Design MBA

Designing Company Culture - Pieter Omvlee & Emanuel Sa (Cofounders @ Sketch)

Episode Summary

My guests today are Pieter Omvlee & Emanuel Sa who are the cofounders of Sketch. Interview Video: https://youtu.be/7SFix4Sakt8 In this episode, we discuss the following: - Pieter Omvlee and Emanuel Sá bio - What was it like in the early days of Sketch - Why Sketch decided to raise venture capital money from Benchmark - What is the Sketch company culture - Why Sketch's hiring process prioritizes communication skills - How to create a company culture where it's about the work and minimize politics - How to deal with a wrong hire - How to not get bored as a founder when working on same problem for 10 years - A day in the life of Pieter Omvlee and Emanuel Sa - Why Sketch did not move to silicon valley and open an office - How to view competition - Making difficult choices - Creating a transparent team culture at Sketch - How to prevent silos from forming at the company - Advice from Pieter and Emanuel for folks looking to join Sketch For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show

Episode Notes

Pieter Omvlee & Emanuel Sa are cofounders of Sketch. By trade Pieter is a developer while Emanuel is a designer. 

INTERVIEW VIDEO:
https://youtu.be/7SFix4Sakt8

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Episode Transcription

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's amazing guests are the infamous Sketch founders Emanuel and Peter who actually don't even need any intro but Emanuel is more on the design side of things and Peter is more on the development side of things.

 

Emanuel and Peter, this is truly a dream come true. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

 

Emanuel:  Thank you for the invite.

 

Jayneil:  I’m trying to think about it like literally going back, all the way back, what it is like, say more than 10 years ago when it was, Emanuel, just you, and Peter just literally working on the first ever iteration of Sketch. What was that vibe, what was the culture when it was just both of you, starting out?

 

Emanuel:  Nice question. Let's start with the with the weird part we never met like until two years post starting Sketch. So, I was freelancing. I was a design freelancer. Peter was finishing university. So, he had other apps that I helped him with. So, we talked a lot about design. I was a Photoshop user, always complaining about Photoshop for the kind of work that Sketch today does. And Peter was always very interested in that topic. He already had a drawing app ‘Draw It Peter’ for two years or three.

 

Peter:  Yeah, indeed. I’ve been working on the drawing app for a while. Nothing special but, yeah …

 

Jayneil:  And you met …

 

Peter:  Yeah, but it was like … sorry.

 

Jayneil:  And you met literally two years after starting Sketch. So, I’m kind of wondering why did you not think like “Hey, you know what? Let me just … let's both of us move to Portugal. Let's both move to the same city and start working in person.”

 

Peter:  Doing that kind of makes sense if you're thinking … if you're coming at this from the perspective of “Hey, let's create a … let's build an app, create a company and let's build a team around this” and do sort of the traditional “We're building a company thing.” The thing is that I had built a couple of apps over the years and I had been doing that with various designers and Emanuel had worked on various projects with various developers and this was just one more of those apps that we happen to be working on together. And if you already have three apps in your portfolio and you're starting on the fourth, you're not going … you're never going to think like “You know what? This is going to be the one I’m going to move to Portugal and is something la, la, la, la, la.” Of course, it turned out to be slightly more successful than the other apps but that's how it started.

 

Jayneil:  And how did you guys communicate?

 

Emanuel:  Sketch, the product written all the time, written, yeah.

 

Jayneil:  Oh, so, literally both of you were working together in the early years of Sketch and you just were emailing each other back and forth just like “Hey, I’m doing this thing …”

 

Emanuel:  I chat … and then we then moved to a couple of chat apps eventually ending up in Slack but it was always, always written. And I never felt the need to call him Emanuel and speak out things with audio or even worse video. This is very uncommon that we see each other on video.

 

Peter:  Yeah, true.

 

Jayneil:  Wow. So, it's almost … it was never … 

 

Emanuel:  Yeah, yeah, it was never designed that way like over here we're going to deliberately try and build an Async or chat only or mainly chat, company culture but it's just … like so many things in the early days, they just happened because that's what you both default to and that seems to work and then one other person joins and they sort of automatically join that same motion. And if that goes well for a while, then that's sort of how you accidentally come up with your company culture almost.

