you basically get a certain amount of money on a monthly basis once you start working. And the more you work, the higher that amount will be; and the less you work, the lower it will or the more it will degrade.
Jayneil: Wow! And right now, it's all just a bunch of NOKO tools, you're putting some stuff in excel sheet and Discord and Boss, that's like trying to implement the version one which is awesome. And eventually, I believe you want to like slowly transition, based on this feedback, to where you actually have a token, right?
Andrej: Yeah, right. One thing I have to mention about token. So, everything is very, very close or similar to how a token would work. And we've been through different models of that but just from a legal perspective, I just need to make sure that that's been said publicly. We do not have a token. Everything is currently, as you said, on NOKO tools, it's on a spreadsheet. For all payments, everybody is invoicing us but generally, the idea is to use the blockchain technology to automate all these this profit share compensation and this recurring kind of monthly … what would you call it?
Jayneil: The payouts and all these things, instead of you manually doing all this stuff with NOKO tools and Excel sheets.
Andrej: Exactly, exactly.
Jayneil: For you, the token literally just a means, a software, a piece of software that can automate it so you and Charlie and the team can focus on other things.
Andrej: Exactly. So, this is also part of the whole decentralization. And it's not that … we're not putting out a token. And so, we have thought about that just being like “Hey, this is a token. It represents now X% of our treasury” or something but the problem with that is … Well, first of all, it's a legal nightmare because in order to issue a token, you just need to be a publicly traded company and it's just … It's very complicated and Charlie tells me to always be careful with that but the bigger problem is also that here once you have a token that represents some very specific value, people can buy it or can buy into it for purely financial reasons and that would influence the value in an artificial way. So, rather than … so, what we wanted to do is really tie in the value creation of the organization as closely as possible to some kind of profit share that we can distribute and avoid any type of financially incentivized behavior where people could just hoard in a lot of money and be like “I believe in Deep Work. Go!”
Jayneil: Yeah, that’s called [inaudible].
Andrej: Yeah, exactly. And that is very chaotic.
Jayneil: So, could it be that right now you literally have all the functionalities that most of them that a token offers but you're doing it on your own manually with a bunch of these like measures, NOKO tools and spreadsheets? Could it be that the more research you do, you end up not releasing a public token just because of these things and just keep it the way it is or just writing your own custom software for it?
Andrej: Yeah, exactly. So, we're actually kind of working on our own software for automating a lot of these things because we are reaching the limits of what we can do with these NOKO tools and they just break or Discord ships an update but it's not connected to Zapier and then Zapier updates their API and then you have to redo all of the connections ourselves. So, it's a lot slower, it's a lot slower progress but it automates really slowly only the things that we really need to automate and slowly kind of reduce the workload that can be automated.
Jayneil: I almost think of this as the software tool that basically runs … like people have backend software that run the entire business. This could be that software that helps to run a decentralized studio for so many people and not studio but just even company because I’ve had conversations with other people on the podcast who want something this and they are kind of hesitant to do anything with the blockchain because they're like … they do want some control and not have to fight with this public piece of code that's immutable and what is written is written. So, there's definitely challenges where you want a little bit of the decentralization. At the same time, you want some control where someone can come in and take a decision and just not have everything be up for vote because that's just like chaos. If everything has to be voted on, it's like … you told me in one of the things like is that person who's giving the vote even the right person to be casting a vote?
Andrej: Right, right. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not useful to throw yourself into all of these things right away. I think … again, it's a progression and when you consider using tools, it's like considering using any tool. You shouldn't necessarily use Notion if you don't write things. you shouldn't start using [inaudible] because you want to start writing stuff. You should first start writing and then go like “Oh, I wish I could make that prettier. I wish I could organize that. What are my options?” And then you look at what are the things that you can pick from. And the same goes for tools for decentralization. It's like what are your problems. Maybe you're not going to need anything that's related to quality control. Maybe you just need some kind of … it's called Multisig but basically like a wallet that can be controlled by multiple people. Maybe you just need that and there is a tool for that. Use just that and automate the things that you currently need.
Jayneil: I think a lot of it has to do with FOMO. I still use Google Keep. People are like “Oh, you got to use Notion” but I’m like “Yeah, I’m already used to this system. I’ve been using it for a while. It's simple.” So, for me, to just switch something just because the public or the crowd is doing it just doesn't make sense.
Andrej: Yeah, totally agree. It's you always kind of … I think … yeah, your approach is definitely like … or from my perspective, I really kind of resonate with that approach because it sounds like you're being mindful about what you currently need and trying to seclude yourself from distractions. And that makes you focus on the things that you do best.
Jayneil: And I think one thing I’m wondering is as you are making more progress and establishing Deep Work Studio as a decentralized entity in its own way to as much further you can take it, I’m trying to compare this to traditional model. In a traditional model, someone starts an agency, they're the founder, they have a lot of stock and either they get bought out by a bigger agency or a company or they get bought out to be in-house agency for another big company and that's where the founder makes majority of the windfall or if it's just private, they have, again, a large percentage of ownership and they get majority of the profit or revenue share. And I’m not criticizing them. I think the founders who started it definitely deserve a little bit more of the upside because they're the one who started it. And everyone has different financial goals. So, in this decentralized model, if you wanted to … let's say, hypothetically you just woke up and you said to Charlie “Hey, Charlie, I want to figure out a way to maybe make 20,000 dollars a month,” I’m just throwing out value numbers for whatever reason, you had your own reasons. So, how can one do that at the same time because it's decentralized, the community is involved and you don't want to seem like that greedy founder that takes everything for themselves; at the same time, you also want to get compensated more. So, how does one do that, in your opinion?
