Speed is Safety: Lessons on Business Building and Local Decision Making

Fredrik, welcome to the show.

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  03:24

Thank you. Great to be here.

Aydin Mirzaee  03:26

Yeah, super excited to do this. Today, you are the CEO and founder at Super side, which is a fully distributed remote operations platform, I’d love for you to just start by talking to us about what is supersize because it’s a pretty unique company. And you’re kind of like disrupting the space that you’re in. And as we get into it, because you’ve had a lot of success, you started coming in 2015 700 plus people, so lots of growth in a very short amount of time. And we’re gonna get to like all the structures and rituals and values that allows you to get that kind of growth and sort of manage the chaos. But I think it’d be really helpful just to start from the beginning and say, like, what is Supersite? In your words? And what are you trying to do as a company?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  04:12

Yeah, for sure. I mean, we help our customers with design and creative. Our customers are primarily large American technology companies and startups. We work with Amazon, meta, and Google, Salesforce and a lot of kind of future industry leaders. And we are different from traditional agency because we’re faster and I think also more customer friendly than many of the sort of big five advertisings out there that are dominating the market today. And so what we’re trying to do is build a more customer friendly challenger to those established agency groups by building a sort of tech enabled meeting we call it creative as a service. Are we 40 or 50 other companies out there are also doing a great job reinventing the agency model.

Aydin Mirzaee  05:07

That’s awesome. That’s a pretty ambitious thing to do to go in and look to reinvent the agency model and Creative Services definitely category that that’s being established, it’s really cool to see the work that you guys are doing there. So if we were to dial back, though, to the very early days of when you started to manage or lead a team, I don’t know if you remember story at Supersite. Or maybe like earlier on in your life, what were some of those early mistakes, if you remember, that you used to make? Yeah,

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  05:36

I remember trying to go into leadership, firstly, through politics in my teenage years for the Norwegian Labour Party. And, you know, we were all just kids. And I think we made just a ton of mistakes. Back then I think the biggest mistake that I think a lot of people are still doing is just ending up talking way too much, and not actually getting anything done. And this I think, is particularly pervasive in politics, right, where you sit around and talk a lot, and you write articles and resolutions, and those really move the needle and me as leader have just gradually become more and more convinced about the importance of always optimizing for speed. And for us, that’s now a core value. And I think the most important thing that I’m doing as a leader in Supercell, is try to increase the speed, and try to ensure that every meeting every interaction, drives towards action. And so that, I guess, is also very good, very good learning in that regard. Let’s

Aydin Mirzaee  06:49

talk about that. So if you have a value that is about speed at Supersite, what is the value called

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  06:55

the value at Superside is called the speed is safety. And its tagline taken from is from mountain climbing, where a lot of beginner mountain climbers, when they go to a big mountain and try to climb that mountain, they climb very slowly. I’m not an expert climber by any means. But I understand that if you spend like hours checking all your ropes and everything, then it’s gonna take you a very long time to get to the top of the mountain. And you know, the weather’s can change suddenly, there’s like a big wind coming, you know, you can start to rain, and very predictably it will get dark, for sure it will get dark. And so this tagline of speed is safety has emerged that it is actually just empirically safer to move very quickly up the mountain because most climbing accidents happen because people just get stuck in the mountain somehow and, and other companies to just get stuck, you know, you you think too much about risk. You have too many like compliance, legal things, you know, you’re just not moving fast enough and not worrying about the biggest risk witches nocturnal out competing your competition.

