- Remote has grown to nearly 2,000 employees worldwide and is valued at over $3 billion, making it one of Portugal's seven unicorns.
- Marcelo Lebre emphasizes the importance of exercise, revealing he runs a half marathon weekly to maintain both physical and mental sharpness.
- He discusses the limitations of traditional medicine, advocating for a proactive approach to health and longevity through functional medicine.
- Lebre highlights the role of AI and technology in personal health management, stressing the need for integrated data analysis beyond standard medical protocols.
- He shares a personal motivation for fitness: the desire to always be able to pick up his child, illustrating his commitment to long-term health.
In this podcast with Kyriakos the CEO of Terra, Marcelo Lebre shares insights from leading Remote, a company now valued at over $3 billion. He delves into his personal journey of maintaining health while scaling a global HR platform. Marcelo discusses the transformative power of exercise, running half marathons weekly, and the role of AI in modern healthcare. His commitment to longevity and proactive health management offers a fresh perspective on leadership.
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Remote is six years in. We're almost 2,000 people across the world. We were valued by over $3 billion. I still work 14 to 16 hours a day. This is Marcelo Lebre, co-founder and current president of Remote, one of Portugal's seven unicorns. Since launching in 2019, Remote has become a leading global HR platform. We're the HR backbone of businesses because we empower literally everything from finding the best person in the world. We have a database of 800 million people. We have an average of 15 million people visiting our platform on a daily basis looking for jobs.
I don't know if you've seen Johnny Ivey joining OpenAI. You have 2,000 people joining your company. How do you convince the best people in the world to be joining? They join your purpose, your journey. That's what they join.
If you would advise the government in Portugal right now and you had three things to tell them that they need to change, what are those things? Without companies, there are no governments because companies are fundamentally what feeds the financial system of a country. And in many countries, especially across Europe, the employment laws make it so that if there's a bad actor, you will be paying for that headcount for months if not years because you can't legally fire them.
How do you structure the teams in the way that everyone builds? I over-rotate on results and achievements more so than anything else. The OpenAI have two things that are non-negotiable. One is we don't bring our ego to work. And second is, we don't accept this.
The Photo That Built a Flywheel
Marcelo, let me ask you about the topic that you never speak, at least publicly. You're a big fan of training. You have great nutrition. And then you have some very interesting opinions about medicine. So can we go there? What's your training principle? What's your exercising? I see you're wearing two wearable devices. Which one do you like most?
Marcelo: Yeah. Okay. First principles on this. I started getting a lot more into exercise soon after I started Remote. That was around 2008? Around five to six years ago. For two reasons. One is I started to realize I was becoming a couch potato. You know, flight of stairs. I would be tired. And I had a small kid. And I felt like I'm not really, you know, I don't feel like I'm the person that I would be proud to be. Like if I were to speak to my 10-year-old self, I don't think my 10-year-old self would be proud of my 35-year-old self not being able to climb a flight of stairs and be out of breath.
So I started with that and realizing that, you know, as you age, you start to become more acutely aware of the limitations of human existence. And also that what you eat, you do on a daily basis has a massive impact. You know, if you eat something, you're gonna not sleep well. If you don't sleep well, you're not functioning well the next day. And then, you know, it's all tying together where, you know, we know for a fact that the best drug that exists to extend longevity is exercise by a long margin. Every single study shows that there's, you know, above all pills that you can take, all supplements you can take, exercise extends your lifespan massively compared to anything else. And I plan to live forever. And so I'm not gonna live forever if I'm gonna die at the age of 45 after eating a McDonald's or something like that. Not to say that McDonald's kills you, but that fast food is not great for you, that we all know.
So I started to get a lot into exercise. And then soon after I realized that exercise also was great to sharpen the mind. I felt that the more I worked out, the more I pushed myself, I could get into this zone, like a flow state, and really almost meditate. The more I pushed myself, the more I would almost narrow down the focus into a single topic or single item and really nail it. And so the more I did, I realized that it became almost like a tool for work and for life. And then I started to push myself harder and harsher, and I started to do longer runs and longer and longer to a point where I was doing, I started to do a half marathon every week.
Kyriakos: Oh, wow. So every-
Marcelo: And you would try to do it every week? Yeah, usually 22, that's what I would do. So I started to do it on Saturdays, and then I would run almost every week, day of the week. But I also felt that I wasn't, I started to get tired. And it's the kind of tiredness that you feel like is not normal. Sleeping it over doesn't work. And then I realized that my nutrition was deficient.
And why was nutrition deficient? Because we're not taught to eat well. In most countries, some countries have different culture around food and others, but even the ones that are considered the Mediterranean food and diet, they're not great. You're still over-indexed on a lot of meat, a lot of fish, a lot of potatoes, and things that they're healthier than you just munching over a pizza or a burger here and there, but they're not fully, they don't really fulfill the fundamental needs of the body. And you notice it the more you start pushing yourself. So in order to be able to keep up with physical exercise and mental exercise, I would need to nurture my body much more. And that started to get me closer to this functional aspect of medicine and health.
