The Tax Secret Every Founder Needs to Know

Sean Weisbrot: This is episode 94 of the We Live To Build podcast. Today's guest is Patriciate, a Spanish entrepreneur, currently based in New York. She is the CEO and co-founder of Cado Networks, a platform for professionals to develop a centralized knowledge graph of their clients and partners in order to automate and manage their relationships before starting Cado Networks.

Sean Weisbrot: Patty worked with several startups where she helped them raise tens of millions and grow internally. After she felt successful in those endeavors, she knew the next step was to start her own company. In this interview, Patty and I discuss the disconnect between what we expected in running companies and the reality of our experience, how to handle doing everything in the beginning. Working remote versus working in an office and much more.

Sean Weisbrot: Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself, where you're from, and how you got into being an entrepreneur, and we'll go from there.

Patricia Recarte: I'm Patty, I'm Spanish. I started my company networking and relationship management solution for Enterprise. So think of a mix between Salesforce and LinkedIn and, well, I basically started working in investment banking in London back in the days after three years.

Patricia Recarte: I decided that that was enough for me, so I started working in different startups. The first startup I worked at was Fever, an event discovery platform. Actually, they announced a new fundraising event yesterday. Actually, they just became a unicorn. Then after that I went to another startup called 21 Buttons in Fashion Tech, where I was head of corporate strategy and an expansion.

Patricia Recarte: So, you know, after going through a couple of startups at some point I decided that it was my turn. Especially because my role in this company had a lot of relationship building, tied to it. And that's sort of like when I started discovering there was a gap in the market, especially when I looked at it like.

Patricia Recarte: Very traditional sectors, right? If you think of investment, bankers, lawyers, realtors, how they do businesses through relationships, and the reality is that these people hate CRMs.

Patricia Recarte: Actually, less than 5% of lawyers in the states actually use A CRM, which is an interesting data point, and it's because CRMs are very focused on salespeople, the marketing teams or operations, but not really for service providers that do business relationships.

Patricia Recarte: I figured there wasn't a gap there in the market. So that's why basically I moved to the states in September, 2020. I did some months of, you know, like discovery interviews and so on. And then December, 2020, I hired my first employee. Since then I've been working in this venture and, yeah, we launched a few months ago, so we've been on a sort of public beat up with several hundred users.

Patricia Recarte: I think we're like seven 50 as of today. And, now we're in the process of closing our first enterprise accounts. So very exciting times for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for the intro and congrats on your launch and having the users. It must be really exciting for you after all these years. Hard work.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, for sure. And especially 'cause I mean, once you start working in startups, I mean, the life of an employee in a startup is hard. There's a lot of work, a lot of uncertainty. So at some point, you know, like I know that I work hard, so why not just do it for myself instead of, you know, working for others and, uh. Ally, making others richer, hopefully, you know, why not do that for myself?

Patricia Recarte: So, yeah, I mean, that was also one of the reasons why I decided to make the big jump and to come to the states, you know, the big American dream. Hopefully that's true what they say, but for the moment it's paying off. Obviously the uncertainty is still there, but at least I know that I'm building something and no matter what happens, it's a very nourishing journey for sure.

Sean Weisbrot: Absolutely. And you were saying you wanted to do it for yourself, and the way that I look at it is it's not for me, it's for my parents to make sure that I can give them a comfortable retirement, and it's to make sure that the team that I work with can become wealthy. Because I don't really care about myself so much.

Patricia Recarte: I mean, it's your, what you say. I mean, the only thing is that when you're working for someone in someone else's startup, obviously all of the work you put in, I have a type of personality that no matter what. I'll give the best of myself and try to work as hard as possible. It's true, you know, like I'm working so hard.

Patricia Recarte: Hopefully I won't be the only one that has benefited from this. Obviously, if this works, I mean, my parents are also kind of involved and. To come out of this, you know, with a happy retirement and to have my employees be able, I don't know, to buy their own house or buy a house partially, who knows? So obviously there's, like many other people right, that benefit from this if it works.