Aydin Mirzaee  08:04

I love this. The story about the mountain climbers, I think that resonates. We also say this in sales a lot, which is time kills all deals. I think in general, too much time on any particular project can be detrimental. But I didn’t if you have a story or an example of something that happened and it was going slow and you changed it or something that really allowed everybody at the company to viscerally feel and understand this value,

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  08:32

where you kind of Institute to this value. Around COVID. When everything changed, try it for everyone in every business. For us. We had 40% of our customers churned overnight. And we were like, Okay, what’s, what’s gonna happen to our company, we decided that we had to make speed kind of a core value and, and just move very quickly, because in a dynamic world that is rapidly changing, you need to do that and, and spin up new services, go find new customers and just move four times as quickly as you have done before. And, and for us. That was kind of the breakthrough moment. Partly because COVID obviously created legitimacy for us to say remote company before that a lot of people have been what are you guys doing remote That’s really strange. Like, I just thought it at home and then suddenly everyone was just sitting at home and people started asking us how do you do it? Do you have any advice for running a remote company etc. And so that completely changed but I think more importantly, it was just a very blatant reminder that we had to move very quickly our business would go under and we thought we would get completely annihilated you know, we were super worried about the business and so yeah, really good learning.

Aydin Mirzaee  09:59

Yeah, and before 80% overnight. Yeah, I can imagine how that would have been super difficult. And so this is a great story, like really a great way for everybody to, you know, at the company to remember why this is important where it came from, from a very practical basis. And you know, tactically speaking, how are ways that people are applying this value in their day to day or when you walk into a meeting? Is there anything that you say? Or do to really like focus people on the speed issue? Or when you’re reviewing a project? Or like, Are there any sort of norms that reinforce speed and safety throughout the work?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  10:36

Yeah, a lot. It’s part of how we recruit. It’s part of how we evaluate people in our semiannual reviews. And it’s part of everyday language. I mean, for me, personally, I just really hate ending a meeting with an automating, if you know what I mean, like, there’s just a lot of these meetings that you discuss and usually agree to do, we need to do an order meeting. And that really frustrates me. And so I try to push for the sessions as quickly as possible for most things, even though, might not always be the right decision. And, and I think I’m also quite impatient and quite demanding. And I think that’s part of the job as a founder or as any kind of CEO. It’s frustrating, it takes up a lot of very demanding, and not everyone likes it in the short term, but people tend to like it in the long run, because you get proud of what you have achieved. And some, if you constantly push your your colleagues to kind of do it faster, can we try to have a dome on Tuesdays and Wednesday, and so on and so forth, it will kind of compound over time to getting a lot more and more done and will make people proud. So I think we’ve done a good job with that. The challenge for us now is as we’ve grown very quickly on to become kind of 700 people, it’s been a year, or a year and a half just trying to build processes and an established necessary infrastructure to for the next phase of growth. And, and it’s very hard to balance kind of these two periods of like hyper growth, which we did for two or three years. And then I guess, cleaning up after hyper growth, and then trying to get to new phase of hyper growth, like momentum is an important force.

Aydin Mirzaee  12:26

So one of the things that you said is that you are demanding as a leader, and in the short term, not everybody might like that, but in the long term that look to see all the things that you achieve together as a team, and then be proud of that. And so this makes a lot of sense to me. But did you always start as being as demanding as you are? Or is this something that you know, was a learned behavior over the course of time, when you think about your own leadership journey from beginning to here, I was

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  12:55

definitely more demanding than many others starting out. But I think it’s very tempting to try to be just normal guy and or to try to have everyone like, it’s very human, it’s very natural, but it probably will not lead to the best outcomes. And so, over time, there’s no way around teaching yourself to be more demanding. I empirically, as well haven’t seen any CEO of a large company that is not demanding, I just don’t see how it could possibly work. But first and foremost, I mean, I think I’m demanding of myself met, I guess it’s a value that you learn a lot in Norwegian society, in the military, I spent a year do not expect from others what you want to do yourself. And we have another value in Supercell, which is called roll up your sleeves, which I think is to try to show this demandingness by example, and enrolling up your own sleeves. And I think I’ve done that over the last eight years. And we have a very loyal management team that do it as well. And so that I think is the core of our culture. Here.