Andrej: You're bringing up many different points, I think, are very interesting. So, for me, it was always important to get as close to something like a meritocracy as possible where you get compensated for the work that you actually do. And if I have that belief, then it should also … I should … I’m part of it. So, it has to also reflect on me. And I stand for that. So, to me, there are no decisions on increasing revenue or increasing any … like looking at numbers in particular. Obviously, I look at numbers but I don't make decisions based on purely financial interest because my interest is essentially focusing on the most meaningful work I can think of. And I think that's something that everybody who works at Deep Work should also be part of. So, I think if they are doing the best work that they want to do and they find that meaningful, then they will be compensated with that accordingly. Now, there's a lot of other factors like globalization is very difficult especially with kind of setting up prices but we can keep that for another conversation but generally, I think that should be the focus is kind of just doing the best work you can do and focusing on creating as much value as possible and then there just won't be “This isn't enough” or “I need to make X more amount of money.” If I need some money, then I’m just going to be, well, first of all, what I need it for and then I’ll just maybe ask a friend “Can you lend me 20K because I need to do this?” And if he says “That's stupid,” then that's my fault. And so, yeah, the meritocratic system also … I guess, that was also a reason for why this whole thing existed because it's not just important for me to compensate people with the … or try and reach that point because … the problem is also meritocracy is a great concept but it's very, very difficult because currently, you can't really quantify what the work is worth like if you work for two hours on some design on some wireframes, what does that cost, what's the energy that you produce like where's the math. And I think that's kind of where I’m trying to get closer at is actually trying to understand what's the value of that work so that that can be as granular as possible but it's very hard. I know I kind of digressed completely. Do you have any other question that I haven't answered here?
Jayneil: I think I understood what you were trying to say by that. Unlike some companies or start-ups you've heard about, you heard the whole WeWork fiasco just reading the book on it, it's not you're using … a founder can look at their company as their own means of enrichment. They're like “Okay, how can I extract the maximum value for myself?” The WeWork fiasco just unfolded. What you said made sense to me. If you are building Deep Work completely on meritocracy, then nobody's exempt from it including you and Charlie. So, it's almost like if you said “Okay, for example, an expert or a facilitator can make this much, for example, 4000 dollars a week for doing that project,” then that applies to you. So, if you wanted to make more money, for example, you would have to also do more projects and stuff, you have to be involved on the ground, doing the work, providing the value like merits, getting paid more money.
Andrej: Yeah. And there's also this point I forgot to mention. I think you're also alluding to that, which is what if you can sell it or what do you do with … like what if the community doesn't agree with the amount of credit you're taking. And I think that's part of the system and I think it's actually kind of a feature rather than a bug. It's just a bit scary because, well, you don't know and you want to keep your base level covered and the only thing you have is your belief in the work that you're doing is right and other people support that but I also feel that's kind of the right thing to do. It’s double checking your reality like are the other things you're doing actually correct. And so, that's also … it's nice to be able to share revenue with people because they also double check you then. And so, for us, the idea is to kind of at some point go and share 100% of the profits across the entire community because they're doing little tasks, they're doing a little bit of work, they are holding up this whole infrastructure and it's not me anymore. And so, if I don't do the work, then I also am not … it's not fair that I would get compensated for the work of other people.
Jayneil: True. Wow! My God, man! It's just like I can feel this energy coming in my body as I’m talking to you. I mean, I know it sounds crazy but as I’m sitting here and listening and it's your enthusiasm for building a decentralized studio, it's just contagious I’m feeling it, I’m feeling the vibe and the passion. My God! How can people contact you or connect with you? Maybe they want to join Deep Work Studio and contribute and help out from the design perspective or maybe they want your advice on how to create their own decentralized company. How can they contact you or reach out to you?
Andrej: I mean, we have a discord that should be in the show notes. And I’m constantly trying to kind of improve the onboarding flow so it's easy to find people to talk to and ask. If you message me and I don't reply immediately, please don't be angry at me. I get a lot of messages sometimes and I kind of postpone answering them to another time but I try to get back to every single one but, yeah, also, don't hesitate reaching out. You can also send us an email at hey@DeepWork.studio. That goes to Charlie and me at the moment. And our website is full with knowledge content but I think Discord is probably the best place to come in and just start conversation and ask questions, whatever is interesting to you. There's a lot of people who are actually interested in helping and also, I’m super grateful for them to be around.
Jayneil: And for all of you watching or listening, that's literally how this interview happened, that's how literally this thing happened is like I went to the Discord and I messaged Andrej like “Hey, what's going on?” So, he does get back to you, probably going to be busy but definitely go to the Discord.
Andrej: Yeah, think I think those are the things. We have a Twitter. So, you can also send us a tweet but I look at Twitter relatively rarely. So, sometimes I’m like seeing those 10 messages hidden in this chat thing and I’m like “Oh, I haven't looked at that.” So, yeah, Discord is more reliable.
Jayneil: Got it. Andrej, thank you so much, my friend, for coming on the show. It's been a blast.
Andrej: Such a pleasure, Jayneil. It was great. Thank you so much for the questions and the amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it.
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