Patricia Recarte: But I was more in the sense of why work so hard for others when you can benefit people that are closer to you or, or eventually yourself as well.

Sean Weisbrot: For sure. I get that you were saying that you, you hope your employees will be able to buy houses and while you were saying that, I was thinking, I think anyone in America today would be lucky to be able to get a house.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah. The market is quite interesting, to be honest. I right now, like me and my husband, we've been trying, you know, to look for. For flats in New York, hoping, you know, to, to build a family at some point. But, the market is pretty high at this point. So, yeah, we've sort of left that on the side especially 'cause when you're building such an early stage startup, anything can happen.

Patricia Recarte: So it's important to have some sort of money or a safe sort of cash on the side. In case you need it just to make your startup just live like one to two months more so obviously everything around buying a house right now, we have left it sort of posted, left it on the side until the company progresses a little bit more.

Patricia Recarte: 'cause I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty. You never know what can happen and yeah, you, you need a little bit of a cushion right to, to react. For run, run days, sorry. Things can be going well the next day. Like, you know, like with COVID, something happens and suddenly your plans change just like massively.

Patricia Recarte: So it's important, you know, to have that, again, like that question, that extra amount of cash, just to be able to push the company a few months more just in case everyone has the same issue. So I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel identified with this.

Sean Weisbrot: I did that and last year I said, I'm done with that. I'm not paying for the company anymore. So finally I was able to start raising funds and got money from other people, and so I'm, I'm glad. But I mean, what I tell my investors is if we run outta cash and we can't raise more, I'm not putting another dollar in. I'm sorry. I'm walking away. And they're like, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: I put way too much in. I did it for way too long. The fact that we're raising money and we're seeing traction now is fantastic. I'm really happy about that. But if things change, sorry, I'm out.

Patricia Recarte: Sure. How long did you put your own money for? How long did you do that?

Sean Weisbrot: Like three and a half years.

Patricia Recarte: Three and a half years. Oh my God.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Patricia Recarte: Okay. That is a very long time.

Sean Weisbrot: My goal was to get us past launch so that when we did our first raise, we could have a much higher valuation and I could save equity. I did that and then we were able to get our raise in the eight figures. So, I mean, I'm happy with that.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, I mean that's, that's great. Yeah, I mean, right now I guess I'm at that, that stage. So we're like maybe in between a pre-seed and a seed on, my goal is to be able to read a, to raise or a, a seed round, somewhere in summer. So to that right now. I haven't done a proper, like pre-seed, but it's been more like a very extensive safe.

Patricia Recarte: So whenever I feel like I need another cash injection, like okay, an extra safe, either I put the money in or I try to have someone put the money in. So this is sort of like how we've been working. I mean, obviously like ideally I thought that, so, you know, was one of the things that we committed the other day.

Patricia Recarte: I thought this would have been like a lot faster, like a lot quicker. You know, my initial expectations were

Sean Weisbrot: That's what this podcast is for. We tell people, look, I thought. It was gonna cost $125,000 in six months. It costs multiples of that in time and money.

Patricia Recarte: Exactly. I thought it was gonna be, I remember when I started again, like December, 2020, I'm like, yeah, in five, six months we're launching a pretty complete MVP.

Patricia Recarte: Like the MVP that I had in mind is we're, we're sort of getting right now, you know, like after one year and two expect. Just like five to six months, again, with like a third of the money that I ended up investing in, in building everything. 'cause I mean, there's so many things that happen in the way of things, like in the head of a founder, first of all, everything was meant to be done for yesterday.

Patricia Recarte: And secondly, I mean, I guess in, in my case especially, 'cause I'm a. First time founder, even though I've worked in startups, in my head, it's like, okay, I'm not gonna find any roadblocks. Everything is just gonna go according to plan. Everything is just gonna go fine. And even like two weeks into development, you start finding issues and whenever you think you're about to launch, suddenly you start testing the app and everything breaks.