Aydin Mirzaee  14:11

Stuff like that is always very refreshing to see the leadership and your executive team and everybody not being afraid to roll up your sleeves, like you said, and I know the values are in general very important to you, and you use it all throughout your company. I know you have some values around Kindness and truth seeking. So I’d love for you to explain like what those are and why you have them. Have they been there since the beginning? How you think about it. It’s

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  14:37

always really strange to me, when companies don’t have kindness as their number one value. It’s really strange to me that almost no company has that as their core value. It’s it’s very rare, but why shouldn’t you be surrounded by colleagues that you like and treats you well and and why not try to build a culture where there are no As holds or where there are no people that aren’t treating each other with respect and, and I think that’s very important. And it’s not that we’re all just so kind all the time. Like, I’m not necessarily that kind all the time, but it’s my aspiration. And I’m always just trying to be kinder and be the kindest possible version of myself. And I think we’ve done a very good job about that. I think our customers feel it. And I think we all feel it in the company, day to day. Kindness is also a core value for truth seeking. A lot of companies have truth seeking like values, but then they build this aggressive alpha male style cultures, which for a lot of people makes it scary to voice their concern or challenge authority in it will always be scary to challenge authority. But that’s why the kindness is so important in order to establish that psychological safety needed to make searching for the truth possible.

Aydin Mirzaee  16:06

So what is truth seeking? Or what’s your definition of what truth seeking is?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  16:11

To me, it’s about or at least for me, personally, it’s trying to be like a boy, kind of like a little boy, with an empty mind. Asking why and trying to listen as deeply as I can and try to, you know, come with the full mind on adult expert that knows the answer already.

Aydin Mirzaee  16:39

Hey, everyone, just a quick pause on today’s episode to tell you about a new feature that I am so excited about, we’ve been working on this one for quite a while, and excited to announce to the world, we’re calling it meeting guidelines. So there’s all these things that people already know they should do when they organize a meeting. So for example, you should make sure that you shouldn’t invite too many people or if you’re booking a recurring meeting, you probably want to put an end date on that meeting. Or if you’re going to invite someone to a meeting, you should probably you know, if they have more than 20 hours of meetings that we maybe be a little bit more considered and asked, Should I really invite that person to the meeting. So there’s a bunch of these sorts of things that you might even know about, but what happened somehow in larger organizations, is that people forget all of these things. And so that’s why we built this feature called meeting guidelines. It’s super easy to use, it’s a Google Chrome extension. So if you install it, what will happen is, it will integrate with your Google Calendar. And that way, whenever anyone within your company is about to book a meeting, these meeting guidelines will show up and make sure that people know and take a second look at that meeting that they’re about to book and make sure that it adheres to these guidelines. So if you want to book or within your company, have a no meeting day, or if you want to make sure that every meeting has an agenda in advance before it’s booked. So all the different sorts of guidelines that you may want. And they’re all obviously highly configurable, because every company is going to be slightly different. But this is the first time that there is a way that you can get an entire organization to change their meeting behavior. It’s something that we’ve been working on for a very long time, super proud to announce it to the world. It’s called meeting guidelines. If you’re interested in checking it out, we’d love for you to do that and give us feedback, you can get to it by going to fellow.us/guidelines. Again, that fellow.app/guidelines, check it out. And let me know what you think. I see how these two are very related, then. So it’s almost like a value around curiosity. But if you don’t have kindness, with that curiosity, it can come across as like you’re being aggressive, like you said, it’s, you know, tell me the answer to this, and why is this like this, and but if you approach everything from a curiosity than from a place of kindness, and just wanting to know, then that can be a completely different environment. And I did want to also call out in the beginning, when you were describing Supersite, the company, one of the things that you mentioned a lot was being that friendly company, right, that company that really seems like the partner to the customers. And so it’s really interesting to see that also in your own values as well. So when kindness is something that’s just a value amongst the employees that naturally some of this is going to rub off on the customers. And it’s like the same sort of principle that that is mimic there as well. Let’s also talk about, you know, from a hiring perspective, so I am curious, you and I were chatting about how all of these values are are also things that you promote people on it’s stuff that you hire, based on those sorts of things. How do you test for some of these things like how do you test for kindness or truth seeking in an interview process?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  19:58