 

Jayneil:  So, you have this company culture that you … it's like both of you and then you've hired a few folks. You're still bootstrapped, right? And Sketch has taken off. There are so many downloads, right? It's going crazy. Now, you have a very important decision to make. You could keep being bootstrapped or you could say that “Hey, I think we've gotten a lot of success. Let's try to make this into a company and raise venture capital money.” And I know there's a lot of things that designers don't taking other people's money and like the independence that comes with being bootstrapped. So, that was a big decision for you. Walk me through how you decided that “Hey, now it's time for Sketch to level up and actually raise venture capital money rather than just being bootstrapped.”

 

Emanuel:  Well, that's a decision that we didn't take when Sketch started to take off. When Sketch started to take off, we just continued the way we were slowly growing the company and all of that. The decision to actually raise money didn't have anything to do with like “Oh my god! We're taking off. We need more people” but coming to realization at a certain point like we have actually built a sizable company behind us. We know how to build a decent product but neither of our backgrounds sort of come with any experience around all the other stuff around it.

 

Jayneil:  Like?

 

Emanuel:  Hiring people, payroll, finance, legal, any number of things that a company that has just outgrown a dozen or a couple dozen people suddenly has to deal with. 

 

Peter:  Yeah. And in our case, Benchmark was very willing to help with that and we shared a lot of beliefs when it comes to design a product. They were very interested and participative in the way. We imagined both our company and our product to grow. So, it made sense to us. It just made a lot of sense.

 

Jayneil:  Now, as designers, we're not like … I mean, I’m not speaking for all designers but just in general, as designers, we're very comfortable in our craft. And being sales person and going to different venture capital firms and giving this amazing pitch is not a natural thing that comes to us. So, was it that because Sketch was so famous, it was very easy to raise money for you or you still had to talk to so many different people and then figure out that Benchmark is the right fit for you?

 

Peter:  Interesting question. We never had to look for investment. The right companies approached us. Of course, we always had a conversation with most of these companies, with most of this venture capitalists but Benchmark was the only one that actually made sense to us considering the point we were at the time. It just made sense for us.

 

Jayneil:  And the culture that you had before like this amazing culture that you both have started, was there a fear that “Hey, once we take this venture capital money, we're going to have to grow at a rapid pace and we might have to sacrifice this amazing culture that we have built so hard.” Was there ever a fear about that or …

 

Peter:  No, zero pressure from both internal expectations and the investment expectations. They are in to understand and help us build a product, not just the company. So, we still maintain the same culture when it comes to that. We grow based on the product needs, not anything else.

 

Jayneil:  So, how would you define the Sketch culture right now if I had to just … I mean, obviously, there's so many things to the culture, right? It's very hard to describe in one way but if I had to at a high level ask you what do you both see the Sketch culture as, if you were a person, how would you describe it?

 

Emanuel:  Very biased and it's been a while. So, we kind of lose some objectivity but for … it's a little bit when me and Peter met, it's all about the trust like we trusted each other to create a product that today is used by millions of people without even finding the necessity to meet, to know who the other person is. The work spoke for itself. The way we wanted to shape Sketch spoke for itself. And we try to do the same at Sketch today. The culture is still very async. It still relies a lot on written communication. That works really well for us. Of course, it doesn’t work for everybody but I’d say the people that work at Sketch, they are quite happy and that's one of the reasons why they also join our team, for sure, yeah but if you want like one specific thing, it's trust and freedom, for sure.

 

Peter:  Yeah because you just know you … if you are not in the same office and you're not in direct communication, you just know you have to trust the other person to do the work at the times that make sense to them, give them some space and some freedom to do it. Indeed, the word ‘trust’ is the main one that comes to mind. 

 

Jayneil:  I could be wrong here but something amazing that I’ve learned about the Sketch culture … and this is just some background research I was doing. So, pardon me if I get this wrong but every new hire or most of the new hires that come in at Sketch, they have to … you have steps that they have to go through to kind of make sure that there's alignment with the async culture. And one of them, if I’m not mistaken, is that they have to spend some time with you in a Slack chat group with just either you Emanuel or Peter and then you just chat and try to solve a problem. And that's one of the most unique things I’ve heard or even witnessed because usually, most interviews I would expect to be like face to face, me trying to pitch you like sell myself but the process you have really focuses on the work like even if you're not the best salesperson, if you can communicate, it takes … so, talk to me more about that. How did you design that and how did that come about?