Patricia Recarte: Like everything absolutely breaks. So even just the few features that you thought that you were ready to launch and okay, now I'm gonna start having like thousands of users, this is all my software. You realize like, okay, this is very far from what I had initially expected. And the little that we have is still buggy, like all over the place.

Patricia Recarte: Even like when we test internally, we just find bugs. So, yeah, I think it's very important for anyone that jumps into the entrepreneurial journey, especially when it's like tech related things take a lot longer than what you expect. 'cause nothing is as easy as it seems.

Patricia Recarte: There are always lots of corner cases that you never think about, and it's always your user as the ones that figure them out. 'cause you may think like, okay, in my scenario, this is how I would do things. Like I do things like A, B, C, but maybe there are users that do things in aBC order and then suddenly the entire app breaks

Sean Weisbrot: stuff problem in the beginning before you have users. Like for myself being the ui ux designer I was making, I was writing the future specifications and designing it.

Sean Weisbrot: Designing the workflows like physically and when you start to actually use it after it's been implemented, you go, actually this is crap.

Patricia Recarte: Mm-hmm. I actually did that as well for the initial year. Now I finally hired a UX ui and I think like my entire tech team is like finally, because, I mean, I did that as well, you know, for the sake of saving money and because it didn't make sense to have someone full time, so I did.

Patricia Recarte: The UX ui role for again, like, yeah, a year. So many times. Again, when I started testing out the flows on the phone or on the Digest desktop version, me, myself, like I, I would think like, why the hell did I do this? Why the hell did I design this in this way? But yeah, I mean, you, you can find lots of like situations in.

Patricia Recarte: Call the mistakes, try to solve them, I guess, as long as possible and not stick to your initial idea. so it's important to be able to adapt.

Sean Weisbrot: I was the product manager and the project manager and the ui ux designer, like I was, a lot of them,

Patricia Recarte: the human and human resources and

Sean Weisbrot: Well, thankfully I have a COO and he's helped a lot with the human resources side. But I was doing all those other things to the horror of the rest of the team. And caused things to get really messed up. We finally had the money to hire a product manager, which was about almost a year ago. She's completely radically changed how product and project gets managed. And while it's still not perfect, it's leaps and bounds better than anything I could have ever done.

Sean Weisbrot: So it left me with just providing the specs and the designs, but I had to go through a process that her and my COO put together, which was far superior to what I was doing. I was originally just. Saying, okay, here's the specs and here's the designs. Go. But after she came in, they're like, well, no, like what's your idea?

Sean Weisbrot: Let's then agree upon this idea as being something we wanna do. Then provide the specs. Then the development team will pick apart the specs and see if there's anything they can think of that's a problem. Add the additional things that might be missing, then go and do the designs. Then let them pick apart the designs.

Sean Weisbrot: If the designs look good, then they get slotted into a sprint at some point, and they'll do the development. So that made the team happier because now they know what we're building and we can put the why into it because they feel included in the process. They can figure out what problems are gonna exist before they start to develop.

Sean Weisbrot: So that it doesn't mess up our sprint planning because we've got story points and all of those things. So her inclusion of the team and taking control of it and me stepping back from product and project was the smartest thing I think we've done so far. But now once we start to get a little bit more money in, which would be relatively soon, we're gonna hire a designer so that that person can actually take the designs off my plate and I can just go, look, this is what I envision for the actual design.

Sean Weisbrot: Go design it. If I think it looks good for me, then send it to the team to pick apart.

Patricia Recarte: Makes sense. When I was just hired as the ux, UI designer, it was such a relief. It's just like everything he was doing just looked so much better, like, so much, I don't know, like up to date, you know. a lot of the designs that my tech team, they, tell me they look a little bit like 1990s. They're like, yeah, Patti, you need to update your style. So obviously, I mean, it's been a game changer. At the same time. I couldn't afford it earlier on, so unfortunately you need to wait. Until the product is advanced enough and it's sort of like, well, I'm not gonna say it's strong, but at least you know you have a working MVP, even if it's based on a shitty design.