That’s something that I think that I have gotten quite good at after having done hundreds of interviews or 1000s of interviews, I don’t know, over the last eight years, but I don’t exactly know how to do it. I don’t have a standard into script or like I asked this five questions or whatever, like, every interview, for me is like initially about establishing some shared chemistry. And I just find it very hard to have chemistry with people where values aren’t aligned. Like, there’s something that just, I guess smells bad, or you obviously can’t smell on video, but you kind of pick up something and every time I’ve had the bad gut feel on the chemistry on, it’s turned out to be some like valid disalignment. And it’s not necessarily that the other person is like, I don’t know, dad, or something like maybe they just have different values about other things that they care about. And that’s totally fine. But there’s something there. And I know you’re not technically supposed to listen to your gut or think so much about chemistry. But I think for me in the first few conversations, that’s really what I’m trying to get that and then we do later on much more structured into process. But I mean, I do ask questions, just open questions around, just ask what do you care about? On which questions? Would you ask people that you’re hiring, but generally, we’re trying to have this open ended questions?

Aydin Mirzaee  21:38

Yeah. And I think you can tell a lot about the questions that people ask you can get a sense of, are they just asking a question because they need to check the box? Because they know in an interview process, they’re going to be asking questions, or are they really curious and like leaning in, and you can kind of feel those things. And I do agree with you that you don’t necessarily need to directly ask, tell me a time where you are kind to. So within your organization, right? A lot of these things can definitely come out in the process as you’re hearing the answers to other questions, or basically evaluating how they’re asking questions or how they’re carrying themselves. I did want to also loop back to something that we started talking about you were talking about your starting days in the world of politics, and you talked about how some people there may talk a lot and do less things. There’s this really interesting quote, you had an interview on Anthro life. And one of the things that you said, which I find very interesting is that many managers overcomplicate things, when most employees are already reasonably good at their jobs. There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. So maybe we just start from what were you trying to communicate? Or what is it a message at the heart of that statement?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  22:56

I think a lot of people have read something along the lines of his seven habits of highly effective people or something where there’s one value, which is proactiveness, adding being proactive is fine. But I think many managers feel that or have read that or something, feel that they need to bother their co workers or their direct reports all the time, like new ideas, like whenever they have a new idea. And I have new ideas all the time. And I do definitely bother my direct reports. I’m sure if they ever listen to this, I’m sure they will be appalled by the incongruency. But I definitely tried to hold myself back, I definitely try to at least be 50% reactive because I know for my own time just like sitting around waiting for a boss to like, approve something or like respond to you’re just waiting for that one thumbs up to send a document to the client or whatever. And your boss is just like doing all this like proactive stuff or whatever, like sharing all their ideas or, or something. And so I try to clean my inbox 100% Every day, my Slack backlog one person every day, I try to sign all the stuff that I need to sign within a few hours. And I tried to do those things before being proactive and most people are really good at their job and and mostly good support and backing in. I tried to do that to the best of my ability. I’m not sure if that answered the question. I

Aydin Mirzaee  24:28

think what you’re saying is you spend a lot of time almost like making sure that you’re unblocking people, as in you trust that the things that they’re doing are, by and large, correct, you know, maybe 20% of the time, it might be different than what you would have done but 80% of the time largely directionally correct. And so there’s almost more value out of you unblocking and making sure that they can plow through and get their mission achieved versus like going in and almost meddling. And so it seems like You prioritize the unblocking before the meddling. And I think you’re right, that not everybody operates that way. And a lot of people prioritize the meddling, blocking.

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  25:09

I think so I think that’s exactly right. And I mean, we have a rally, which is called the side locally, which tries to get at this, but also, and I’m a big believer in the decentralized organizations in general, and, but for many countries, and for many people, it doesn’t come naturally. And so we will have in a leadership meeting, for example, people asking like, or for, you know, the seals to weigh in and kind of do a vault or something or ask me for like a decision and, and even though I might have spoken for, like, 30 minutes in that meeting, and shared all kinds of opinions, and that I have, it’s like, that shouldn’t matter. Like it, it shouldn’t matter that Fredrik said, or the CEO said that this is not about the topic at hand, the person that is closest to the problem should then just be like, Okay, thank you everyone, for your inputs, I will now go back and make the actual decision by myself that I think is an ideal governance model. And then sea level or whatever, like CEO, can resolve an issue if there’s a deadlock or disagreement, but I think very rarely should anyone else than the person closest to the problem, make the decision, I think that’s a symptom that you’re doing is wrong. If the CEO is making too many decisions,