 

Emanuel:  Well, because so much … I wouldn't say that we have a written interview where we will both walk to a specific problem scenario with the person being interviewed but, as you say, it's common to talk to the person and pitch them to the company and try to sense what the alignment may be but since all of our communication … most of our communication is just written over Slack, you want to know what this person is in sort of the daily work environment. And the daily work environment is written communication over Slack. So, the most natural place and way to interview that person is in the same environment. So, yeah, we've just done Slack in interviews with that person. We introduce us, the person introduces them, we talk about what we're doing, how they could help, all of the basic interview questions but just over Stack because that's the way they will be co-communicating with us during daily work as well.

 

Jayneil:  Wow! 

 

Emanuel:  It just always made sense.

 

Peter:  Yeah, for us, a lot. You can see it from this perspective. If they are on the interview, we probably have a good understanding of the qualities and what that person is going to be hired for. What we don't know is how they react and understand the problems that the team that they may probably join, how you would react and deal with those issues because, let's be honest, most people join a team to help the team. There is a need, there is a reason why that person is necessary. So, exposing that person to some of the issues or some of the ideas and projects that person might work on and trying to understand how they apply, how they structure that communication, if it aligns with the team is more important to us than anything else. Therefore, if they succeed being effective at communicating in a written way, trying to solve some sort of problem we may have at the moment, that gives us … we become confident that that might be the right person to join our team, basically.

 

Jayneil:  And this is so contrast because both of you said that you want this culture to be about the work should speak for itself. And I worked at a lot of big companies like Fortune 500 companies and a lot of times what happens is like … Peter, where are you based right now?

 

Peter:  I’m in the Netherlands. 

 

Jayneil:  Okay. So, I’ll give you an example. In big companies what happens is like “Oh, Peter is the main executor CEO and I’m also based in Netherlands.” So, there's a lot of like “I’ll grab drinks with Peter. I’ll become a lot friendly.” It's not I’m not doing the work but then I’ll become more friendly, I’ll say good things to Peter, just typical politics. And then instead of letting my work speak for itself, it would be “Oh, Jayneil hangs out a lot with Peter. So, he's Peter's favorite. He's untouchable” like all these politics things happen. So, how do you fight that at Sketch, making sure it's always about the work speaking for itself no matter where you're based?

 

Emanuel:  I don't see it happening with me. Do you see it happening with, Peter?

 

Peter:  No, no, I don't. It's just … of course, it's something to watch out for but it's never been that much … such … it’s never the most prominent question that I have or so, no. Indeed, it's always about the work and maybe it's a benefit. There's no nobody in my immediate affinity who can pull those kinds of tricks but, no, to me, it comes in natural, just to look at what the person is contributing.

 

Emanuel:  It's been 10 years now, 11 maybe, I don't know, I lost track of time but, of course, we have friends at Sketch. Some people are with us since the very first day but that happened naturally after some years, not in the most immediate weeks, because this model basically creates a big separation of who you are as a contributor than who you are as a person, your individual life. And that sort of takes away those issues or those concerns as someone joins the company. Like you said yourself, the work in the end speaks a lot for itself before anything else happens.

 

Jayneil:  Was there ever a fear early on as you were scaling this … I mean it's hard to have 100% track record of making sure every single hire is correct that fits with the culture. 

 

Emanuel:  Yeah.

 

Jayneil:  So, how do you deal with that? I mean, it must be hard like if let's say there's not a good fit and you have to tell them like “I’m so sorry but it's not you, it's us, and it's not a good fit.”

 

Peter:  I don't know if this is in any way different from any other company or the person in the office. Yeah, if you've hired and grown to a team of more than 200 people, it's inevitable. You hire some people that turn out to be bad fits and you need to be fair to both sides and find a way out of that. And that is not easy, it never is but it is something that has to be done.

 

Jayneil:  And, Emanuel, you just said that it's almost more than 10 years since you're working on the same problem, the same problem space and working on Sketch for so long. Now, I don't know about both of you but I have ADHD. So, a lot of times I’ll work on something and I’ll be like “Huh! I’m tired of this idea. I need to work on this new shiny idea” and you get distracted with it. I mean, both of you are creatives. Do you ever face that? Do you never like get, I wouldn't say bored, but “Hey, let's focus on another problem.” So, how do you deal with that because you're working the same problem for so many years now?

 

Emanuel:  Yeah, that's true, but at the same time, Sketch is a Russian doll of interesting problems. And there's so many problem areas. And if you dive deep, in one there's another problem hiding inside, the scope of the design is so enormous that no, I’ve not found myself really bored with sort of a design as a whole. Jayneil, whenever I’m bored, I just talk to some of some friend who usually is a designer and trust me, he will make some … he will tell me something that takes my boredom immediately away. We have a lot of stuff to work on. One of the things me and Peter used to say when we started Sketch is “Dude, we have like 20, 30 years of work ahead of us. This just doesn't end like it's going to be forever.” And so far, it is. And I love it like that, to be honest.