And my biggest realization was I reached out to, I remember, okay, I'm gonna start doing some regular blood work. And you go to doctor after doctor and the analysis, oh, you're fine. But I feel like I could do more. Oh, no, you're fine. Like your blood work is fine. But what does it fine mean? Because you look at it and you see some values that are not in a range. And also, what does the range mean? And then you start to dig a bit more and you realize that some of the ranges haven't been updated in decades. The outlines or the recommendations and protocols recommended, they vary from country to country. And so something is not really optimized.
Kyriakos: You also consider the age as well, right?
Marcelo: Absolutely. They tell you between, you consider testosterone levels, for example, and then it's between the age of 30 and 80, which it's very obvious that testosterone dramatically decreases by decades. Yes. So you can see basic things like, oh, the limit of, the toxicity limit of vitamin D is, I don't know, 4,000 or whatever it is defined. And then you look it up. And the reason why it is stated as 4,000 is because decades ago, there was this random, very poor study done that sort of noticed that at 4,000 UIs of vitamin D, nothing bad would happen to people. And then it was sort of adopted as such. But no one really questioned it. And same for cholesterol. What does it mean? What is the difference between HDL, LDL, ApoB, et cetera? Most doctors don't really screen patients for ApoB, for instance.
I am grateful to live in an era where medicine, especially in Europe, is widely available and that you can get really good, fast treatment for acute symptoms and acute diseases. But I do feel, and we were talking about it earlier, that we're not really tackling health and longevity. We're tackling disease and sickness. And that, I feel, for people like you and I that live with a certain degree of stress that is unavoidable, that can compensate through good food, good exercise, good sleep, that there are not good enough knowledge, information. I'm very fortunate that I met someone that I work with, Miguel, that is a functional doctor. And we work on literally every of these items that affect not just me directly, but my family. And this is an insane privilege.
Sometimes, and you mentioned my devices, I have a Whoop, I have an Apple Watch, I also have an Aura, and I often compare the data between the three. I discuss it with my doctor. We look at things like how to optimize things, how these things also affect my family and their health. And this is working for longevity. This is investing on avoiding sickness and living longer and happier life. So, of course, the longevity is debatable. If I leave the building and I'm very happy and I get run over by a bus, then there goes my longevity. But I had a great quality of life. If I look at pictures from my grandparents, my great-grandparents, at my age, they looked like three times my age. If you look at the pictures, the speed of aging was ridiculous. And by the way, these people lived in an area, in a geography or a place where they didn't really eat any fast food. And so we're not necessarily saying that, well, fast food is the core of all problems, the bane of our existence. It is not. There's a lot more to it. And so I think that especially for, in this day and age where people lead stressful or at least ambitious lives, this has to be fundamentally key.
Kyriakos: You spoke about having a doctor, but the problem for majority of people, they don't have access to a good doctor. And what I mean by that is whenever I go myself, I told you a story earlier, but whenever I go to a doctor, there is these frameworks, there is this tendency to look at if you're sick or not, and not really see the progression you're doing towards a goal.
Marcelo: Yes.
Kyriakos: Like in your view, what's the future of this going to look like? Like in the next five to 10 years, how do, like, would we have more doctors? Would we have more AIs? How does this look like?
Marcelo: So I've, the way I see it, in the past few years, we've seen massive growth of companies that now enable you to take health on your own hands, right? You do blood work, they give you 200 biomarkers and try to give you a sense of what do these mean. Now, this is, of course, it's amazing, right? But this also opens up a new world where up until now, most people didn't really have access to all this, let alone track their own biomarkers and how they evolve in life. Now, given the amount of companies that do this at a reasonable price, now, the second stage of this phase is beginning where you need to be able to understand them because if it says, you know, this biomarker is fine, but this other biomarker is not fine, or these two biomarkers are at, you know, the edge of the acceptable, and you could look at it in isolation and say, well, this is fine, but it may not be because if you know, you know, to know biology, to know the evolution of the human body is also to know that certain things are correlated and other things are caused, you know, causation and correlation. And this is where, you know, the true knowledge of medicine is important because you may know enough to be acutely aware of your state of health and what certain biomarkers mean, but 99.9% of us do not have the background in medicine or any kind of professional training in medicine. So you do not have the necessary skills to analyze and formulate an informed opinion. So now you need someone that is able to do this. What I find is that a huge amount, as we spoke about before, a huge amount of health specialists have training in protocol approach to disease, not necessarily to longevity.
Kyriakos: And by protocol, what do you mean?