Aydin Mirzaee  26:30

that’s an important one to underline, too. So because I think what can happen is you can feel really good about yourself, and that you’re making all these decisions, look at how important you are. But in reality, if you are making a lot of decisions, like you said, you’re probably just doing it wrong. So for anyone listening, and I think it’s

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  26:50

also partly arrogance, right, and not arrogance just gets fueled, every time in your companies become successful, you know, that arrogance gets fueled more and more, and the CEO gets more and more excited to make more and more decisions. And I mean, it can go well, I mean, if you are just a hyper decision maker, I guess, like Elon, or whatever, like maybe you can just have run three companies and make a ton of decisions at all of those. But I think at least for me, and for most managers, you just aren’t smart enough to take all the will make a lot of right decisions, as best you can make all your decisions. Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee  27:25

And I think the part that I want to highlight is that it’s not that this is like a feel good thing in terms of necessarily doing that, because it’s for the good of the people on your team. It’s not necessarily like it is good for your team. But it’s not because of that. It’s just like, if you want an efficient organization, this is a way to build efficiency, you should be able to decide locally, it makes logical sense. Talk

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  27:49

to them. Yeah, for sure. It’s all about decision quality, and decision speed is impossible to achieve without the centralized local decision making. So yeah, we’re big believers in that.

Aydin Mirzaee  28:01

Yeah. So I know you guys care a lot about efficiency, I’d love to ask you about just getting very tactical, you know, CEO, 700 plus person company growing very fast changing industry. How many direct reports do you have? And what are your one on ones look like? Right, now,

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  28:19

our CMO left to join another company, and we’re looking for new CMO. So if any CMOS out there, feel free to DM me, former cmo has done a fantastic job. And we’re all excited about her new opportunity. But then personally managing the marketing team right now, which gives me another five direct reports in addition to my existing seven so right now I have 12 direct reports, which is not great for my own personal lifestyle and not great for I think any other direct reports. It’s just very hard to manage to do high quality management across that many people but thing is working. Okay. I think it’s maybe a little bit different for people at like, different. Some people I’ve worked with for six, seven years. I know really well I talk to super often and it’s useful just also for me to just spend some time talking about how we are are doing and folder one wants to smash more. Okay, what are the big problems right now let’s hack it out. I don’t have any particular like formula for one on ones like occasionally we spend one hour talking about one problem and trying to figure out how to solve that. Other times. It’s like eight admin things that needs to get knocked out. And I always kind of like that, you know, it is organic may or is it is little bit complex. It’s hard to find a specific formula. I think,

Aydin Mirzaee  29:58

I think the approach that I would have There are, it is different on a person by person basis, I think when you’re starting out, one of the things that you’re looking for is like you said a formula, right, just three bullet points or three questions that you can ask. And you’re going to do that for every single person, but it is different. And it’s also interesting that you pointed out that it’s also gets different. If you’ve been working with someone for six or seven years, that’s going to look different than someone that you just started working with. And so I think the nuance is important, it doesn’t change, like the concept of the meeting, which is, it’s about alignment, it’s about exchanging feedback on things that are happening, like those don’t change, but the format changes, maybe the frequency changes, the length of the meeting changes based on, you know, a number of different factors. And also timing, sometimes you have 12. And sometimes you have seven direct reports. And that definitely adds to the mix as well. You know, a fun fact, just very random, I also have the exact same situation where temporary basis, my marketing team is also reporting to me directly. So that just, yeah, that happens to be something that you and I both share right now. So that’s really interesting. I did want to also ask you about your staff meeting. So this is kind of like all the people on your executive team, what is the super effective staff meeting from your perspective or executive meeting?