 

Jayneil:  Oh my god! That is just mind-blowing. What does your day-to-day look like for both of you like just a typical day for both of you, what does that look like? 

 

Emanuel: It depends enormously. Sort of being one of the CEOs, you're sort of half the time just being pulled into whatever the problem of the days that you have to fix. You need to help here. Some person is going on leave, you need to temporarily take over their job, for example. So, sometimes, for a couple of months, my sort of daily routine looks completely different because I’m fitting in for someone. I still try to squeeze every moment I get to put in some programming. I think that's still the thing that I like doing mostly where I get the most satisfaction from. I don't go to eight hours a day but there are some days where I spend most of my day … some weeks where I spend most of my time coding and then there are weeks or months that go by where I get a lot less time. So, it's incredibly varied.

 

Jayneil:  And what if you feel like … so, for example, when they say a typical CEO, they're like “Oh, you have to go away from the coding and the day-to-day. Just focus on the people, management.” How do you feel about the conflicting advice?

 

Emanuel:  I don't agree with that advice. I think we have … we started Sketch and we made it the success in part because we were there at the right time right place but also because we have certain skills. And if we just stop using those skills and just think “No, no, no, the world sort of expects me now to be the CEO, so I’ll go do this job that I’ve never done before and that I don't really like doing sort of the traditional CEO,” I’ll just be unhappy trying to do a role that was not made for me and I’ll do a bad job and make the rest of the company unhappy as result. So, no.

 

Jayneil:  Wow! 

 

Peter:  Yeah. My day is not very different from Peter’s. I mostly focus on the design, culture, marketing side of things but it varies a lot as well. One thing that is important to note at Sketch is that the company was built around Sketch and not the other way around. So, instead of the two CEOs focusing on creating a company, we focus on creating a product. Instead, we hire people that are really good at setting up and keeping a company running, which for us is far more valuable.

 

Jayneil:  Wow! Oh my god! I love this like doing …

 

Peter:  I mean what Emanuel says is completely right. We started this because we wanted to build a product, which is why we never sort of go and said “Hey, we should move to a place and open an office because this is just the first stop and it's the first step in build building this amazing company.” No, we wanted to build a product. Well, as it turned out, you need more people for that than what we could do to get us bit by bit. So, we need someone for that. And because it's all sort of async and remote, it's sort of easy to lose track of … not to lose track … I’d say it's easier to focus on the product that you're building than the company because the company doesn't have physical manifestation in an office building that you go to every day where you see everybody else in the company at their desk working, you meet them every day for lunch at the table and all of those kinds of things. So, the company was always a more fabulous aspect compared to the very concrete product that we were building.

 

Jayneil:  And now, just after COVID, most of the companies are very remote friendly and they understand it but both of you have been doing this for a long time. And I always wondered at some point you might have thought about “Hey, let's move the entire company to Silicon Valley to attract the best talent to have an office.”

 

Peter:  No. At a certain point, I think, when we were around 10 people, I was compensating like Well, maybe … it seems we're onto something. Maybe we should find a find a place and an office.” And we said “We'll build a proper company here” but then you realize like “Well, half of the people that are now working with us wouldn't want to move wherever that is.” I was living in Amsterdam. Well, Amsterdam is a fine city. Surely, we could convince some people to move but not everybody. And then if you want to turn your 10-peraon company into a real company and in the process, you lose half of them, that's not very efficient. And I said “Well, if it works for 10, maybe it works for 12, 15, 20. And if it stops working by the time we get to, I don't know, 20, 40, we'll see about it then” but it never did.

 

Jayneil:  So, Emanuel, a question for you is like … you said you focus more on the design side of things. So, as a designer, let's say if I want to improve in my career, one of the things I’ll do is I’ll take a course, I’ll watch the latest YouTube videos and the latest features on Sketch, I’ll practice more on the tool and that's how I will improve in my craft but then both of you are running this company as well while creating this software. So, where do both of you go to level up yourself? Is it reading books? Is it talking to other CEOs? Is it talking to other founders? I’m kind of curious where do you both of you go to level up?

