Why Using a Dev Shop is a Red Flag for Investors

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. The way we work has changed, and I don't think it's going back. In fact, I'm happy to see this revolution finally taking shape. People are demanding higher wages, more autonomy, more flexibility, and a sense of purpose connected to their careers and it's way past the time that they did this. What's come with COVID is the great resignation.

Sean Weisbrot: What will come out of this is people doing work they love, even if it means a higher percentage of people end up working on multiple projects at the same time, to ensure a more stable career or working for themselves to build something they can take ownership of. Either way, we must think differently about how we find people, the types of engagement we use to work with people and the way we compensate them.

Sean Weisbrot: In this episode, I talk with Yossi, the founder of upstack, which helps companies build their dream product teams about how the labor market has shifted and how we need to adapt to stay relevant and competitive. We talked about what are the different types of engagement, what are the differences between in-house versus freelancers, et cetera.

Sean Weisbrot: What are the different methods of finding people? How do you identify talent in people? How can we ensure the people we hire are. Capable of working remotely and how do we support them in that transition and much more. So thank you to Ysi and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Sean Weisbrot: Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about what you do right now?

Yossi: I run a company called upstack. Upstack is a network of over 1500 awesome, top 1% remote software developers. Our actual company itself. Is over 150 people, probably even close to one 60. We're a fully remote and distributed company, so I've picked up a lot of different skills around hiring remote talent, whether or not it's developers or other skills.

Yossi: So I've been involved in the hiring process for loads of developers, but also, um, other areas like, you know, marketing, sales, hr, finance, and, you know, really all areas of the business. So I picked up a lot of skills that I thought I could definitely share with you guys in terms of how to find great talent, what to. General pitfalls, rules, stuff like that.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's get into the different terms of engagement. You had mentioned to me full-time versus part-time. Uh, I've also heard of contract versus gig. Uh, so let's start there.

Yossi: So I think like, you know, on a general, really general term, there's different ways of looking for someone.

Yossi: I mean, I think that people are often looking at starting up a new startup, a new company. They're looking at their core team, their in-house team will sort of use the term sort of full time. To define that, although that does become a little bit blurred, um, in terms of whether or not that's a full-time core team member, let's say, based in the US or based in the country of, you know, where you are based or where your startup is based.

Yossi: That's often sort of in-house in the traditional sense that would've been in your office or it would've been one of the co-founders or would've been one of the actual staff of the company. Obviously that could be a full-time contractor. That's where things get a little bit blurred about what happens if you did find a freelancer and they became full-time.

Yossi: Or what about if they're in a different country? In the us for example, if you're full-time, you'd often be a W2 worker, you know, which means you'd actually be a full-time team member, you know, that would be paying taxes in the US and taxes would be withheld and you'd be going through a payroll company and all of that sort of stuff.

Yossi: That's, that actually applies in other countries as well, whether or not the UK or other European countries or really any country has some sort of concept of a fulltime team, you know, member, some people like. There are benefits, whether or not it's social security benefits, whether or not it's, you know, being able to get a home loan and take those documents to the bank, or whether or not it's, uh, you know, unemployment benefits as well.

Yossi: Or even, for example, some countries in the eu, they don't really have this in the US but in the, in some countries in the eu, they do have. You know, after you have a baby, you get paid leave for a period of time from the government and different things like that if you're a full-time direct hire to the company.

Yossi: So that's sort of the full first classification, which is sort of that full-time worker. And then I suppose there would be the full-time contractor and then part-time and hourly as well, you know, where you could actually be looking for people on a contract basis. It doesn't mean that people can't move up the ranks where they sort of start off hourly or contract and.

Yossi: These other roles. Um, so they're the sorts of terms that I would use. It's a little bit vague these days because you know, a lot of more people are starting to use different third parties to get stuff done. Obviously it was a lot more common for many, many years to use an accountant remotely or to use, you know, certain things like that.