Patricia Recarte: But at least have that so that you know, you can start proving usage. And once you have that, well, you can hire a proper professional designer. It's trial and error. Pretty much.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm really looking forward to hiring like an accountant because until now I've been the one who manages all of the money, pays all of the bills and all of the salaries, and takes screenshots for receipts for everything, and puts 'em in folders and does the tax filing.

Sean Weisbrot: Like I don't like that stuff. I'm doing it because I don't have a choice, but like if I could pay someone to do it, especially because right now we only have 13 people. But with the amount of money we're looking to raise, we're probably gonna get close to 80 to a hundred. Like in the next year or so.

Sean Weisbrot: Wow, that's great. Congrats. Imagine paying a hundred people and imagine managing the software licenses for a hundred people. Like, I don't wanna do that stuff. I've gotta deal with product and community and business development and investors and going on podcasts. Promoting what we're doing. Like I don't have time to do payroll and all that, so I don't know how you manage any of that stuff.

Sean Weisbrot: But we have it set up with TransferWise and we have a business account. And what I've discovered recently is that not only can we get physical cards, but we can also get digital cards. So we could set spending limits for people so we can assign team members to like, let's say the tech team has a budget and they need like.

Sean Weisbrot: A hundred thousand dollars for the year, we can set it so that they can spend a hundred thousand or divide it by 12, you know, that amount per month, something like that. Or if we hire someone who does the accounting, they could start the payment and then they'll go, Hey, we're ready. And I just check it and go, okay, yes.

Sean Weisbrot: No. So I can be the one that actually hits send, but they do the prep. It's like there's so many tools out there that are so cool for helping you manage stuff.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, no, I mean, right now we're a very small team, so we are. Full time, they're like several freelancers. So right now I'm like, you're right. I'm, I'm managing everything. I take care of running the payroll and the.

Patricia Recarte: My engineers are based in Spain, so it's another legal entity, another different type of filing, different type of, you know, like social security, everything.

Sean Weisbrot: So we are a Singaporean company and we have no employees in Singapore. We have no physical office in Singapore. All we have is just a lawyer and, and his company does the legal stuff like the corporate secretary directors.

Sean Weisbrot: So we use one company and we use TransferWise to pay all of our salaries.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, but I mean, how do you do tax or fiscal sort of, you know, Singapore? Because the thing, the thing is that in Spain it's a little bit tricky, in that sense, like everything around human resources, social security. So, I mean, if you tell an employee, a Spanish employee, that they are hired by a Singaporean company and therefore they don't benefit from certain public benefits, it's gonna be very difficult to hire someone.

Patricia Recarte: So they need to be under sort of like a Spanish legal entity to be hired.

Sean Weisbrot: We don't have that problem.

Patricia Recarte: No. I think it's because of the case of Spain, like Spain, France, and several European countries. They're very picky with those things.

Sean Weisbrot: We have one. Guy in Greece and we have one girl in Turkey. Everybody else is in the Southeast Asian region. So what we tell everyone is you're employed by the Singapore company, you get paid cash, any sort of legal or social things, any sort of health insurance, all of that is on your own. We give you the full amount and if there's anything like that you file on your own.

Sean Weisbrot: We don't take any responsibility for that because it's impossible if we're gonna grow to, like I said, hundreds of employees potentially across the entire globe. I'm not gonna incorporate in every single country just to manage the social payments for all these people. No. My goal is to pay them enough that they don't care.

Patricia Recarte: That's good. That's true. I think it's just like the Spanish ecosystem is very different. Like there's a lot of public services, you know, like social security when you compare it, you know, like to the states especially. So. When you're hiring engineers, especially, I don't know, like backend engineers with a lot of, you know, like experience whatever.

Patricia Recarte: Either you have a proper hiring system, a legal entity, or otherwise they're gonna tell you to, to get screwed, basically. Like, bye-bye. I'll find someone else. Don't worry. Every day I get like 10 offers thrown at my face. So if you don't give me this, this, this, and this, don't worry. Like I have another 10 companies that I can choose from, like today.