 

Emanuel:  We are great people. I mean, everyone heads up to the decision process in Sketch. If you join Sketch, you are part of the conversation right away. And the more people … we are 200 people today. I believe we have a really diverse company when it comes to experience in other companies, experience with other products, experience in design and development. And let me be honest. Design doesn't make a decision alone at Sketch. That's something that really worked well for me and Peter, which is I got to learn a lot about what it's like to develop a product and Peter learned a lot about what it's to design a product. And we still try to input that into every single hire at Sketch. So, in the end the decision process is indeed everyone. For me, it's a lot more important to listen for feedback and advice for someone that is working on a product that someone that it's not because the design space is very, very, very complex. If you listen to all the needs that people have, you end up building the products that we wanted to compete against to begin with. So, we got to be really sharp on what we want to do and that in something that, in my opinion, me and Peter knew very well since from the start and we still do, in my view. Call us stubborn. We are. So, that is something that most people that join Sketch in the end more or less align to. So, for us, that's more valuable than outside feedback.

 

Jayneil:  What do you mean by being stubborn? You said that “We are stubborn.” What does that mean?

 

Emanuel:  Jayneil, we didn't want to move to create a company in a physical space. That tells you everything. Something that we try to imply at Sketch when it comes to culture is that work-life balance is very important for us. I love being a designer, I love working on Sketch but I love being where I live and having the comfort of life that being remote provides. So, that lives on in the company on the 200 people that work with us, for sure.

 

Jayneil:  And imagine, one of the most amazing things I uncovered when I was doing the research on both of you, one of the analogies. You're a fan of soccer I assume? Yeah, me too

 

Emanuel:  Football.

 

Jayneil:  Yes, yes, football, soccer. This is what happens when you live in America. I’m a Liverpool fan and …

 

Emanuel:  True.

 

Jayneil:  One of those analogies you used, and I’m going to try to remember that analogy, in the football world, what happens is the way the fans behave is like there's one trophy. There are all these teams competing and one team wins it. So, it's like winner takes all mentality. And everyone wants to be like “Oh, Liverpool won or Manchester City won or Real Madrid won the European Cup” but again, you still have different fans supporting different teams and every team has a different philosophy but now when it comes to the tool space, designers are always like “Oh, Sketch is going to be the main one that's going to take everything. Oh, it's going to be Adobe XD. Oh, it's going to be Figma.” And they think about all this competition like winner takes all but you said, using that analogy, that it's not that. So, can you explain that like how do you approach that and not get caught up in what feature is this competitor doing and that competitor doing but focusing on what Sketch is about?

 

Peter:  I would say designers many times live in a bubble because what people need to understand is for the last 10 years, a lot of people have joined the design space, UX designers, UI designers. 10 years ago, there were no UX designers to begin with. That was not the title. Every year there's millions of people joining this space. So, why think one single product can cater to all of them. I think that's plain wrong. What people need to understand is that Sketch focuses on specific problems, Figma focuses on specific problems. And the best for them is try to understand what they need, what they are going to use this tool for and make their decision. Of course, we still get that feeling like someone must win. How do we deal with that? Depends. Sometimes, it's annoying. Sometimes it leads to interesting discussions with our customers and other tools customers but we will still keep that mentality that there's a lot of space for a lot of tools in the design space, okay? There can be four or five more competitors and I’m pretty sure we all would be on business and profitable. So, let's try to bring … let’s try to foster the creation of such tools because the community needs it. That's why Sketch was built because we needed it … there were no options. Now, there's 10 options. That's amazing.

 

Emanuel:  Yeah. And I would say the analogy that we used for football or soccer; people love these kinds of games because they provide a very simple view. Like I just said, you either win or you lose and that's a very simple concept but that does not apply to the real world. And we have the tool, other competitors have a tool but that doesn't mean that if you use our tool, you are team Sketch and if you don't use it, you're not team Sketch, no. We're all just designers that use a variety of tools throughout our career, throughout our day that solve a particular problem that we have. And if today it’s Sketch and tomorrow it's another too or another way around, that's fine. It's a tool. It's not a team that you have to pledge your allegiance to.