Yossi: Or even legal. You know, it's very rare that a startup even up to a pretty large size, would actually have their own legal team. They'd often be using a law firm of some sort and definitely be using an accounting firm of some sort. Even very large startups. Still don't even have those capabilities in-house.

Yossi: So that's an area where we're very used to using contractors or third party companies to, to do stuff. But it's also becoming a lot more common with, you know, sales and marketing and things like that. Especially with loads more companies going remote in 2020. So they're the classifications.

Sean Weisbrot: You touched upon in-house versus freelancers versus agency versus consultancy as well, so let's go and define those now.

Yossi: Yeah, sure. I think like in general, let's define also the terms about sort of where you would find talent. I think that there are different ways of finding talent. I think probably the most old school and conventional way of finding talent is from referrals or word of mouth. Let's say you're a hot startup and you are.

Yossi: Treating your staff really well, or you're building a great product that people wanna be involved in. Obviously people are gonna be coming to you, um, and actually just connecting. Or hey, you know, someone's already working for you. Do you guys know anyone else who might be, you know, we're looking to hire for this position.

Yossi: Do you know anyone that's the really traditional, let's call it like referrals, word of mouth, that category. The next area would be that the company would actually create their own job board on their website. Where they can actually start taking applications. You know, just using a tool like Greenhouse or these different job boards that are out there where you can actually have your own job board, and then starting to promote that, which would be really the next level.

Yossi: Putting it out there on different, you know, job sites like Monster or Indeed. Or even AngelList and those sorts of sites where you actually say, Hey, you know, we have this job opening, we're looking for a software developer for our company, or we're looking for a marketing manager for our company. And you know, if you're interested, apply on our job board.

Yossi: And then obviously there's LinkedIn as well, which sort of fits in a little bit between. A social network or a little bit of a referral, but also a job board. I mean, ultimately it is sort of a job board, essentially. I mean, you can actually post jobs on LinkedIn as well, so I'd put LinkedIn in that bucket.

Yossi: The next area would be freelance platforms where you're starting to move a little bit out of the traditional sort of job hiring funnel. You have freelancing platforms like Upwork. Where you can find, almost like that gig thing that you mentioned where you're looking for someone for a really short term thing, someone to do something for a few hours.

Yossi: You can also find people who might wanna come on part-time or even full-time into actually working remotely. It is different. Very rare. Would you be hiring through a platform for a sort of a W2 or a direct hire sort of model. Usually you'd be. Paying them as a sort of independent contractor, sort of a freelancer, that's very easy to get going, where they would take care of their own taxes.

Yossi: They would be something that you'd be able to onboard them quickly and offboard them quickly, but they might not be necessarily perceived as a core team member or someone who's really engaged in your product. I would say that exactly where my company Upstack fits in and the sort of this newer model of sort of hiring, it sort of goes through a lot of these different areas, so it's hard to box it into one of them, but it probably would be definitely in the c classification of a freelance platform.

Yossi: But it also sort of moves into some of the other areas as well. Sort of is like a job board as well, and some of the other categories too. Then the next area would be like a consulting firm or a dev shop or an agency. Sort of model where you'd be actually going to a company and saying, Hey, we wanna build.

Yossi: This product, they won't necessarily commit specific resources. So you wouldn't actually be hiring a specific developer or a specific resource, but you'd be using their firm to build it for you. Sometimes they'd be doing a fixed price project. This happens a lot in development, also happens even more in design if you're using a design agency where they'll say, Hey, this is the price to do this particular piece of work, and you know, you agree to the price and you get it done, but you don't have control over those.

Yossi: You might have control over what you know, those resources for a short period of time. So let's call that dev shops or a consulting firm. That's sort of another area of hiring that covers most of the main areas that I can think of about where you would find talent.

Yossi: I always experiment, you know what I mean? I don't really feel like there is one fixed way that works well. I've seen all of these ways work well. I've seen disasters in all of these areas as well, actually, and I've seen more disasters in some of them and more success in some of them. So I've seen all.