Marcelo: So what I find, you know, in our experience is, you know, I have something, you know, I have a problem. I go to the doctor, he looks you over and says, well, you have this disease that is not so bad, but you know, the protocol is you take these pills three times a day and go for it. And then if you get better, you're fine. If not, come see me again in two months. Now, this is most of the experience. And generally speaking, it may be fine. Now, what we also know at sometimes, it's the disease in itself is a symptom to something else, right? We also know today, for instance, that a lot of, you know, skin rashes are a representation of how your gut health is doing, how your gut health is doing. And you may see a dermatologist about this, but, you know, dermatologists are gonna try to fix your skin. They're not gonna look at you and think, well, have you been stressed? You know, how's your poop, right? And this is the kind of, finally, we're at an age where, you know, information, you know, LLMs, technology, AI, is able to integrate all this information. And we are, you know, we used to go to the doctor and say, hey, I'm really worried about this. And the first thing he would ask is like, well, you went to Google, right? And you're like, yeah, it's somewhat a shame that, yeah, I went to Google. Yeah, you don't have cancer, right? Just shut up. Don't Google it, right? SEO is a death of you. But we're now at an age where you can really explore your options. And it is great that some of the medical profession, specialists are starting to adopt it and understand that there's a more integrated approach to this, meaning now with entire amount of information that you have about your body, about your biomarkers, about your sensors, that you can, you and your physician can interact with data and context at the same time, rather than a protocoled approach to a single individualized set of symptoms rather than the holistic person. And now I'm not saying with using the expression holistic that I jump on the bandwagon of trying certain things that have no scientific background whatsoever. I think all we're discussing is scientific backed approaches and scientifically backed initiatives. Not to say that you now are looking at crystals and singing Kumbaya and hoping that it's gonna cure all your diseases. And so AI now enables you to do amazing things like you did a blood work panel, everything seems fine, you know what? But your aura is saying that you can't sleep and your body temperature is up. So something is not well. Maybe it's your mental health that is not great, but mental health is part of health and needs to be addressed too. So we're now in this situation where you can interpret a lot more and do a lot more a lot earlier. And I don't think that most of the health professionals are ready or embracing this as they could. I'm fortunate to work with one that is and understands that a lot of the times it's actually very positive that we come with questions, that AI helps us to narrow down what we feel about our bodies and what we could be related and explore to go much more beyond the symptom, but rather explore what you can do to live a longer, more fulfilling life.
I can give you this example. One of the things that also propelled me a lot into working out, I saw this quote, and this is a very common quote that has been going around for ages that says, you know, there's gonna be a day where you will pick up your kid and neither of you will know that it's the last time that you will be able to pick him up. And this is not a dark quote, but it's reality, right? They get heavier, kids get heavier, they grow up. And so you start, you know, eventually there'll come a day where you don't pick them up anymore. And I read that and I was like, fuck this, I'm gonna work out until I'm super, I'm not ever gonna stop picking him up. And it's the same, like eventually, if you become a grandparent or a great-grandparent, you wanna be able to enjoy your extended family, just go on walks and explore, go on hikes, maybe by that time we're on the moon, I wanna take a shuttle and go to the moon. I don't wanna get to the age of 80 and barely being able to lift from a chair.
Kyriakos: I think with all the AI now, it feels like you can write software on an individual level and personalize everything so much that it's going to significantly change everything. It also feels like we can spend two hours speaking about this topic.
Marcelo: Yes.
Kyriakos: Even before we go to the moon, I wanted to ask you about, we're both Europeans, we both meet in San Francisco. So how is it running a company from Portugal and starting a company in Portugal? How different is San Francisco? And then I also want to ask you, it's going to be the next question, but it's going to be about advice to the European Union, advice to the government in Portugal.
Marcelo: Yeah. Well, I started Remote with my co-founder, Job, and we're friends for 13 years now. It's been a while. Happily co-married also. We started the business, we were both in Portugal at the time. We started this company called Remote because we wanted to find a way for people to be employed from any company in around the world and companies to find the best people in the world to work with. We happened to both be in Portugal at the same time. We built a global business out of Portugal. So today, Remote is over 2,000 people all across the world. We have a company in over 100 countries across the world and we help pay people literally, almost literally in all countries in the world. It is a bit of a strange environment doing so from Europe. My feeling, five to four years ago, we always had downs building and eventually we raised money and we raised money and we raised money and the company was super successful, still growing quite fast. And I remember the day we raised our Series A and a news reporter in Portugal rang me up and I picked up the phone, hey, I'm so-and-so, work for this newspaper. We'd love to ask you a few questions. Sure. Well, about your fundraising. The first one is, where have you been? No one heard about your company and all of a sudden you raise like 100 million? Like, how does this happen? How do you raise this amount of money out of Portugal? So it took me quite a while to explain to people that I've been building a business. I'm not out there doing interviews or on the TV and that you build businesses by working on them. And it still didn't land, right? And then the next questions were more about, oh, does this mean that you're now rich? Does this mean that you now have a part of this money? And so I found myself having to explain business to a five-year-old. It seemed basic terms, basically. It felt like we were 100 years in the past. Now, of course, four to five years have passed and Portugal's ecosystem evolved quite a lot. So we're now 70 unicorns, it's a significant density for given the size of the country.
Kyriakos: 70 unicorns, yes. This is since when?