 

Jayneil:  And a stupid question that comes to my mind is what if you hire 200 people, let's say, in the next six months and then team Sketch tries to solve for all the problems. Right now, team Sketch is focused on specific problems, competitors are focused on other specific problems and that creates a differentiation. So, what if you hire 200 people to just solve for all the problems and then Sketch becomes the one tool that just sells …

 

Emanuel: No because that's how we got started with Sketch because there was one tool that did it all. It was called Photoshop and it had like a million tools. And basically, what the designers back in the day thought was like “Well, Photoshop is probably the tool you want to use but ignore that, ignore that, ignore that, ignore that. Just focus on that.” If we double, triple the team and we build everything that everybody could possibly want as a designer, then the next UI designer might be told “Well, hey, you should have a look at Sketch but ignore that and that and that and just focus on that” and then someone else will see an opportunity to just that because there is a lot of benefit in just providing one way or a couple of ways. If you try to solve everything for everybody, then you make a product that nobody likes a couple of years ago, we used this … of Microsoft Word where probably the … Microsoft Word probably had the features that people needed, by the time, I don't know Microsoft ’98 came around and they just started adding more and more stuff on top of it until it gets to a point where nobody even knows what we what are the new features and nobody cares what the new features are. Then a new market pops up under text editors for focused Markdown editors, for example, just because people say “Get all that stuff out of my face. I just wanted to type something.” So, I don't think there can ever be a tool that does everything and you shouldn't try to build a tool that does everything. I think it's much better if there's a viable ecosystem of multiple tools that solve different problems in different ways.

 

Jayneil:  Wow! 

 

Peter:  Yeah. A market is never healthy if you don't have proper competition. If you just own all the community, what's going to make a change, what's going to make you improve? I don't know. It probably doesn't. It just gets more expensive. Remember what happened to Photoshop 10 years ago. It just kept getting more expensive. It stopped being a product … ownership in the space was so big, it became a business, not a product. So, we want to make a product. So, of course, we don't want to just own everything.

 

Emanuel:  And I would say a big part of design is making a choice. We want to do it that way and you know that whichever way you choose, you will leave some people out, for sure. For example, if you look at symbols in designs, either you can lock things down more and it will maybe make it easier for implementation later but then that comes with some restrictions where you can't as a designer just go in and change everything and you have to make a choice there. What do you want? You can't have it both ways, right? So, you have to make that choice and that makes some people happy and other people that's happy and there are other tools that make choices there in a different way. And if you try to cater to both in the same app, you're just creating a huge mess. That’s the … you have to make a choice and that leaves some people out and that's fine. We all deal with that. That's why it's good that there is competition.

 

Jayneil:  Both of you talk about making the hard choice, right? And the way the media talks about it is “Oh, Apple is the company that became that company because of that one decision of making the iPhone. This one decision changed the whole company.” And there are so many other companies that failed because they to point out this one decision was wrong for them, right? Like “Oh, Nokia never moved to android. That's why they failed.” There are all these narratives that come up. And I kind of wonder if I were to put myself in your shoes, which I don't even know if I can ever fill, I probably won't and fail at it, but I feel there's this … how do you deal with that fear that “Hey, as a company, as a culture, we're making this choice. It may not be the popular choice, it may not be the popular decision and it could be that 10 years from now when we look at it, successful, awesome, that was the choice and decision we made and that's why we're successful. If it doesn't go to plan, then that's the choice we made.” So, how do you overcome that fear and say that “I got to make this choice right now.” 

 

Emanuel:  Well, a couple of things there. There were more phone makers than Nokia before Android was around. Some of them did make the switch to Android and still failed. So, it's not as if there's one choice that they didn't make that ultimately doomed the company. And not making a choice is also making a choice. It means continuing things the way you were doing and don't take that other idea. And so, if you're just afraid of making any choice, you still end up making choices and they're probably just the ones that you don't want to take out of fear. And I don't think that's ever a good thing.

 

Peter:  Fully agree. That’s simple.

 

Jayneil:  And when both of you are making these hard choices, what does your council look? Is it like other founders that you walk them through this choice? Is it like your VC firm? Is it just both of you that get on call and say that “Hey, we're going to make this hard choice? Let's discuss the pros and cons.” What does that trust council look like?

 

Peter:  You just described it. It basically is the company itself. Of course, Benchmark and Chetan plays a big role in that. They have a lot of experience. They share a lot of information that would take years for us to get on our own. That's very valuable. So, of course, that informs every decision that we make and that's tremendously helpful for us, 

 

Emanuel:  Yeah but you hire smart people because you value their input. So, of course, you use that. When it comes to personal decision making, a lot of it comes down to instinct. You can analyze both sides to death but probably somehow you … I often find that we instinctively go for one or the other option and then later you try to rationalize why it's it might be a bit forced but, yeah, you take all of those things into account.