Patricia Recarte: So yeah, I think it's just like the specifications of Spain as a country that makes things a little bit more complicated and therefore it means that I need to spend more time. I mean, I have some political accountants, you know, like the company that deals with just running the payroll.

Patricia Recarte: And filing the taxes in Spain, but still like I need to make the payment communications. So it's a lot of time if I don't file myself. Managing. So yeah, eventually, you know, I would love to be in your situation, hopefully not too far from now where I can hire someone to just take care of that. And I could say bye

Sean Weisbrot: If you know that Spain is such a hassle, why do you engage in that?

Patricia Recarte: Well, I'm Spanish originally, so it was easier to find very good talent. Well, because I'm Spanish, I worked in a few European startups. It was easier to find people. And something that I wanna make sure that I do, you know, within the company is to build a team ecosystem. So the good thing is that they're all based in Madrid.

Patricia Recarte: So once a week they go to the office, they mingle together. So that's one of the things that, just like culture relief, I wanna enhance, you know, make sure that there is this feeling of. Belonging. Belonging to a team, to a common project, and, helps a little bit with, with the connection in terms of things that you talk about that are not work related, you know, it's easier. We speak in Spanish. Initially I wanted to do it in the US and I actually started speaking to potential engineers in the States until I saw like, okay, for a senior backend engineer, like someone who writes in Python, I need to be paying like 300 K for someone who has. 10 plus years experience and I'm like, you know what?

Patricia Recarte: Let me reconcile it. So that's why, you know, I decided to go to Spain

Sean Weisbrot: In Asia you can get that for like 50, 60 K.

Patricia Recarte: I mean, Spain is a little bit more expensive. I would say it's more like the seventies, but again, like it's not 300, right? I mean, it's day and night. So that's why I decided like, okay, you know what? Even though it's a little bit more of a pain in the, and all of the legal entity and run a different payroll, whatever, I'm gonna have, you know, more ease in finding people and again, like creating that team that I wanna create because I didn't wanna have like people a little bit. Like spread out all over.

Sean Weisbrot: You also have an American company, right?

Patricia Recarte: Yeah. Like the American whole thing, and then the Spanish subsidiary.

Sean Weisbrot: So all of your revenue should go through the American company. Yes. And then Spain is just for paying salaries, otherwise you're gonna get screwed on income tax.

Patricia Recarte: In Spain, we have this sort of intercompany agreement. Every month what happens is that Spain has to invoice the American company. For the development of software services. So at least you know, the American company has a cost base as well. Otherwise, I'm just gonna have like a bunch of revenue in Europe. That makes no sense.

Sean Weisbrot: We explored something like that when we were thinking of doing a token sale because Singapore isn't allowed to do the token sale, so we have to set up in another country. I won't name that country here. Set up in another country that specifically handles the token cell. And then because the money goes there, but Singapore is the one that manages the operations, it would need to invoice that other entity to get the money to pay the salary. So totally the same thing.

Patricia Recarte: And did you know like this beforehand or was it something like you just stumbled upon?

Sean Weisbrot: It's something my lawyer told me when we were planning the structure, but we were not doing the token seal now. So I have the knowledge, but not the structure.

Patricia Recarte: Well, at least you, you know, beforehand, that is not something that you just tried doing and suddenly you found yourself in the situation of, oh damn, I cannot sell my product.

Sean Weisbrot: There's another ACU that I may or may not be aware of that I've recently learned basically. So as an American, right? Yeah. If we have equity. You're, you're probably already a tax resident of the United States, so this will probably apply to you when you have equity and you do a raise and the value of that company is worth, goes up, there's technically a capital gains tax on that unrealized gain.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. And when you go to sell it, there's definitely a tax on that gain for sure. So instead of holding the shares. Personally, you should form a holding company and the holding company will hold those shares and receive the salary, pay the business expenses for your personal life, whatever, and then give you a smaller salary.

Sean Weisbrot: So this lowers your tax burden in the United States as a tax resident.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, that's something that I've been thinking.

Sean Weisbrot: And when you go to exit the company or if you, even if you sell any percentage of your shares, even if you're still involved in the company, the burden doesn't hit you. It hits. Your company.