Marcelo: The latest unicorn was announced like two months ago, but the first unicorn was like potentially, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, I'd say, give or take. The fact of the matter is that as a country, the density is, if you compare the amount of unicorns and the amount of the population, it's quite good. It's a good ratio. I think it comes a lot from Portugal to never having been considered front runner in anything. When there's a line, Portuguese people are not sitting in there in the front of the line. And so we always were taught to work for everything we have. It's been always a somewhat poor country, but we always work our asses off to own what we have. And that is a bit part of the spirit of trying and trying and trying and trying. But the perception has been, it's improving significantly, but since we started the company, every time I would speak with someone, they would be appalled as if we were doing something illegal. A company this size out of Portugal, how does this happen? And it's not possible. How can you do this? It's massive, like you must have been a genius. So this just demarked that people are not used to it. It's not like we can, absolutely we can, like the ratio is amazing, but people are not used to it. And so it shows quite a lot of the delta.
There are always three phases of the evolution of an ecosystem. Zero to one, where you go from nothing to something. One to two, where that something matures a bit more and grows slowly. And then two to 10, where the thing just skyrockets. And I think that up until very recently, we've been on a zero to one journey and it took a lot. We would meet with governments and they would treat us as the sort of weird kids in the block, the geeks, the nerds, the ones that did something that is not really expected of them, but sort of pat on the back and good job. Which is kind of weird. And then today, if we grouped five or seven or whatever unicorns in Portugal, we're a massive percentage of GDP, massive. The problem is that most of us are not really, the headquarters is not the country, it's not Portugal. Why? Because the laws for incorporation, tax, fiscal, corporative, they're unfriendly. They are typically built for decades old businesses and stem from very outdated, very outdated ways to build a company. And so that is non-conducive to these new companies, which the environment in itself is tough. In Europe or in Portugal, at least, it's not as easy to raise capital. There's not enough liquidity in the market to raise and to build. And so you see a lot of companies starting a business and dying right after with great ideas. Companies that out here in the US would raise massive amount of money, would be wildly successful. But it's the same as you're trying to plant a flower in the middle of the desert. There's not enough water. So it dies. So you can have the most amazing founders, but because they never found the nurturing environment they needed, their idea to change the world just dies. It's a massive waste of opportunity. Now, I'm also glad that we've made significant progress in that matter. But I feel that between us and literally everyone else that is watching this, maybe the two people, I'm kidding. But the biggest impediment is politics. Whenever we sit down with any party, the conversation always ends up on us having to explain. What it feels like to build a business from scratch. Most politicians never actually built a business from scratch. Most of them actually never worked for a company before. So it is a fundamental disadvantage when you're trying to build something or you're trying to influence a country to do more and to be more and to allow for more and nurture more. The reception, the party that should be receiving the information does not have the know-how to understand what you're talking about. And even the advisors to the advisors to the advisors do not have the experience. And this is the biggest impediment to evolution, I believe, that has been in Europe. I'm very happy to see certain movements, you know, the Ewing, for instance, they're pushing forward this project Europe, pushing forward to, you know, fund earlier early stage founders to give a boost, reduce complexity, reduce regulation, enable innovation. It is starting to happen. But we also have to admit and also have to recognize that it's 50 years late. And if we don't move faster, then we'll keep being 50 years late. And the world is now, especially with AI, moving at almost the speed of light. So we actually effectively at the speed of light, because that's how internet travels through fiber optics. Up until recently, I would say, there's no one to listen. As founders, we get together, we try to influence the new politicians, the new governments and new parties, the new commissions, parliaments. But there was no one to listen. Now I finally am seeing some rays of sunshine, where there's people that finally are willing to listen. But we have to keep push for more. You and I met in this city, San Francisco. The reason why, it's not because we were bored, right? It's because we're both trying to build a great business, not an okay business, not a satisfying business, not a good business, but a great business. And to do so, we have to give ourselves the best chances. And the best chances are for a business are related to liquidity, to markets, markets that are open, where trade can happen without a lot of impediment. And so a city like San Francisco is a hub that pushes all that flow of not just capital, but ideas of communication, of getting together, of me struggling as a co-founder or as an entrepreneur and reaching out to you and say, Hey, would you mind to go for a coffee? I'm really stuck with something in my company, and we'd love to have your opinion on it. This is probably one of the few cities where this actually happens frequently. And within vulnerability and peers and sharing comes this massive amount of value creation. And we need to port this spirit into Europe. I don't think you can port or copy it. I don't think we should copy it at all. But I think that we should understand that this creates value, and then we should explore more what is our ability to create value in Europe? How do we create our value? Not a copy. I don't want to say that, you know, Portugal is the SF of Europe or Portugal or, you know, that there's a new hub that is the new New York of Europe, the new San Francisco. I don't want to say that. Like SF is SF, New York is New York, Berlin is Berlin. But I want to be able to talk about Europe and Portugal, of course, and say, holy crap, it's so cool to be able to build here because there's a community, there's people that help, you know, the government is involved. Of all the places, I think European Union is super well suited to be much more involved that, for instance, in the US, you know, we know that, you know, capitalism has so many great things, but also has a very marked interest in capital. And we know that European Union is not as close to capitalism as the US, but it has its strengths, right? And we can draw a lot from that strength, that community sense, that ability to trade from other countries and travel freely. And that is the one thing that I think we're very much lagging. And we're all excited about all these initiatives, but boy, it feels still quite too late.
