speaker-0: Okay, Reggie, thanks for joining me today. It's really exciting to have you on. You are the founder of, co-founder of Vista Social, a social media marketing tool that we here at Plug will use daily. You're also the host of the Beyond Social podcast with your other co-founder. So really excited to have you on. Wanted to talk about remote work and how you define productivity, get work done. So why don't we dive right in a little bit by learning some about you. Tell us who you are. How'd you get here?
speaker-1: Yeah, for sure. Well, Barry, thank you for having me, first of all. Excited to be here. I love Fluggable. I'll be honest, the day that you reached out, probably last year, you changed my world and subsequently my wife. She's grateful that my home office is no longer a mess of cables everywhere. So thank you.
speaker-0: Wow. Great to hear. We didn't pay you to say that, but I appreciate that.
speaker-1: I'm going to be very honest here. It's crazy, right? We've been at this for five years and my CEO and I partnered at a previous similar software company. We were fully remote before. Really it was popular. I joined them in 2016, I believe, and we never really looked back. It's been fun. I don't know that we'd ever really switched to an in-person, at least 100 % of the time, scenario, but it's been a fun ride. have crazy talented people on the team. from around the world and that ability to choose from that talent pool is what's allowed us to accelerate our growth so much faster than we could have expected.
speaker-0: That's great. Yeah, you said, kind of always started as remote even in the previous business as well. Was that by design or was it just out of necessity? Did you choose remote or was just kind of one of those things you were forced into based on the dynamics?
speaker-1: You know, and I've mentioned this in the past in some other interviews, the first time my CEO Vitali reached out to me about an opportunity, I didn't know him, hadn't heard of the previous company before. And once I got far enough in the interview and he mentioned that this was a fully remote position, started to feel a little weird. Like, is this a real company? You know, people are probably going to think I'm unemployed. And I've told them this too. I finally decided to take the risk and come on board. spearhead customer support at the company. And the first paycheck time came around and I really like wondered, am I going to get paid? Like this remote work? This is pre COVID, you know, years before COVID. You didn't hear about people working remotely back then. ⁓ but it was fantastic. So it was a culture that he started. He had already brought on some engineers and some marketing folks that were remote. And it all came from just the fact that And there's so many talented people around the world who just don't have access because they don't live here. You know, it'd be fantastic for me to have, you know, eight plus engineers in my backyard. know, growing up in Broward County, Florida, we're not really known as the Silicon Valley of Florida. We're definitely not. But to be able to, you know, execute like eight plus every single day in the product, we're able to bring in engineers from Europe, from Latin America, from anywhere you can think of. And the borders really just don't become a factor anymore.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's really fascinating. Plugable too is a fully remote company. ⁓ Not originally. ⁓ The company started in Redmond, Washington and was fully on site, a small team ⁓ just outside of Seattle. But when COVID ⁓ kind of changed the way all of us work, the decision was made by Plugable to go fully remote and never looked back. I mean, it opened up, like you mentioned, like the talent pool of people. Obviously Seattle is a bit of a hotbed for tech talent, but... ⁓ to have that flexibility to expand across the whole ⁓ country and then into Canada and now into the UK and EU. have some presence over there as well. it's really, really fascinating remote work. Now I've worked remote for going on, geez, 16 years now. So I was remote work before remote work was cool. I started as ⁓ a doing tech support for a company, working the light shift. ⁓ I've never looked back. don't think I could ever go to an in-office setup, but ⁓ one of the biggest things is having the proper setup to actually get work done. But we'll dive more into that later. ⁓ But ⁓ yeah, it's fascinating as a remote company. So ⁓ I wanted to, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but I want to kind of get your point of view today. Like Reggie, today, how do you look at remote work from the founder's perspective and the leadership perspective? Because obviously there's... There's some bias about remote work still, even though we've been doing it for so long. Now post COVID, there's some bias that, you are people actually getting work done? What's the actual work-life balance look like? How do you balance that kind of, or how do you navigate that? are the benefits? What are the drawbacks you see?