 

Peter:  And that's why in a way it's great for us to be too. We make all the decisions together. We share a lot since the beginning about what we're thinking, why we are thinking that, and where that leads us. And although we are very agreeable on most situations, we have very different points of view that often illustrate the ultimate decision very, very well for us. So, I think, in this case, as being a team and not just being one CEO, it's very helpful for us.

 

Emanuel:  Very helpful.

 

Jayneil:  And you talked about the gut feeling, right? So … by the way, I’m a huge fan of Chetan. I’ve never met the guy but I follow him and …

 

Emanuel:  You should. He's really nice.

 

Jayneil:  We both the same kind of Indian food. So, there's something in common but let's say, hypothetically, I’m just trying to understand, that's why I’m asking this question … so, Chetan’s like “Hey, I think with this decision you're making, this is what I’ve learned from my experience and this is what I would recommend you do” but then let's say, Emanuel, Peter, both of you have a different gut feeling. So, now, in this case, does it make sense to follow … and I know I’m generalizing but does it make sense to follow the true and tried and tested option or is it more of like “Hey, our gut is telling us this. Let's just go with that choice making.”

 

Emanuel:  I think this is a very generic scenario. 

 

Jayneil:  Yes, I know.

 

Emanuel:  As I said earlier, we hire smart people and it would be silly not to listen to them. The same goes with our investors. They are smart people and they've been through a lot. So, it makes sense to listen to them. At the same time, Sketch is in a unique position. So, not every lesson from the past can be copy-pasted on our situation.

 

Jayneil:  Got it. And then one question I have, going back to the culture side of things, the transparency that you have, one of the things I heard is that, and you can correct me if this is wrong, is when a Sketch employee onboards … usually at big companies, they have this whole onboarding weeks where you take this course, take that course, there's all these rituals before you finally get up to speed. And what blew me away is that … what I heard is that at Sketch you just have one notion document that tells you what the values are. And what I found out is if I am in let's say the marketing team, I can go into the design channel and chat with Emanuel and learn some things that are going on there versus in other companies, it's like “Hey, you are in this space. You have to ask permission before you jump into another one.” So, why did you decide to have such an open culture not have compartment silos and be like “You stay here. You stay here. You have to ask permission to know what's going on in the other department.”

 

Emanuel:  There's no benefit in silos. Just there's no benefit. We are not in an office, okay? So, a lot of things that people take for granted in an office especially is you get to observe how other people work, right? So, why not do that in remote in a way people should be able to join a channel, observe other teams work. Every channel has their specific documentation. We use Notion a lot at Sketch. There's documentation for the goals, of the structure or why such team exists just like onboarding. So, people are fully open since day one to just go and learn, okay? Just because I work in marketing, I shouldn't be locked away from design and development because that informs why I work at Sketch. So, for us, it's tremendously important that there's no silos, okay? Open channels for everything. Open documents for everything. If you join today, you have access to everything right away. Choose your path.

 

Peter:  And I think it comes back to the early days where my sort of … how do you say it … when we were making Sketch, we both had sort of equal input in how the application should behave, what it should do. It was never like design dictates and development builds because we both only know sort of half of the story. Emanuel can design something that is impossible to build or he may not have thought of something that is really easy, easy to go that I think of because I know the code in depth. And so, we both had a different perspective in things and we both strongly felt that combination of perspectives is what made that first version of Sketch work and today, that just translates like we try to use Sketch for a lot of things. Of course, there's designers using Sketch every day but there's people, there's developers using Sketch as well, there's people in marketing that are using Sketch and we all have a different experience when it comes to the design tools that we've used before, the expectations that we have, the thing we're trying to accomplish. So, if someone in say marketing has an issue using the product in a certain way, why should they not have the ability to just talk to those people directly like “Hey, I’m struggling with this. Could we do it? Why don't we do it like this?” 

 

Emanuel:  Long story short, why would you sign those things off … if you try to hire smart people and value their input, why lock down their input to a certain silo.

 

Jayneil:  But then over time, these things naturally happen, right? Both of you are working at high level things in so many different stuffs. How do you fight or prevent the culture from becoming that? Do you talk to people like junior people? Do you talk to randomly different people to kind of get a feel? How do you make sure that the culture, as you double the team or grow the team in the future years, stays the same way and doesn't become this other culture that you don't want it to be? How do you fight that? 

 

Peter:  Well, we're still involved in the day to day, for one. We didn't both graduate out of sort of design or development and now we're just looking at spreadsheets with targets or anything like that. If you're still involved in the day to day, you can still help shape, you can still observe how it's going.