Kyriakos: Yeah. I think my beef, if you'd like, with the whole initiative in Europe is that we want to change the perception or we want to change the narrative. I think the reality is one should not compete. It's not a solution to imitate what the US is doing, right? And you should learn what's happening here. You should not say that London is a hub or Berlin is a hub. They are not. Like, I spent a lot of years in London. It's not a hub. And my problem with saying that it's a narrative and that it's a narrative difference is you reduce the chances for a new founder to take the leap and say, you know what, if I want to take maximum chances, I'll do what's best, I will go to San Francisco and do it. That's from the San Francisco side. But there is a lot you can do in Europe to improve it significantly. If you would advise the government in Portugal right now when you have three things to tell them that they need to change, what are those three things?
Marcelo: Kill bureaucracy for building a business, deregulate the amount of requirements that are needed to sustain a business, to pay the taxes and employ the people. And thirdly, enable investment. I can talk about the three. The first two ones are heavily related. Even though you can easily in a fast way create a business, the structure of it is very monolithic. I can't easily create a business that I could sell a portion of it to you if you want to become an angel investor. You have to jump through hoops to make that happen. It is an outdated structure, a form of the business. So the second part is what do you need to create and to maintain a business? The amount of formalities that you have, of reporting requirements, of tax reportings, fiscal responsibilities that you have to follow on a monthly basis, having accountants forced costs onto you, and sometimes in Portugal you have to pay in advance taxes before you make it as a company. You and I, when we started our businesses, we had no idea if this would yield anything, let alone it becoming a company that yields millions of revenue or has several dozens or hundreds of employees, whatever. We didn't know. And so how can we predict, how can we have this entire overhead for people? And the same for how we employ them. A lot of countries across Europe have labor laws that are fundamentally destructive to early stage company, meaning I'm not advocating for full employment at will as in the U.S., quite the opposite, because I think people deserve a level of compensation that is correct, that is just, that is fair, that gives them support for them and their family and to live a good life. Now, what I can also say is without companies, there are no governments, because companies is fundamentally what feeds the financial system of a country. And in many countries, especially across Europe, the employment laws make it so that if there's a bad actor, you will be paying for that headcount for months, if not years, because you can't legally fire them. There's nothing you can do. Absolutely nothing. And so if all of a sudden you're trying to, you're trying to create a business. When Job and I created Remote, the first funding round that we had was sufficient for us to build roughly the same, the very first year of the company. If out of the people that we hired, a handful would have played, you know, a bad acting trick on us, we would be screwed. There was nothing we could do about these people. Now, we're very happy, you know, we did a good job at hiring people. They were great performers, great people too, but there are companies that are not so lucky. And, you know, there's also companies that are themselves bad actors and then behave very badly and have to deal with the consequences. But what I'm saying is that if we're trying, you know, building a startup is a risk approach. You invest heavily, you're over leveraged, but you also expect a great return. This great return is for everyone involved, is for the founders, for the shareholders, for the company, for the country where the company operates and reports into, because the money is that owes a tax, right? So what I'm talking about is creating the levers and avenues that give a business, you know, we know that 99.9 something of startups die within two to five years. So what we're doing, we're really doing is a numbers game. And we're trying to give these businesses the biggest opportunity to exist. And so to do so, we have to give them the green field to run at their best speed and not be caught and spend their time. I still work, you know, Remote is six years in, we're almost 2000 people across the world. We're doing very well, the business is growing very much. We were valued by over $3 billion, but I still work 14 to 16 hours a day. If a percentage of that is wasted on managing the local entity, you know, because now the bureaucracy requires me to hand over a file, whatever, and the person that I'm calling, by the way, on the authorities has no idea what I'm talking about, because they don't know what a startup is, then I'm screwed. I cannot compete with any, like, how can I compete in countries like the US, the Emirates, China, Japan, you know, how can I compete? I can't. I come from a background, you know, of a country that is not a superpower, and I still have to struggle with this. So it's impossible. It's a rigged game. And so, and lastly, is the investment. Most countries in Europe are hellish to invest or be invested in locally. The local regulation for company building is so outdated that it's sometimes physically impossible to invest. You know, in Germany, whenever you have an investment, you have to have things read aloud by the notary. You could take hours. I'm not joking. Everything has to be like dozens or hundreds of pages. It's insane. Sometimes in some countries, you have to pay, you have to pay taxes upfront on stock options that is unrealized gains and 99.99 something percent will not yield anything. So in fact, you're paying taxes over nothing, which, of course, is a catch 22, because who wants to invest in an environment like this? No one. So it creates risk averse investment approaches where investors either put in only small tickets for very big portions of businesses that then if they're happy and if they're lucky and they grow, then when they try to raise serious capital from serious investors or bigger investors across the world, when they look at the cap table, they look up, what do you mean you gave, you know, 30% for 50k? This cap table is ruined. Like there's nothing we can do here. We can't work with it. So these are three angles that I would say, we've, we've been trying to work very closely together with different, different governments to inform, to push forward, to make sure that, you know, they can review all these items. At the end of the day, there's always a problem of ideology. Every different government looks at these three things that I just mentioned from completely different angles. Sometimes it's more about public perception than actually execution. And they also are afraid to change regulations that exist for 30, 40, 50 years. And that is where the big problem lies. We have to be fearless in this. We have to understand that without evolution, we just die. What you and I learned building businesses is that not taking risks is much more expensive than risking something and failing. And this is what countries need to understand. But often they make decisions on a four year long plan, no more. And that's very short sighted.