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  31:20

Um, yeah, we haven’t found out and we’ve tried for eight years, when didn’t do leadership meeting or a staff meeting for many years, because we found those meetings to be highly ineffective meetings, we found that most decisions could be made locally or by a small group of people much quicker by just jumping on a call and didn’t feel necessary to wait one week for a big leadership meeting. Now that we’ve reached a little bit of a bigger size we’ve tried again, and it’s starting to work quite well. Still not entirely happy with the structure, but it’s starting to work quite well, we have, I guess, nine people or so in our leadership team, we tackle one or two topics, each time, usually two topics where someone in the organization, either part of the leadership, team or outside, prepares a topic. And that could be for example, pricing, like we’re working on updated pricing structure, a new subscription plan, and then all working group working on that. And they kind of present their projects halfway through and get feedback from leadership meeting. And it’s a useful way to check in on these projects and provide feedback and provide, in a way artificial deadlines to ensure the project gets moved forward. But with the pricing topic, for example, I find it much more powerful for me to just spend one hour along with the guy that runs the pricing project and problem solved much more freely with him rather than this. I don’t know, somewhat anxious, big meeting context. So I don’t know I haven’t found a good formula. Maybe I need to listen to your podcast and get some advice from all the people on how to do it.

Aydin Mirzaee  33:17

I think the parts that I’m going to highlight is that what’s interesting is you said that in the early days, you didn’t really have that meeting all that often. And you found that it wasn’t necessarily super effective for your working. So the reason I want to emphasize that is that there is no one right way to do these things. And so you built a successful company. And that way of working worked for the people that you had on your team. And so now obviously, you’re constantly iterating even as the company is getting bigger, you’re iterating with new approaches, and you find something that works well. And that works well until the dynamic changes. Maybe there’s like new people on the team. Maybe it’s a new era. And so I think I want to highlight the fact that all these things are changing over the course of time. And I think that that in itself is super interesting. So Fredrik, we’ve talked about a lot of different topics we talked about some of the early days and early mistakes before building the company. We talked about speeders, safety, kindness and truth seeking how to hire. We talked about one on ones and staff meetings, very insightful conversation. The question that we always like to end on is for all the managers and leaders constantly looking to get better at their craft. Are there any final tips tricks or parting words of wisdom that you would have for them? It’s

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  34:33

like all these things in life all the things that are good or good in life, you know, like inner peace or happiness or something, if you try very hard to find it, it will just disappear. You know, you try to grab it and it will just disappear. And if you try too hard it you won’t reach it and and I think it’s same with like these things like management and leadership Do you think there is some formula you think you can read all the business books and listen to all the podcasts and just adopt all of the best practices from? But it’s not like that the world is complicated. And India, of course, you can read a little bit like that. But you should also read other things, whatever and take inspiration from your friends and from elsewhere. And I think trying too hard is probably not the right answer. I think I just all the people that I’ve seen that kind of burn up gets like really challenging situation at work, is because they’re not allowed to, or they’re not allowing themselves to kind of be themselves and trust their own instincts and their own intuitions. And so kind of always feel like you have to fake it or always feel that you have to figure out some new system to actually get things done. So, yeah, that’s my long, concrete piece of advice. I guess, to trust yourself a little bit. I remember, we got a couple of kids two years ago. And the best advice I got from my good friend was to not listen to any advice. And that doesn’t mean to like, ignore advice out there. But it just means to find your own. I guess and listen to your own voices, and also to try to have a good time. I think if you’re just trying to have a good time, it’s very likely that you will be successful. If you’re able to just have a good time for, you know, 10 plus hours every day for 10 years, it’s quite likely that it’s going to be a productive company. So yeah, that’s it for me.

Aydin Mirzaee  36:49

That’s great advice in a great place. And Fredrik, thanks so much for doing this,

Fredrik Thomassen (Superside)  36:53

for sure. Thank you for having me.

Aydin Mirzaee  36:56

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at WWW.Fellow.app/Supermanagers. If you liked the content, be sure to rate review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you can help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.