 

Emanuel:  Yeah, we are very active in the culture of the company. So, like Peter said a while ago, if for a specific month, let's say, a lead developer is going on holidays or had a baby and they need a replacement, then probably Peter is the best replacement, knows the team very well, knows the features they are working on very well. Peter will go to that team. And I’m pretty sure people do not look at Peter as the CEO but as other developer helping for that time. I do the same in design. It’s the same in marketing, people, ops, etc. So, if you are on off topic, we are there on off topic channels. We are there daily just talking about our own off topic stuff. So, there's no disconnection in the team. They don't look at us … of course, we are the CEOs but they don't look at us as like the CEOs first. They understand we are team members. And I’m pretty confident that most people understand that our DMs are open all the time for anyone. We don't impose management structure like “If you want to talk about this, talk to your manager.” I’m available. You want feedback? Come to me. that's fine. Peter does the same. And ever since day one that still exists at Sketch and that's amazing.

 

Jayneil:  Wow! I am blown away by so many things. One is the fact that both of you are so approachable and haven't become the traditional executives where you got to go through people to talk to you but even more amazing thing is when you said that Peter will fill in for that lead developer, which means that in the development world like languages … programming languages change so fast, things update very fast. So, I’m just kind of wondering how on earth, Emanuel, you keep up with the latest design, pattern updates or design changes and, Peter, you keeping up with all the new coding changes and all these things. It's just mind-blowing how you figure out the time to do all of that and still run the company.

 

Emanuel:  We have really good people helping us run the company. That's really helpful. So, as a designer, in my end … I don't know if I can call myself a designer. I don't design for a while. I do help a lot on design decisions but not so much on design itself but I love my, team I love my design team. So, they share a lot. There's a lot of discussions on what's new, what's interesting, what informs our decisions. So, that's my source of inspiration and updates. For Peter, I think it's the same but he better says it himself.

 

Peter:  Yeah. Well … yeah, it first, we're not the traditional CEO people. I think we made that quite clear early on already. And as I said, you try to hire people who are smarter than you. And we definitely hired a lot of developers who are smarter than me and I learned a lot from them but I do indeed try to step in from time to time in whatever area help is needed. And I do think we both have sort of a unique perspective to offer like in my situation, there's a lot of developers out there who can … well, who are better developers than me but with all the background that I have, the long history of Sketch, there are certain benefits to having been around for a long time and having been the person who wrote much of the … who basically wrote that first version that it's relatively easy still in some areas to sort of get up to speed and contribute and I try to do that with some new features when they're needed. Yeah, I know the rest of the product whether or not just from a sort of the design and the product perspective that I can contribute in that way as well, just with ideas and “Hey. Well, what if we don't do it here like we did it there?” It gets back again to the open culture. You sort of have to belief that you can learn from everybody out there and that everybody out there can learn from all of the things that everybody is doing. And so, all that is not locked up in one place and if that person lives, then the entire thing falls apart.

 

Jayneil:  Got it. And my final question for both of you. For designers that are listening to this interview when this comes out and they're like “Oh my god! I definitely want to work at Sketch with Emanuel and Peter,” what tips would you give them to increase their chances of let's say get selected at Sketch.

 

Emanuel:  From a design perspective, speaking to designers, curate your portfolio, keep a good portfolio. You don't have to work for many companies to have a portfolio. You can create stuff on your own. You can create case studies. You can create shareable content, free content, paid content. That informs the final decision always. For me, it's very important to see how the person thinks and how the person designs. Of course, sometimes we need more of the thinkers, sometimes we need more of the visual designer and that's what we account when making the decision how good their work is. From there … just trying to sell themselves, market themselves, it's not very helpful because that is filtered out, as you noticed, right away. So, in the end, the work does speak a lot for itself. So, expose yourself. Be out there in the community. That's very important. 

 

Peter:  Yeah. And I would say, for the developers, we're always looking for talented people to join. And what I look for in the developers also is some design and product sensitivities and sort of the confidence to perhaps sometimes push back against the design and being active contributor in the product shaping process. You're not someone, at the end, who just in the end gets handed the spec and that's what you have to build, no. The sooner you get out there and start getting involved with how the product should work, how it should behave, whatever requirement should be there, that’d be better. So, if you want to work as a developer at Sketch, try to be more than the developer. Your job is not to write code. Your job is to help build a better product that you can contribute there in so many more ways than just writing code.

 

Jayneil:  Thank you so much both of you for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.

 

Emanuel:  Thank you, Jayneil. It was really nice.

 

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