Yossi: You know, areas, and I don't think there's a one size fit all model. I think there are a few rules that apply across the board no matter what, which I believe are sort of universal rules, but I don't think there's one way which is better than the other. Let's start at the beginning of that funnel where we're speaking more about that word of mouth and referrals.

Yossi: Side of things, you know, when I've seen that work? Well, I know a startup that we work with based out of Manhattan and they, they still do hire some remote talent, but you know, most of their core team are based in their office in, in Manhattan. I mean, obviously they weren't for the whole COVID period. Now that that's over, they're back in the office as quick as they can get back there.

Yossi: They really need to be in the office. They really rely on this direct hire and they do really well with that. There's a lot of situations where, you know, a startup that is sort of following more the conventional route of, you know, VC funding and building up, you know, through these rounds of funding and you know, they start hiring in a specific location.

Yossi: They can do really well with these direct hires and they never need, they really need to go beyond that. I think for a lot of other companies, they might not have the money. They might not have the funds to sort of hire everybody full-time, paying US based salaries, or they might not necessarily have this amazing traction where they can sort of take $150,000, you know, developer or $200,000 a year developer and say, Hey, quit your job.

Yossi: Come work for me for 65 grand, but I'll give you stock options because this is gonna be wild. I think that's very rare that you actually have that opportunity. Um, and you're probably gonna have to be paying market rates to hire someone who's gonna join your company. In that case, you might need to look elsewhere.

Yossi: You might need to look for someone remote, you might to look for some people in other locations. There are other benefits just to cost about hiring remote as well. You know, in that there are different cultures. I think people talk a lot about diversity these days. If you're gonna have diversity in gender or, or origin or you know where you are from.

Yossi: I met Clark Valberg, the CEO of Envision, and we went out for coffee a few times. And his thing was, you know, they're a fully remote company. I think it's like six, 700 staff. I mean, that was like a year ago. They probably even have more now. They hire people in, in remote locations, not to save money. They hire people in remote locations to get different cultural viewpoints and to get different inputs into their product and different ways of seeing things global now.

Yossi: Dollar advantages to hiring people in different places, but there's also advantages into how they see things and the culture that you're adding to the team. So I've definitely seen that work. Well, as you start to look into these freelance platforms or other ways of hiring, let's sort of assume that, you know, for the, you know, 80 to 99% of people who might not necessarily be able to go down the conventional route of.

Yossi: You know, attracting massive VC dollars from day one or having a product that is going wild that can attract talent right away. You know, there are different creative ways of looking. I find a lot of great people in my core team, for example, on Upwork or different freelance platforms. I was looking for an SEO person about nine months ago to join and you know, at that point it.

Yossi: Didn't really even exist in my company and it was something I wanted to do. I've tried different people, I've spoken to different people. I met a lot of people along the way, but eventually I found someone who started off hourly and is now getting very close to being a full-time team member of the company.

Yossi: Um, he is actually based in the US so it's very likely that very soon I would like to offer him. A full-time W2 job if he actually wants to come on full-time or at least a full-time contract role where he can actually go for a full 40 hours. I think now he's on about 30 hours a week. I really, I suppose, think is a great model of really bringing people in to try them out quickly, see who works, and then bringing them all the way through.

Yossi: To ultimately becoming full-time now. I mean, they might not want to, but you can also get a lot of stuff done in 20 hours a week as well.

Sean Weisbrot: I found when I first started that I brought people on and I didn't really have the means to pay them anything, so they were kind of just helping at first, and I was getting to know them and they were teaching me a little bit and then where I was deciding whether or not I wanted to work with them, but they had other jobs, so they were like.

Sean Weisbrot: Using extra time to help and see if there was a chance that we could work together and I could offer them a job. So they would quit their other company. And eventually I hired some of them and they were the right person or the wrong person. You know, I learned all of those mistakes that we do. They were all developers because we're, you know, software companies.

Sean Weisbrot: So obviously hiring developers is the most important thing in the beginning because without a product you have nothing to market or sell or provide customer service for, et cetera. And what I found was, so my CTO, who I hired, he was the first person I hired and I found him on Telegram in a digital.