Sean Weisbrot: So if you register that company outside of America, in a country like Estonia, which doesn't have an income tax for companies, it has a profit and ed tax. So as long as you never declare a profit, you literally don't have to pay tax in Estonia.

Patricia Recarte: Wow. Yeah. That's tax engineering. No, but that's something I was thinking about it.

Sean Weisbrot: This is something that you should be doing as soon as we finish this recording. Because you've already raised money.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah. I'm gonna call my lawyer like, hey.

Sean Weisbrot: It's very simple. All you have to do is make yourself the employee of a holding company that then holds the shares and receives the salary.

Patricia Recarte: Yeah, and that's, and that's it.

Sean Weisbrot: It'll save you in Spain, it'll save you in America.

Patricia Recarte: I'm pretty sure. It's very common.

Sean Weisbrot: It's only common if you think about it. A lot of people don't think about it or they think about it and it's kind of late,

Patricia Recarte: That was sort of like my fear, like I know I need to do something about it. But, you know, like my head every day is just like all over the place and I'm always like, okay, I mean, I need to sit down and think about this. Like, if this works in the long term, I need to make sure that I'm a little bit protected.

Sean Weisbrot: Especially because you're living in America. As an American citizen, I'm screwed no matter where I choose to live, but by living outside of the US more than six months a year.

Sean Weisbrot: And being an employee of a foreign entity, I have what's called foreign income exclusion. So the first $110,000 that I earn each year, I literally pay zero to the American government. Legally, I have to file, but I pay zero.

Patricia Recarte: But you, so you are six months a year, you're outside the states

Sean Weisbrot: usually like 10 months outta the year I'm out of the states.

Patricia Recarte: Oh, really? Like, well, you go to Singapore or just like to travel?

Sean Weisbrot: Well, I was living in Vietnam for multiple years. I was in China for years before that. I'm moving to Portugal now, so I'll be living in Europe.

Patricia Recarte: That's cool. Wow.

Sean Weisbrot: I was planning on going to Greece and then to Croatia, and then to Slovenia, and then maybe to Spain and from Spain to Portugal because I have to wait for the Portuguese government to fingerprint me to do the residence permit.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. Once they gave me the entry visa. Then I may wait a few months until they're ready to do the fingerprinting. So I'm basically gonna just travel around until they're ready and then come back.

Patricia Recarte: That's a good plan. Like an international CEO?

Sean Weisbrot: Well, I mean, that was my goal when I started this company was I don't ever want to have an office. I want to be where I want to be, and I want my team to be where they wanna be. And as long as we all have that, it's a good foundation of trust. And like you said, you, you want your team to feel like part of a family, and I want that too. I think we just think about it differently. 'cause I hate offices and you know, if I wanna work on the beach, then I wanna work on the beach.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't want anyone to be like, oh, you need to get back to the office. Like, nope, sorry.

Patricia Recarte: And none of your employees have ever felt any times, you know, of I don't wanna say like, you know, like anxiety, but you know, like there's a lot of like mental health. Topics going on right now about, you know, like employees feeling very lonely because they're at their homes and, I don't know, they, they don't see any other like, colleagues during the day.

Patricia Recarte: Again, I mean, it all depends obviously on how you manage your own life, right?

Sean Weisbrot: This is like a very personal decision. I feel anxious. I think everybody feels anxiety and I think working from home probably doesn't help. It helps in some ways where you feel less stressed about the work you do when you're focused, but a lot of them that we hire are married and some of them have kids.

Sean Weisbrot: So if they're at home all day with their spouse and their kids, chances are they feel less lonely on an individual basis, on a company-wide basis. I am trying right now to figure out every way that we can to make people feel more engaged. And part of the product that we're building is for engagement and gamification of work.

Patricia Recarte: It's a team collaboration.