speaker-1: Yeah, very, it really ultimately comes down at least what we've seen to the culture. And I've heard the conversations of, you hire remote and they're maybe putting in five hours of work. You know, they're probably at a coffee shop, whatever it is. And I definitely have seen that in lots of colleagues who went remote post COVID and during COVID at their own companies. But ultimately what it comes down to is the leadership of the company. What's the vision? or how fast are you guys moving? What's the expectation you set? So as not exactly a startup, but a company that operates very similarly to a startup, we are lean and we move quick. And so a big portion of how we're able to establish a culture of there is no kind of slack in and around that stuff is during the recruiting, right? We're looking for people who are hungry to make big moves in their career and they're ready to move quick. You know what I mean? We're transparent that nights and weekends are not going to be rare here. And so when people come in, they understand the expectation. And this is the reality of working at Vista. Everybody is compensated well and we're all growing fast, but it's because the company is moving in that direction. And so once you establish a culture like that, we've rarely found it be the case that we have to be micromanaging the time output of everybody. Like, are they on the computer? Are they working? Are they doing this? So. for us ultimately has just come down to making sure we're spending a lot more time in the recruiting end of things to make sure that the people coming in, are they aligned with not just the direction but the pace that this company operates at.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, that's great. think a lot of companies, especially during COVID and post COVID struggled with that is how do you recruit for this type of work? But it sounds like you guys kind of have that nailed. I've met many members of your team and ⁓ I can definitely speak to the fact that they're all go-getters. They're very on the ball. So I love working with you guys.
speaker-1: I love that.
speaker-0: Let's ⁓ say a little bit more about what you do specifically with Vista Social and tell us a little bit about Vista Social just for our viewers who maybe aren't as familiar with it as I am.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So I oversee both the revenue and the customer experience side of things. So when I mentioned that we operate like a startup, we really do. Even at the top level, we're all wearing multiple hats still to this day. We crossed, I believe, getting close to 40 employees at this point worldwide. But that means I oversee customer support, customer experience, account management, the sales side of things, the sales processes, and being able to tie all that in into product as I collaborate with our CEO and who oversees ⁓ product development and engineering. And at Vista, really, we kind of were created from the premise of social media managers, social media marketers, it's a tough space to be in, right? You have this grand dream and desire of being able to plan this beautiful calendar of content, and you're going to be proactive, and you're going to research. But the majority of social media managers are marketers that we work with. They have no choice but to be reactive. There's last minute changes and pressure coming from different areas of the business that makes them shift their strategy almost on a weekly basis. And so building a software around what they need versus what's convenient to the software company has been a big part of our success. And so Vista Social is a social media software that helps marketers and brands to collaborate together, to come up with great ideas, to find those ideas and then execute on. Plan them, publish them, draw inspiration, but also understand what's working. What are the things in our strategy that need to change and twist? And so we try to get the whole life cycle of social media into our platform.
speaker-0: That's amazing. Yeah. Your tool has really been a game changer for someone such as myself. Obviously, I'm on the marketing team here. So when I first started using it post ⁓ our meeting last year at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, ⁓ I got to work with it and I tested here and there. And I found that every time I was in the tool, it just kept you wanting to keep moving forward because you guys built the tool for today, it seemed like, versus a lot of the older tools, which were just new. ⁓ new platforms, new tools, just kind of bolted into an older infrastructure. Vista seems like it's really nimble, really built for today. So that's great to hear that story.
speaker-1: I appreciate you hearing that, but it's the kind of thing where the space moves quick, and if we don't move quick, next week we're left behind kind of a thing.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. All right, a little bit about productivity in your role specifically. How do you, what does that mean for you in your role? How do you stay productive and how's that changed over time?
speaker-1: man, it's so new. mean, if I just look at the last 12 weeks, productivity is defined so differently than maybe last year. And it's all because of AI. I'll be honest, probably every conversation ends up leading here, but the reality is with the rise and ease of vibe coding, every frontline team member at this point could be building solutions to make their end results, their end execution faster. And so for me at the top, it's been figuring out how can I empower these team members. We're not a not-for-profit company. And I like to tell my team that a lot, right? Like, hey, we are a for-profit organization. But one of my biggest tenants in life is I want to make sure that as I bring in people into any company that I oversee and lead, is that I get to have them leave Vista or whatever company better than I found them. And so giving them skills, giving them education, whatever it is so that their resume and their next gig is strong as a result of their time here. And so it would be a huge disservice to them if I didn't empower them. with what they needed in order to become AI powered. Because a workforce that's not AI powered, you look forward another 12 months, is probably gonna be non-existent. And so a big part of our productivity has been, what are those repetitive tasks that we're doing that doesn't require strategic thinking? It's just a time, it's a lot of clicking, it's a lot of filling forms, and what are the things that we can be doing to automate those? And a lot of that has been vibe coded weekend projects that have resulted in just a lot faster execution from marketing to support to partnerships. ⁓ So ultimately that's really what it's been now. It's how can we shorten the time for executing things that don't require too much strategic thinking.