Kyriakos: You're running a business that is valued more than $3 billion. You have almost 2000 employees or more. And you did this in six years.
Marcelo: Yeah.
Kyriakos: There is, there is thousands of questions I would ask, but can you put in context how the product evolved over time?
Marcelo: Yeah.
Kyriakos: What was the initial product and how did you move to more products over time? How did you think about the new product lines and how did you know that these products are going to grow?
Marcelo: Yeah. We started with an idea and we sort of started the company with this, I often joke about this and say that, you know, it's a bit like the episode from Curb Your Enthusiasm, like the spite store where Larry just builds a store, a coffee place next to another out of spite. And I think it is not necessarily that, but we built this because my co-founder and I always believe that people should do what they love. The worst thing in your, you know, when you go out to a coffee place, a restaurant, public services is when someone, you know, like you're being served by someone and this person like is like hating their day, like, fuck, like, you're like, hey, morning and like, yeah, what can I do? Like, I, this is, this is worse. And the reason why this happens is because people are miserable. They don't, they don't like what they do. They do it because they need to eat at the end of the day. And that's the best job they could find to meet those requirements. So we set out and said, we're going to fix this. And in our idea, the big problem was that if you make two lists, the number of companies of people looking for a job in the world, the amount of companies looking for people in the world, and you were to matchmake them, you would be in such an amazing place, right? Because people would be able to do the best job ever and the companies would have the best people aligned for the job, but due to geography and regulation, you can't. So we said, what is the best way to solve this? Well, the first thing that came to mind was a job board, you know, but job boards only, they act as a directory only. They don't really connect the dots. If the company is not next to you, they're not going to be able to pay your employee. So we thought, okay, so the big problem on the table is actually not the search, is the contractual link part of it, the agreement part of it, the employment part of it. So we looked into it and we found this concept of employee of record. This company that, you know, helps another company find an employee, someone to work with them from a different country. And so we said, okay, let's build this. But why doesn't this already exist? Well, it sort of exists. There were a few incumbent players, but these companies were basically out of spreadsheets and emails. So you'd say, hey, you know what, here's my friend, David. I want to employ them. My company is in the US, but they are in the Netherlands. So here's all the information. And then this would take months. Okay. You would, you know, the company would reply back, here's the employment template. And you'd say, well, there's a mistake there. I don't want this person to be employed in this job. That's not what I'm asking for. Go back. This would take months. And we said, oh my God, this is crazy. Also percentile points of the job. So if the job would take 100K, the company would take like 10%, 10K out of that. So it felt weird and clunky and poor. And we said, okay, so how can we build this across the world and make it simple? So the only way to make it simple is if you automate it. You can only really automate it if you own everything end to end. So we did. We went to every single country. We raised a shitload of money to go into every country, understand employment laws, payroll laws, tax, equity, corporate, fiscal, anything.
Kyriakos: But like how many people does this involve? Like how many people teach you how around the world doing this?
Marcelo: A lot. So we started by taking this approach of lend and expand. The way we would do it was we pick a country. We had a list of countries, land, and we would land and request a referral for a good company that could work with us initially, meaning they would teach us about all these laws, all these regulations.
Kyriakos: And that's a coincidence?
Marcelo: Actually it could be, but sometimes it could be like a local specialist firm that would work with us. And they would sort of, we would hire people locally as well, and they would act as the first brain dump of the basics. Then we would incorporate the data, build it into the platform, and then maintain it and build it. So that's how we built the first employer of record solution across the world.
Kyriakos: Out of all of the advice you are getting at the beginning, how much of it was nonsense?
Marcelo: A huge portion. Huge, huge portion. I can tell you that most people would say, well, you can't do this. The reason you can't do this is too complex. It's too lengthy. Employing people takes months, negotiating contracts, paying people. Payroll is very complex. No way you can automate this. Bigger companies tried and failed. Again, my co-founder and I are very good at working out of spite. And so the more we would say, you can't do this very hard, you're not going to be able, you're not going to succeed, the more we would be pressing on to do it. So we managed to create a solution and a product that today you can onboard in hours rather than weeks or months. You can't find this in any other platform across the world, even today. So this is where we started. After this, we realized that we actually store a huge amount of information for our customers, you know, around the employment information.
Kyriakos: Just to interrupt you there, the EOR, was it a new idea? Because it's in a way employing the person, so did it happen before?