Sean Weisbrot: Exactly. So we're trying to figure out how we can get people who are working remotely to feel engaged and desire to do their work in an efficient manner and how to reward them for that. Obviously it's, you know, gonna require years of study and research and development and all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: Going from here, from the original, from the first thing that we launched. But, it is very important. And by being a fully remote team, it puts us in a position where we are building for ourselves. So we, yeah, we have a sense of what needs to be done. Like, for example, because we're gonna be building an AR and VR in the future, you know, I've got a VR headset, my CTO has a VR headset, and I've discovered an application called Altspacevr, which not only has a desktop app, but a VR app.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I've. Kind of forced the team to download it, even if they don't have a VR headset, download the desktop app and we're gonna get together in a world and just have a happy hour. We've never done it before, and so I just want everyone to just get together and chill.

Patricia Recarte: Have you chatted out already?

Sean Weisbrot: I use the app once or twice a week. I talk to strangers all over the world. It's a ton of fun. So I created a private world and I've whitelisted all of the team members so that no strangers can come into this place. Okay, so I want us to be able to meet in vr, like I've wanted us to meet in person, but obviously that's not possible. Right now.

Sean Weisbrot: I've actually only ever met one of the team members, and that's my COO, who I've been close friends with for 22 years. I've never met any of the other people. I would love to meet them, but at least right now, VR is the best I can do.

Patricia Recarte: Hey, do you have your own avatars?

Sean Weisbrot: yeah.

Patricia Recarte: So cool, but at the same time, so frightening. I dunno why I need to get my head around it.

Sean Weisbrot: You need to get your own headset and get your head in it.

Patricia Recarte: I mean, I've tried some VR experiences, but more like an attraction type of thing.

Sean Weisbrot: Like a rollercoaster that makes you want to vomit.

Patricia Recarte: No, but as in like, there's this van gogh experience in the, in New York and one of the areas is like, okay, there's like a VR experience. You put on the headset. And you're like walking around Van Gogh's house and the suburbs of the city and where he got inspired. So you're like having to walk around. I mean, which was pretty cool. Then I need to go from like, okay, this was a fun sort of like a 20 minute game to like, okay, this is gonna be part of our lives.

Sean Weisbrot: That's where I am, where I have a quest 2. There are good things about it. There's bad things about it. The bad thing about it is that it's a little too heavy, so it can hurt your head and your neck. If you wear it too long, the battery dies after an hour and a half to two hours, maybe two and a half if you're lucky.

Sean Weisbrot: So I don't like that. There's also an AR pass through, meaning you can do AR applications, but because it's on a gray scale, it's not a very good experience. The good things about it are that it's quite versatile and the experience is really fun. So, for example, I have a table tennis game, a boxing game, a mini golf game, and, like Altspacevr.

Sean Weisbrot: So I will play this thing every day until the battery's dead. So I'll, I'll play it for an hour, hour and a half, two hours a day because it's my fitness. I can't go to the gym, so I've gotta burn calories and like using the boxing within 15 minutes of fighting, I'm sweating really? Sweating really bad in a good way.

Sean Weisbrot: Oh, it's fantastic. It's really cool. Like you have to actually move around and duck and like, you know, punch for the face and punch for the chest and, and the stomach. And like, there's different reactions for the people. It's really a positive experience and like VR has a lot of potential to bring people together, to bring teams together.

Patricia Recarte: If you have a thing that is spread all over the world, then you know, like basically the office as a concept, it disappears. You know, from our daily work lives. I mean, ensure that vr, it's a very good substitute to ensure that people are engaged.

Sean Weisbrot: I think AR is really solid for productivity. A VR is very solid for company culture and engagement and. I think offices are dead for multiple reasons. One, they're expensive. I'll give you an example. I interviewed a guy from Canada. He has a company with like 150 employees. They rent a warehouse in Canada, $80,000 a month. Because of the pandemic, he was able to save his company a million dollars a year. Not to mention if you don't have an office, there's no electricity and there's no equipment costs.

Patricia Recarte: Exactly.