speaker-0: What, obviously the topic of AI, what, and know that Vista has various different AI functionalities baked in, probably leveraging different LLMs and whatnot. What's your personal ⁓ AI tool of choice right now? is there, and maybe not necessarily an LLM or a chat based system, but kind of AI tools are really working for you lately.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. I was big on, on Shad GPT for a while, to be honest, maybe about two months ago, I started digging more into Claude as a result of our CEO. He's big on Claude and vibe coding as part of his, his workflow. So I started using Claude and I haven't looked back. I'll be honest, sometimes I'll go back to Shad GPT and I'm like, man, that answer, it's just, just feels weird. You know? But between that and cursor where we do a lot of our vibe coding projects, that's mainly where I spend. most of my time with AI's cursor and then cloud in itself.
speaker-0: Awesome. Yeah, I hear you on the chat GPT side. They were first, so everyone was bought in. But over time, Gemini and Claude have really taken up a lot more of the lion's share of my use. And I still have a lot in chat GPT, and it's like slowly trying to transition it over. Sometimes you got to go crawling back because that project lives fully there. But yeah, Claude has definitely been big. So what's an average day look like for you? When you get up in the morning, Do you get right at it? Do you kind of ease into the day? How do you structure your day for a productive day?
speaker-1: I'm an early riser and part of it is having two kids now and part of it is just trying to stay ahead. But usually 4 45, 5 a.m. I'm up at my home office. Luckily, I don't have to commute anywhere. And I really try to block that morning part before family breakfast to just be thinking. It's the quiet time where the rest of the world, at least from my perspective is asleep. So it feels like a perfect time to start thinking strategic. to plan my week, to plan my month, what are the most important things I got to get done? Family breakfast, and then I'm back at it, usually around nine or 10 a.m. And then just execution, having the meetings with the team, any brainstorming decisions that they need me to make. And then ultimately, probably two hours of AI work in some form or fashion, whether it's implementing new things, ⁓ providing proof of concepts to our engineering team to implement within the product. Everybody at Vista in the last probably three months have somehow become either product managers or engineers as a result of live coding. So that's been really cool.
speaker-0: That's amazing. how do you prioritize that? You said you sit down and you do some AI work, you prioritize. Do you actually use AI to kind of prioritize your workflow for the day or is it just kind of the last mile sort of thing?
speaker-1: Yeah, that's a good point. So before the end of every year, I do try to have a better approach of like, what's the vision for next year, right? What are the milestones, the KPIs that are going to be important for the growth of the company? And I'll try to pinpoint the projects, try to kind of work out quarterly, what are going to be some of the things that I'll need and which departments are, am I going to need to connect with for deliverables around this? Now I know everybody's been pitching and talking about AI assistance and those are fantastic, but I do have a human. executive assistant and she is fantastic and the organization around email calendar management, but most importantly helping me stay on task of these are the projects coming to, you know, this is where each of these initiatives are and where they're supposed to be at. ⁓ Probably more of a project management standpoint of anything, but it's really been helpful having her be able to keep me aligned. keep me in check on where things need to be. So a big part of it is collaborating with her realistically on daily syncs, weekly syncs, on where our projects are at, which teams I need to be connecting with.
speaker-0: Do you feel like that's possibly the most fundamental piece of success, especially as a remote company is still keeping that human connection? I'm not sure how you at Vista are structured ⁓ for that type of work, whether it's daily standups, weekly standups, all hands, but you feel like that's one of the biggest success points, especially as AI is dominating the landscape.