Marcelo: So it already existed, but it was all manual. There were no platforms for it whatsoever. The platforms that existed was just a landing page, barely any more than that, or a little more than that. So we built the full flow, automated flow for all of it. And once we started to do so well, we started to be able to break the status quo. And one of the worst parts of it all was that we were working on this space where everything was sort of outdated and people would be able to give us all kinds of advice about how to automate around themselves, except themselves. And that was the biggest issue. And we had to take a completely different approach because we were able to, it was almost like reverse Pareto rule. You would spend 80% of the time to fix 20% of the problems. And we wanted the opposite. And in order to spend 20% of the time fixing 80% of the problems, you have to really remove yourself and take out the status quo and say, I'm going to assume that I know nothing and I'm going to start from scratch and I'm going to understand what a good flow looks like. Rather than faster horses, I actually want to build a car. That was the approach that we took. And after taking that full automation approach, we had so much success. The feedback was so great. The next piece of feedback we got was, okay, so you know what, Empowered Record is a part of my workforce. I have several...
The HR Backbone: From Single Trick Pony to Global Powerhouse
One is people in countries where I already own the entity that just need payroll. There are people that are just freelancers, they come and go. Or there are folks that are freelancers, but I don't really want to handle them. I want you to handle them. Or eventually, a relationship like this in the US is called a PEO, where you employ people in other states in a co-employment solution. And the feedback was always the same: it's like, guys, you already have the piece that is unavoidable in my business. It's the center of gravity. So everything that the HR teams used was revolving around us.
And we saw this in 2022, where everyone started cutting costs. And the first thing you could cut are like the $10 PAPM on that tool that tracks time off, the $10 PAPM on that tool that tracks if that person is online or not. And then we started to understand there's a massive consolidation play here. So we started to build everything into the platform, because we understood that Remote is the first thing you turn on when you start your business, and the last thing you turn off when you close down your business, hopefully a long time after.
This was like the act two of Remote, in which we are today, where we went from a single trick pony to multiple products. Typically when I have two seconds to talk about this to anyone, just say that we're the HR backbone of businesses. Because we empower literally everything, with the pillars being, how do you pay people across the world? And then the compounding effect of it is, how do you manage people across the world?
So we can really do end to end from finding the best person in the world, we have a database of 800 million people. We have an average of 15 million people visiting our platform on a daily basis looking for jobs. And if you're able to, based on your job description, say, rather than you spending time sifting through 20,000 people that apply to your jobs, we will actually tell you who are the best people around the world that we believe, based on your job ad, and AI, what is the best. Then it's up to you how you want to engage with them, pay them locally as a freelancer, contractor, whatever we believe is the best fit. And just manage them, promote them, let them go, whatever you want to do within the platform.
With our infrastructural moat, because we're still the only company that did this in every single country, we can do things that no one else can. We can give you the best expert advice in anything. We can help you scale up, scale down, give equity, manage RSU, stock options, whatever across the world, plan where to hire next, based on your pay ranges, so on and so forth.
In all of this, I wish I could say it was just a stroke of genius that we woke up and said, no, this is such a massive and loud market that the only thing we had to do was listen. People were telling us, the more you build, the more we buy. And look, we're very good at building. I don't think we're very good at promoting ourselves, but we're very good at building. And that's what we're building, doing nonstop.
Inside Remote: Structuring a 2000-Person Team
Kyriakos: Speaking of building, if you have 2000 employees, how do you structure the teams in the way that everyone builds? What's the structure internally? You have these so different philosophies, for example, I'm very inspired by the supercell idea, for example, having many cells internally that they act differently, or you also have these cult-like, the Peter Thiel, if you'd like, way of running a business. How do you run the business and so many people? And are there management layers? Are there no management layers?
Marcelo: So, I am of the approach that I never copy anyone else, because I believe that structures work in a very specific context of the people, of the time, of the business. So, in the history of Remote, it actually evolved quite a lot. And we've always rolled with the evolution of the people that are in seat, the types of teams, the types of objectives we have. So we don't shy away from changing structures based on the need. And we try to get the solution close to the problem, rather than define a structure and then hope that it sort of addresses the problem.
Job and I have two things that are non-negotiable. One is we don't bring our ego to work. We never did. And we also do not accept that others do. It's good that you're proud about things that you achieve. It's very different being proud and having a massive ego or a significant ego. And when people start to optimize for ego, they get stuck on a local maximum and they forget the global maximum that is the best for the business. And so we never allow ego to be part of a discussion. So that's one.
And second is politics. We don't accept this. If you come to play and your angle is, hey, I'm going to do the thing that is going to give me most visibility. Dude, everyone knows that you're playing politics. People think, oh, I'm going to be so smart because I'm going to do this and I'm going to get in front of the CFO or the COO. And, you know, my team is going to have so much visibility. I'm sorry to say, but this is not 1975. People know that you're playing politics. Everyone knows. And so it's all about outcome. Either you deliver or you don't.
I don't like OKRs, for instance. I never did. I think it's a massive waste of time. You spend a huge amount of overhead. You have a strict approach. And most of the times people waste time rigging the game to make themselves successful rather than making the business successful. And so I over-rotate on results and achievements more so than anything else.