Sean Weisbrot: Nomads channel, which was great. He's from the Philippines. He started introducing me to people in his network, so I got the referrals and he helped me to kind of start to define what is the architecture, what are the languages we're gonna be using for development, and therefore, who we should be looking to hire, and kind of like what the rates might be for them.

Sean Weisbrot: And so without his help, I would've been completely lost. I started using word of mouth from there, and then when I ran out of word of mouth, I started going onto LinkedIn and Facebook groups for developers and specifically targeting people on LinkedIn who had those languages in their titles and all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: Inevitably, my strategy was to hire people full-time immediately, because I've heard horror stories of. People stealing your code or saying they're going to do something and then eventually not doing it. Even when people, I hired full time, I had people like that not stole the code, but they said they were gonna do something and then didn't do it.

Sean Weisbrot: It's not just about the strategy, it's also about the person. So I. Why don't you speak to, since you have so much experience with finding people and then, you know, helping them to get work, so identify the positives and the negatives of a person's attitude and personality before it's too late and there's potential damage.

Yossi: Yeah, I mean that's, that's a huge point and yeah, I, I totally hear that and, and look, when it comes to developers, I'm the same. I actually do like to hire them full time. I agree with you totally. On that point, I think that not all positions. Best suited for sort of part-time or hourly engagements. I think sort of some specialized marketing skills can work quite well for that.

Yossi: You know, if you're looking for someone to write articles for your blog, if you're looking for, you know, marketing or even accounting or even design, I think works pretty well in that sort of more hourly or or part-time model. That being said, some of the biggest disasters I've seen, even on a full-time hire, I'll give you one example.

Yossi: So there's a startup that I worked with. They've raised $35 million that were really hot startup. They're doing really, really well and they, you would think would be able to attract. Great talent. They had gone through this whole rigmarole of looking to hire a VP of engineering role. They found a guy, he seemed great, he interviewed fantastically.

Yossi: He went through five interviews or whatever it was, a whole bunch of interviews. Organized to quit his job, quit his job, had a few weeks off, started at this place. This whole process is probably three months. Maybe even longer. Finally, he starts on day one. It's evident that this guy's crap. He's just really not the right cultural fit.

Yossi: It's a total disaster. Clashing, butting heads directly with the CEO, just total disaster. I mean, it took a while to take him through a process of realizing he wasn't good and trying out a few things and took two months. So that's. Three months lost in the hiring process, two months, you know, to the point where you actually fire him.

Yossi: That's five months lost. And for a startup that's not just money, right? Obviously that probably cost them over 50 k, probably even more in actual dollars. The time that was lost and the aggravation and energy and the morale that's lost for the team members to get all excited that this guy's coming and he is gonna solve all these problems, and then going through this whole process.

Yossi: It can be extremely challenging on the morale when you're interviewing them. What I'm looking for. My number one rule, I suppose, is really my only real secret source of everything that I've been doing at Upstack, you know, for over five years, you know, is really, you need to basically wanna go out for a coffee with this person.

Yossi: It's like, look, they don't need to be your best friend. They're not your soulmate, they're not your partner, but they need to be someone that you would hang out with, go out for a coffee with, and you'd be able to discuss with them freely. Who would you go out for a coffee with? It's usually someone that you can chat to, which means they've got good communication skills.

Yossi: They speak the same language as you. And that sort of stuff. So I don't negotiate on that at all. You know, a lot of the time the people that I end up hiring have sort of a fit to your own personality and the things that you're interested in. A lot of the people have hobbies, have interests, have their own life outside of work, whether or not it's snowboarding, fitness.

Yossi: Making soaps, cooking, whatever it is. I think that people who have a life and people who have interesting stuff, it does make a difference. It's not like, you know, you have to be the coolest person in the world necessarily. It's not like you have to have tattoos and things and specific, anything specific, but you need to be able to go out for a coffee with this person.