speaker-1: It is, it is. actually because of the AI domination, what we're realizing in our standups and our sinks is that the, skill of communication is becoming more and more crucial because one can only get good results out of AI if it could put in good prompts. And we're finding that it's just the idea of, just talk to AI, have it, have to do these things for you. It doesn't work if you don't know how to communicate well. to get what's in your head down on paper, written and communicated. One of the ways we've tried to bridge that gap and one of the things that in standups we've been really pushing the team to do is just having voice conversations, turning on dictate mode and just having free flowing thought going into the AI because it does, it can figure it out. When you got that free flowing thought, can structure things, it can figure it out. But the time that it takes your brain to filter what you're thinking and then you're typing it in, you've already lost so much context. So that's hopefully I answered the question right. I think it kind of went on a tangent there a little bit.
speaker-0: No, that's great. I get that. I really like that. And I hear this from a lot of people, especially in leadership positions, that just turning on voice mode in your AI tool of choice and just having that conversation can let you articulate what you're trying to accomplish far better than trying to do it fingers to the keyboard type deal. So no, that's a great answer. Thank you. All right, let's pivot a little bit. Talk a little bit more about your setup start talking about the tech a little bit. We've got a good idea of you know, who you are what you're all about but First off I want to know and I think I've said I know the answer this question as a remote Company, but where do you do your best work? Do you do it in your home office at home on the go? Do you ever get together with with anyone and you know, just do like a co-working session or does Vista do? Co-working sessions where you bring everyone together and that sort of thing. Where do you do your best work?
speaker-1: Yeah. My best work, you know, I can do my best work. I feel like is going to be in my home office, but if I'm home too many weeks in a row, I need to get, got this thing where I got to get out. So luckily I've got, you know, it's not going to be a shameful product placement, but I got this super cool monitor. That's why, you know, I can bring with me as portable. And so I'll usually work out of a mall locally to me, you know, I'll grab lunch, hang out at the food court, wherever, maybe catch a movie in the evening. But the ability to have that additional monitor, I can't live without a second monitor is the problem. I've got this beautiful setup at home where I've got a big monitor, my laptop's on this little stand that's elevated. And I just feel like that little MacBook screen just doesn't cut it anymore when I'm on the go. So that has been phenomenal. So thank you, by the way, for sending that over.
speaker-0: Yeah. So you mentioned, that's our portable monitor, the USB-C PDmon. It's been huge. It's been a wild success for us. The idea of being able to take it with you on the go and replicate or have some semblance of your home setup when you're not working at home has been big. So I have my home set up here, ⁓ four monitors, including two of the portable monitors. And when I hit the road, if I don't take at least one of those with me, I'm stuck. ⁓ I end up like the meme of the shrimp leaned over your keyboard trying to see the small screen and that sort of thing. So I get what you're saying ⁓ about having that dual setup here, or at least one extra monitor ⁓ set up. So happy to hear it's working out well for you.
speaker-1: It's huge. It's huge. And it's been a transition because my, my RCEO, my co-founder, he was always, I mean, man, this is like what 12 years in the making of me trying to convince them to get a second monitor. And it's like, come on Vitaly, like you're not going to understand until you just do it. You know, there's this level of productivity and his, his take has always been like, man, I get that. But if I get used to it, I travel so much, but by the time I'm at the airport or somewhere else, like I'm going to feel like my productivity is going to be cut in half. So like that's even unlocked for him, this ability of whether we're at a conference, whether we're doing a team team or that somewhere that he can just pull that out. Right. Like, and that's helped me, you know, we're going into that in a couple of months knowing that I can have that monitor with me in the hotel room or at breakfast. That's huge. Yeah. So now he's got five monitors at home. You went from back to like, he calls it the command center for when he's by coding.
speaker-0: That's amazing. That's amazing. I'd love to see a shot of that. ⁓ Just a quick tangent then or aside from this, where do you think computing's going when it comes to remote and being mobile? Like there's devices like the Samsung Galaxy, now there's the tri-fold and then there's the dual folding screens. Those devices are becoming more powerful, pluggable, has products that can interface with those devices. What do you think we're headed towards? Do you think the laptop will always be the go-to device? Or do you think we'll ever get to a place where Maybe not the iPad, a more powerful phone can replace all of that and be your device for at home and on the go.
