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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🍊 The Future Of The Creator Economy. An interview with Jennifer Phan, co-founder & CEO at Passionfroot.
🌱 Collection: Explain Your Leadership Philosophy? A collection of thoughts from a collection of leaders.
🥗 Open Sourcing My Content Diet. You are what you eat, and it works the same for your brain. Here is what I eat and why.

PARTNERS 💫

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I flew from Australia to Argentina over the last 48 hours, so today I thought I’d share with you some of my topics and tidbits from other conversations I’ve been having around the internet lately. These posts seem to be popular when I post them. For those of you who have been subscribed some time now I have a question for you.

I am still working away to find the right mix for everything within this newsletter. It’s an imperfect art, that’s for sure. My next deep dive I am working on is the story of Nintendo, and have some great founders interviews coming up. Anyway, enjoy this one!

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

1/ On leadership

I think my greatest strength as a leader is my ability to connect with people, inspire people through storytelling, and build a strong company culture. There’s something in the intersection of brand and culture — it’s a great place to be if you want to be successful. You want a strong brand so you can attract A-players and a great culture so that when those A-players join, they are motivated to do their best work. If you have that going for you—you can do almost anything.

We have a motto at Athyna and that is ‘What would Ned Stark do?’, which in short really just means do the right thing. That's the most important thing for me. How I act and how I behave is how those around me will behave. So I try my best to be fair, honest, and act with integrity at all times. I do this to a fault at times but I think doing anything but this means you are using short term thinking and it will come back to bite you in the future.

2/ On being a CEO

I think the job of a CEO is pretty simple, and I have a stick note on my desktop that outlines it. First, you need to set the strategy. Next, you need to raise enough money to execute. Hiring is third, you should be working hard to build an All-Star team. Fourth is communications. You need to be the megaphone for the company. Investors, leads, employees, users. Storytelling is key. And fifth is the non-that-fun part and that is holding people accountable. And sometimes making tough decisions when it’s necessary to do so.

3/ On my routine

My typical day goes something like this.

4/ On remote work

My biggest ever post on LinkedIn really did a good job of summarizing my thoughts on this. I think it went: remote work > better life, better life > happier person, happier person > better employee, better employee > winning business. To be honest, I believe that. Studies have shown across the board that people are generally happier working remotely. I am not here trying to fight the fight. I think it really is a philosophical thing now. And if you think your product will be better because there is some magic to in-person, then I wish you the best of luck.

AVO LOOK AT THESE 🥑

Founders, investors & leaders in tech, that read Open Source CEO outperform their competition. These are our best tools. Business is hard. We want to build the tools we wish we had.

5/ On remote culture

My philosophy is that I want the happiest people, and as mentioned in the previous question that comes with improved health and wellness, better sleep and more time with loved ones. That’s what remote work gives you that the office does not. Culture is everything at Athyna.

I used to stress in the first days of Athyna about us being a remote company. That was until our first Head of People & Culture, Carmela, said something to me that I’ll never forget. She said; “Culture is not made at the water cooler, culture is how you treat people.” And that’s how I have always wanted to operate. People first.

Today we are a global team, with members in around 15 countries, including large hubs in Argentina and Brazil. Out of about 70 team members, we have incredible talent from around the world, and engagement scores that average at 93%. The positive word of mouth about our culture spreads like wildfire, attracting more top-notch professionals, so I know we’re definitely doing something right.

6/ On companies hesitant to hiring remotely

I always view things through a very clear frame. If I look at a new hire, I ask myself, will this person add four times the amount of value by being in San Francisco, New York, Sydney or London. Because that’s how much salary you will pay in comparison to hiring the best talent in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Bangalore or Cape Town.

Add to the fact, Latam for example has an incredible tech ecosystem. We will often place people from Mercado Libre, Nubank, Uala etc.. Mercado Libre and Uala have market caps of $86B and $62B respectively. Imagine bringing someone into your company with that experience for 25% of what you would pay locally.

As I mentioned previously, some people think there is some magic to being in person. Maybe there is, some. But for most areas—especially engineering, ops, marketing, finance, creative—there isn’t any reason someone would add four times the value. The one place I could see things being different is true boots-on-the-ground enterprise sales and customer success.

So for me, acting as a fiduciary to all our shareholders, I can’t justify hiring in places like the United States. It would be acting recklessly and stunting the companies growth. So that would be my advice: start to building your global hiring muscles internally, or find a partner like Athyna that has the experience to do it with you. Either way you go you’ll be outcompeting those who don’t.

7/ On tools I recommend for remote teams

You can check out the complete software stack we use at both Athyna and this newsletter through this detailed tools database, which includes ratings and descriptions of how we utilize each tool. Key tools for facilitating remote work include: Slack, Notion, Loom, Zoom, Lattice. No one needs really sophisticated tools to make remote work effective. The essential aspect is maintaining a documentation-first mindset.

If a procedure happens regularly within your organization, it should be documented. And once something is documented, it's crucial to have a system in place to keep it updated. There is nothing more culture and vibe destroying with a remote team then having countless meetings and distractions because you are unorganised and people don’t know where to find what they need.

8/ On skills professionals will need

If I had to pick one characteristic that all great leaders should have i'd say resilience. The ability to bounce back from setbacks, learn from failures, and keep pushing forward is essential. Entrepreneurship is a rollercoaster, and being able to stay focused and motivated through the ups and downs is crucial.

If I had one more, I would choose empathy. I think the key to being a great leader is to be able to be empathetic. If you can put yourself in the shoes of others and act selflessly when you can, it will go a long way and your team will usually follow your lead.

9/ On resources that have helped me

A pretty big inspiration for how I do things is A Song of Ice & Fire. For those who have been living under a rock, is the Game of Thrones series. I take a lot from fiction and a lot from ASOIAF in particular. There are incredible tales to be found in fiction stories. The greatest leadership story ever told is the story of Torrhen Stark, the last King of the North. He was the king who was forever known as The King Who Knelt. The TL;DR is that he gave up his crown to save his people knowing that he’d forever go down in history as weak, as a traitor, as craven. For most he was hated. But for some, and for me, he was a hero. The ultimate selfless act of leadership.

My other resource would be How To Win Friends & Influence People. I read it 10 years ago and made a promise to myself to read it once every year for the rest of my life. I want to be clear, I have not done that, but I do love that book. It’s the ultimate guide to being a better human and living a better life. Everyone should read that book at least once.

10/ On future work trends

I think the idea of remote ‘hubs’ is something we are seeing more and more of. Big companies have always worked in this way. We are currently working with the largest creative agency in the world through their ‘Argentinian office.’ Super common, super typical.

What has not historically been as common is scaling startups—Series B-Series F for example—building our their hiring hubs. More and more we are seeing or helping build engineering and product teams in Brazil, marketing and creative pods out of Colombia and ops teams out of Asia.

The benefit here does go back to the culture piece. People love remote work but it’s great when you can build a hub, or a team within a team regionally. That way you can get the best of both worlds.

And that's it! You can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just caught this chat on Stratechery with Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO. He shared some pretty honest thoughts about AI and its impact on business. Salesforce pushing this new thing called Agentforce at Salesforce, aiming to make business interactions smarter and more efficient. Super interesting listen if you’re curious about where AI’s headed in the upcoming years.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