Sean Weisbrot: So if I had to choose between putting a million dollars in the pockets of my investors or spending it on an office that I'm forced to go into, I'll give them the money every day of the year

Patricia Recarte: here. Like I tried the office concept for a bit in New York, but the reality is that a lot of days I would stay at home because, I mean, you have these days where you're like on call after call, after call, after call. So you need to get out. Mini office space anyway. And like if you're in a WeWork, you end up in the phone booth. So why the hell would you wanna be inside a WeWork phone booth for the entire freaking day? Right. So,

Sean Weisbrot: exactly. When I do these calls, I try to go on walks, although, like when, when we're doing these kinds of recordings and I need to be tethered and I have got the microphone and all that, it's different. But I wouldn't wanna be in an office or in a phone booth. Not worth it at all.

Patricia Recarte: Especially if it's just like this, one time, one meter square meter meter speed, which is just horrible. I mean, it's good to find that sort of balance, especially if you're in the same city. Obviously your case is very different, but if you're in the same city try to meet up, you know, try to see someone face to face from time to time, like I think it really helps just maintain.

Sean Weisbrot: Amongst the workforce. I would say, you know, the first stop in Europe, I'm going to Athens. Why is my team member there? I'm gonna spend like a few weeks with him. I've never met him. He's the marketing director. He is the lead, you know, for the department. He's a very important person and I don't know much about him other than, you know, typing with him and like a few phone calls here and there.

Patricia Recarte: I have never seen my marketing director either. He's part-time, but he lives in Miami, which is not very far away, but I haven't just been there. But, yeah, I've never seen him either, and I'm like, okay, next time whenever I find a moment to fly to Miami, we, we just have to meet and just to see each other, you know, like, I'm curious to know how tall you're, especially because it's fun whenever you see like people in person then, so you're like, oh my God, you're like a lot taller than I expected, or a lot shorter.

Patricia Recarte: You felt someone was big and humongous and suddenly they show up and they're like super tiny. At the end, you look like me. It's interesting when you see people for the first time, like in real life, how you find out you were so wrong. About how many hypotheses, about so many hypotheses around, around a specific person. But yeah, I mean other than that, as I was, as you were saying, I totally agree that the office space as we knew it, it's pretty much that.

Patricia Recarte: It's just like, it's a certain amount of money that you waste that just makes no sense. Especially now like every employee when there's like a lot of rotation, they. End up buying their own sort of big screens and their own sort of like, especially engineers, they all, they, each of them have their own keyboard that they like and has like multiple colors and the cool, mouse or whatever.

Patricia Recarte: So the only thing, if any, you need to give them is the laptop because the rest of the sets, they already have it. So you save a lot on buying extra screens and extra keyboards and you know, the desk of tearing. All of that is sort of like.

Sean Weisbrot: Here's an example. We were just mentioning, you know, cost savings, and I said if I had a million, I'd rather give it to investors. But actually what I plan on doing once we do our next raises, is telling the whole team, look, if there's anything that you need to upgrade, you've got $1,500, give us the receipts and we'll pay you with your salary. Because for example, we have one designer and he's amazing, and he is like, I wanna get into 3D.

Sean Weisbrot: I need to upgrade my computer and it's gonna cost me 1500. And I was like, great. That's how much I was thinking of giving everyone stipends, but like, we're just not there yet. So just figure out how exactly, how much it's gonna cost to get your stuff prepared. And if you buy it now, like go for it. And then once we're ready we can pay you back. Just like keeping receipts. I really wanna do a lot for the team, especially because we can't do things like health insurance or anything like that. So for me, the top. Most important things that I can do for the team are tech upgrades, maybe a psychologist that's in-house full-time and emergency medical costs.

Sean Weisbrot: Like if, if you break your leg and you have to go to the hospital and it's a thousand bucks, okay, here's a thousand bucks.

Patricia Recarte: I mean, at the end of the day, it ends up being more worth it than finance. Some sort of structure to pay health insurance to all of them. It's just like if the event happens, I'll just pay.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, all we have to do is set aside a thousand dollars. For each person for the year and just don't really tell them about it. 'cause otherwise you may have to deal with them trying to get it even if they don't need it.