Yossi: You need to be able to chat to the person, which means that they have the communication skills to be able to talk freely and not. In a pained struggled way. Now that being said, sometimes you will find someone who might be based in, you know, a country where English is not their first language. They don't need to be, you know, writing Shakespeare poems and things like that, but you need to be comfortable to chat with them and things like that.

Yossi: That's really, really important to me, and I don't negotiate on that one. And I think the other really important rule is when you are looking at dev shops and agencies, dev shops is where I've seen the most disasters. So just to explain how dev shops normally work, if you've never worked with them, you know, there are these massive sort of outsourcing firms that you'll find in, you know, really all countries, but especially in like Russia, Ukraine, India.

Yossi: Even other countries in Eastern Europe, they're almost like different developers that work in these sorts of places. Then work fully remote. These guys want to have a sort of a nine to five job. They might not have the communication skills, so they're relying on a project manager to manage the process.

Yossi: And you go to these companies and you say, Hey, I wanna build this. They'll quote you, A price might be like five grand, 10 grand might be 30 grand, it might be $400. You know, they'll quote you some sort of fixed price for the work, and you don't really have control over those resources. You know, I would say that the number one rule is you have to work.

Yossi: Directly with the developer. No intermediary, no project manager. So if the project manager is a great communicator, but the developer isn't, or you don't even know who the developer is. That's the biggest disaster that I've ever seen. That's the biggest pitfall. And on the reverse side of the pitfall, the rule, so the biggest pitfall is using an agency for the MVP.

Yossi: A lot of the time you might say, oh, I wanna build an MVP, I want to get something out, so I'm gonna use a dev shop. It's so cheap. I mean, they've quoted me five grand to build this thing. I've spent five grand, no, probably, lemme write a check. Putting it on my credit card. Whatever it is, I'm gonna borrow it off my grandma.

Yossi: Five grand. It's amazing. They promised to do everything for five grand. Now you end up building it. It's a disaster for a number of different reasons. Number one is. You don't have control over that resource, so you're gonna have to find someone again. A lot of the time when that developer comes along and I actually look at the code and say, Hey, you know, it's not something that I could just take over easily.

Yossi: So it can, it can lead to a lot of frustration, and I think that's something really, really important to think of. If you're a startup that wants to raise money, there's no bigger red flag for an investor. That when you are using a third party agency, I don't think any savvy investor will ever invest in a company who is building their product in that particular way, unless of course you've got extraordinary numbers in some other area.

Yossi: Obviously you could build your product however you want. You know, you could be building, you know, an agency where you have zero control over anything in your metrics or so unbelievable. You've got like Flappy Bird, you know, something that's getting like a million downloads a day and generating, you know, huge of revenue, which is unlikely to happen.

Sean Weisbrot: I wanna share an experience I had recently hiring someone full-time where I did want to go out for a coffee with this person and I ended up firing her after a few months. Problem was the experience of the person you're hiring is extremely important because I was trying to hire a QA manager. I had my developers give me a word of mouth referral for someone that they had worked with before.

Sean Weisbrot: You couldn't tell when you were doing the hiring process, and part of one of the reasons why she was so horrible in that specific way was that she was used to working for a very large company, and so she wasn't a cultural fit, but we couldn't see it until after we hired her and she started working.

Yossi: Hiring fast and firing fast is, you know, really important. You really only find out if someone's good on the job and, um, you probably found out pretty quickly. You probably found out in a matter of days or maybe even a week or two if they're remote, you know, you can often get them started without being, having too much impact on the rest of the team.

Yossi: Like, they might just be like, oh, hey look, we're trying out this person for the next two weeks or four weeks, which is how we do it. Often when somebody joins, they start off, you know, sort of knowing that really the. Two to four weeks, or the first month, let's say, is gonna be a trial essentially. And you know, we'll see how it goes.

Yossi: If they leave during that month, that doesn't really bring down the morale of the rest of the team so much. Even if you're bringing them on full time, and even if they've gone through all of the tests, you'll pick up flags along the way and you pick up intuition along the way too. Right. So probably next time you are gonna realize that

Sean Weisbrot: all of the developers I've hired are from the Philippines so far, just because I think there's a really great cultural fit between Americans and Filipinos.