Remote is structured. Leadership is structured into two levels. One is exec, so a C-level and a CP. And the second level is VPs and up. So second level we call the bridge because I'm a Star Trek fan. Bridge of a ship. And then we have the remaining management of the organization. So exec, executive team meets every quarter. Bridge team meets every six months. And then the other teams, if meaningful, if important, they will meet on a point-to-point basis, discretionary. But not really good groups. We're fully distributed. There's no single office across the world.
I'm not going to claim that we're flat. And a lot of people claim that they're flat as if it's something important. I don't think it is. I think that you still need some reporting lines because you have to make sure that your team is performing, that they're doing their best and people are happy at the end of the day, or at least making the business grow while being happy. But I do not believe in, as I said, in politics. And if a C-level wants to work with an IC, then why should they have to go through the entire chain of command? That makes no sense. And the opposite, true. If someone had just joined the company, he thinks that I should see something or that they should tell me something. Why not? Just DM me, send me a message.
We don't use email internally. We use Slack. Typically, I like async communication. We do like a lot of async communication. So create a page in Notion, share it with me, or a Loom video, or send me a DM, whatever. I do inbox zero. My co-founders are roughly the same, even though I think he does more inbox denial, more than inbox zero. But we get to everything. And if you structure your day and your priorities, you get to everything.
I don't subscribe to extremes where those executives that never talk to anyone, or the executives that are on everyone's business, on the micromanagement. I think that if you're doing that, then you're setting yourself to a massive catastrophic failure. Because one day you're not going to be there. The whole thing's going to implode one way or another. So I think that truth is in the middle. And we try to make an environment where people feel that they can talk when they need to talk, when they ask for help, or they call bullshit when they need to call bullshit. What matters is prioritizing the business and the growth of the business. That's why we're all here.
I don't subscribe to that topic of, we're a family. This is a lifestyle business. We want you to enjoy life. It's not up to me to tell anyone how to enjoy life. I don't have a family of 1000 or 2000 people. My family is very small. And my family is my family. My friends are my friends. And I hope that everyone plays the same approach. Because I don't like mumbo jumbo. Because it just isn't real.
Kyriakos: Yeah, I think it's much closer to a football team, for example, Barcelona. It's not that the players are a family. They're not family at all. It's a very high-performance organization. It's just 11 players. And if you are not the best, you get subsidies. That's the whole mantra of Barcelona. I think it has a lot to do with very close to sports.
Recruiting the Best: It's About the Mission, Not the Money
Kyriakos: I want to ask you another two questions. We're about over time. I don't know if you've seen Johnny Ivey joining OpenAI. So I wanted to ask you, you have 2000 people joining your company. It means that you have some extremely good advice on how do you convince the best people in the world to be joining?
Marcelo: They don't join you. They join your mission. That's how I reduce it to. They don't join you. They join your purpose, your journey. That's what they join. You could be the best spokesperson in the world. But the best spokesperson in the world, it could be a smooth, soft talker. That's fine. And people may even pay attention to you. But they won't join you unless they believe that you're on a path to something. They may not know what it is. And often I find that I've been able to convince people to join. And I realized that after they joined, they didn't really know what the company was fully doing. Maybe also because we have a fairly complex business. But they joined the vision. They joined the journey. And that's how you convince people. And I've never tried to convince anyone out of money. Of course, it plays a good part because you don't hire people if you don't pay them. And a lot of the great people, they really require quite a bit of money to hire. But they join primarily a vision or mission or journey. And secondarily, the work conditions. That's what I find.
Imagining the Future: Remote's Role in a World Without Money
Kyriakos: So the last question is, if we're forced 100 years into the future, and the world is alive, what is it doing then? What are the things that are changing?
Marcelo: So I subscribe a lot to the Gene Roddenberry vision of Star Trek in a future where people don't work for money. You work for your own benefit. Maybe you're the best woodworker that we could have alive right now in the world. But we don't know. And probably you don't know because you're building a business because you think that this is what you should be doing at this point. Same for me. I wish there would be in a position where this is real. The reason why you and I also do this is because we have ambition. And our ambition is also tied to our chip in our shoulder. Because we don't come from a tier eight countries where we want more. We want to give our family more. And we want to experience success. And today this comes super tied to money and financial gains and freedom. I want the world to live in a situation where people can actually do what they really enjoy. And actually, you know, everyone gets, you know, we don't work for money. We potentially work for whatever else. Like a former UBI, Universal Basic Income, exists. And Remote could be the company that handles that 100 years in the future. Where we make sure that everyone has what they need across the world. From either money or credits, whatever you want to call it. And the benefits that you need to be healthy and be free, be happy. If Remote is alive within 100 years, that would be a good outcome.
Kyriakos: First time, it's been awesome chat. Thank you.
Marcelo: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Kyriakos: Awesome. Well, I have 11,000 questions. That was really good.
Marcelo: Cool. Excited. I love this. Thanks for having me, man. It was great. I had like a list of 20 questions, but we just went through five.
Kyriakos: Yeah, that's okay. When I'm back, we can do part two or I can interview you.