Sean Weisbrot: A lot of the people I hired had jobs. In the city in an office, and they just wanted to work from home. So a lot of them quit their jobs and came to work with my company because they now didn't have a four hour commute every day.

Yossi: I think there's a new breed, a freelancer, and a new breed of developer, especially these days, what I call a remote warrior.

Yossi: And a remote warrior really is. Someone who is sort of always never working in a way where they don't necessarily have the nine to five hours. They're really, really dedicated to what they do, but they still have a good work life balance. They still have hobbies, they still do stuff. They still like to travel.

Yossi: They still have a family if they want, you know, depending on their exact stage of life or whatever they want to do. They have a life outside of work, but for them, building a product that users love, like building something that is gonna delight the end user is really, really important to that person and their own work-life balance.

Yossi: You know, being able to achieve their own goals, um, and be able to, you know, to read or be able to learn or to be able to take new courses and things like that. And I would say that's also a really good way of hiring to start to become a little bit more sensitive to that. Sort of person, you know, does have a life.

Yossi: Like if somebody says, Hey, I'm working on my own side project. Don't get defensive and be like, well, what about me? You gotta work for me full time. And you know, think it's a bad thing. It's a good thing because anyone who's good is gonna be working on something else. They're gonna be contributing to an open source project, they're gonna be working on an app.

Yossi: They're going to have other hobbies. They're gonna wanna travel, they're gonna be wanting to have kids or a family, or whatever it is. Like there's different things that they're gonna have going on. That's a good thing. That means that they have a motivation to succeed. It also means that they, you know, that they're gonna be driven to do a great job for you.

Yossi: So I think that's another really important thing I would say, like a little hint that I've learned or you know, is that that's a great character trait to look for.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to go back to the whole remote thing. So obviously I've hired remote people. My company is a hundred percent remote. We've been that way for over three years.

Sean Weisbrot: We've hired some people that have remote experience. We've hired some people that don't have remote experience. But since we're on the topic of hiring people. And since most companies now are forced to be remote, what kind of advice can you provide to a company founder who wants to hire people for remote work, but maybe the people they're trying to hire have no remote experience?

Sean Weisbrot: How can they find out if that person is capable of handling working remotely? Because not everybody can. And what can they do to help them ease into the remote works lifestyle?

Yossi: Well, I think people usually adapt pretty fast. I think that, you know, obviously trying them out and see how they adjust to working remote.

Yossi: I think making it very clear what your expectations are at ups, we created a document we call our remote manifesto or something like that. I think we might have changed the name.

Yossi: Manifesto was a little bit intense. That was just basically where we outlined what we expect, like how we communicate. We also created our own tool called Jam Bird, and what it basically does is it's sort of a replacement for the daily standup.

Yossi: It's not like it's sort of a once a day thing, but as you're going throughout the day, you actually have a thing concept called a jam where you actually jam about what you're working on. So we have our way of communicating with the rest of the team, sort of. Projects or chunky size tasks that you're working on throughout the day, or even smaller tasks, like, you know, if you're in a specific interview, those actually get shared with the rest of the team as jams throughout the day, you know?

Yossi: So we've sort of built our own way of working. So I think making it really clear to the rest of the team, like what your expectations are from a person, how you work remotely, what you're expecting from them is really, really important. Letting them know how important video and voice is. Having a shaky camera or not having your video on all the time.

Yossi: Not everyone wants to have their video on all the time because for whatever reason it just doesn't always work out. But generally speaking, having a video on, you know, most of the time is, in my opinion, a requirement. And having good audio and good internet connection is just those things are not negotiable.

Yossi: And if you have to buy the hardware for them, that's just part of the hire. They should really already have that. But just explaining how important that is when you're interviewing someone, you know, I expect them to have video on, I expect them to have audio on. I expect them to be on time to a meeting.

Yossi: If they're late, it is actually a big red flag. And if they have audio connection issues, it is actually a big red flag. A lot of the time you, you can get very caught up in the, but the person's so cool, or the person said this, or the person said that they wanna do a phone call, but I'm sure they'll learn how to do video by now.

Yossi: They should know how to do Google meets or Zoom. I think having a daily standup definitely for development teams is really important and that's a way of seeing if they can handle working remotely, because they will be on time, they will. Have their video and audio on for that daily standup. Think somebody who's not good at working remote, you're probably gonna see pretty quickly that they're messing those things up.

Yossi: They're running late to things. They're not organized.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you feel like the pandemic is changing the way companies hire people or how people see. Work and their careers like. Do you think the pandemic has forced people to think that being a freelancer is better than being a stable full-time employee?

Yossi: There's a lot to discuss there. There's lots of different aspects. I mean, I think there are, some of them are a little bit philosophical and a little bit hard to pinpoint with metrics. The word remote used to be taboo almost. It used to be like secondary. Definitely if you went to a San Francisco or a New York based startup, these sorts of hot places where there's a lot of VC money flowing wild.

Yossi: Having everyone in in your local location was a big deal pre COVID and building up that team. And so that whole remote taboo is definitely, it's got to the point now where remote is now Cool. It's actually a selling point. It's like, wow, you know, we're trying to work that out. We're trying to go remote.

Yossi: We're definitely seeing that, you know, upstack is super busy at the moment and there's a lot of people who are much more open-minded to it. So that's for sure that I have quantitative data for. To actually see that, you know, people are definitely a lot more open-minded. And you know, the marketing message can definitely include the word remote a lot more.

Yossi: So I think that's changed a lot. I think people have now realized, you know, everyone is remote and even the companies that wanna go back to the office are obviously struggling. But this gets a little bit more philosophical now on the actual talent side, especially full-time workers in the US or really anywhere.

Yossi: People who are full-time have now realized, well wait a minute, maybe my job's not so secure. It's not like you have any guarantees. Anyway, I think this also does open up this whole discussion around, you know, full-time versus. Freelance or full-time first contract. People are definitely a lot more open-minded into different ways of doing things.

Yossi: I'm a huge fan of Upwork. Don't get Upwork confused with my company. Upstack Upwork is a great way, way to find people. I don't use that to find developers at all, but for other skills and for other areas, I've had a lot of success for marketing, for SEO, for people who know how to crunch numbers, like if you've stuck on a.

Yossi: Google spreadsheet and you're trying to crunch numbers or do something interesting or something that you've never done before. You can find anyone on there who knows that stuff like really, really quickly. That's, I think, the way that hiring is gonna go a lot more. And you know, I'm a big believer in the sort of contract to hire model where you start off with someone contract and then from those guys.

Yossi: You actually hire them full-time, and that's what Upstack does. So Upstack allows you to start working with a developer really, really quickly, remotely full-time within sort of days rather than weeks or months. We take care of all of the hassles of paying them and billing and all that stuff, and then eventually you can bring them on to be part of your core team if you want to.

Yossi: If I hired a guy a few months ago, he's helping me with my LinkedIn. He actually worked at LinkedIn, he was available on Upwork. I hired him. He's been helping us with, you know, our LinkedIn marketing, our paid LinkedIn, and our general LinkedIn strategy, and he actually worked there. He knows the inner workings of how this was built, you know, and he's available to hire.

Yossi: What better person to hire for LinkedIn than someone like that, rather than someone who's a social media manager or a social media expert or something like that? Even a marketing expert that's even more generic that probably knows how LinkedIn works. Put some text and image in and click the button, but doesn't know all of the inner workings and things like that.

Yossi: I think a lot more people have maybe been freaked out or maybe even lost their jobs during COVID who aren't returning to that in a rush and are gonna try a different model of earning money. I think we have to see how it's all gonna pan out. A lot of people will return back to how they were before. I think there's a lot of elasticity with everything.

Yossi: Things will change permanently. I don't know if we really know, and I know if we wanna.