speaker-1: Yeah, you know, I probably see a little further because with the meta glasses, the meta display, Apple's vision, I really am seeing a world where we are getting rid of these bigger clunky iPads, laptops, and it just becomes the glasses. ⁓ If you pair that with the fact that, you know, for me, the biggest waste of time that I feel like is when I'm commuting somewhere. If I, you know, I've got to go down to the studio to record something in Miami. It's always something where I feel like I'm wasting my time by sitting in the car. So when we pair that with the advanced technology for self-driving, I 100 % see a world where in the short term, wherever we're going, we take that device with us without having to pull anything out, whether there's watches or whatever, and we're interfacing with something. within our glasses. That would be super convenient for when I am commuting. I have been taking the train a lot more to Miami now and having a gigantic display like that, you know, just in your field of view, probably be humongous. But that's ultimately where I'm seeing is like us getting further and further away from having to have these like mega intense, gigantic displays, big laptops to things that interact with us a little bit closer to our field of view.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. So you almost see something like a hybrid in between Apple's Apple vision and maybe the meta display is something a little bit more powerful than the display, but not quite as locked down as the vision. Yeah, no, I can see that that future for sure. All right, back up a little bit to your your working remote at home. Do you have to kind of flip a switch to be like, okay, I'm in I'm in home mode, I'm in work mode, or do you find that the lines are constantly blurred between home? mode and work mode when you're working in the house.
speaker-1: When I was first getting started, was tough, right? I started by working out of the dining room and then eventually the couch on the living room. And I realized very quickly that there has to be this physical separation, almost as if, you know, if I'm in the office and the door is closed, ⁓ it's as if I had driven out of the house and I'm in the office. And so, you know, being able to set boundaries with the family and if they're friends over, whatever it is, like, hey, if I'm in the office, I'm working. I'm across the city right now, right? I cannot be disturbed. And that's helped me to kind of create this, not necessarily a space that's quiet, but a space that's focused for what I need to accomplish, what I need to do. I try to carve out some time within my day to go out for a walk or get some lunch. know, most days I've been skipping lunch, which is how much there is to do. But yeah, there's definitely this need to have a discipline and boundaries around your home environment where you're going to work. or else you're not really gonna get much done.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ You kind of touched on this. What is your exact home setup like though? Like, so you have two monitors, three monitors, what's the Regi command center look like?
speaker-1: I call it a two monitor setup, but really what it is is I've got my main monitor, and I'll send you a picture later. I've got my Dell 4K, I think 120 hertz, supposed to be like a gaming monitor. I don't remember the last time I brought my PlayStation out. And then I've got my MacBook on the left, but it's elevated on an arm, so it kind of acts as a second monitor pretty close to my main one. But I've got an external camera that I'm on right now, the Opal C1 that's USB-C. I've got a podcast mic that my kid just broke, so it's... ⁓ no. be in repair soon, which is also USB, wireless mouse, wireless keyboard. So it was a lot of plugging in 50 different dongles into all the different USB ports on my MacBook in order to start the day and end the day on plugging everything.
speaker-0: How do you connect all that stuff now?
speaker-1: Ah man, very intelligent. Plugable will save my life. So I went from cords everywhere and having to unplug stuff. And I have a Thunderbolt dongle now that I actually placed underneath my desk and I've got a standing desk. So everything routes beautifully under the monitor arms right into it. And it's got the USB-C, the USB 2.0s. I think I even got an HDMI and it powers my monitor as well through the USB connection. I went from like five, six different things plugging into my laptop to one cable that I unplug when I'm done or I need to go somewhere. And that one same cable is what I plug into.
speaker-0: I love that. Especially when you know the way you've described your your MacBook being up on an arm. The last thing you want is cables, cable spaghetti hanging off of it. amazing. ⁓ Is there any tech on your desk or that you use day to day? You you cannot live without it. And then on the flip side, ⁓ is there any tech that you were, I probably don't need this until you tried it. And now it's also a must.
speaker-1: Okay. Because of my, not necessarily need, but because I so often go work out of coffee shops and the malls or whatever it is, I have this Epos headset that I bought and it is by far one of the best noise canceling microphones on the market. noise canceling is like, you you Google noise canceling, it's always about the sound and can it cancel the noise that you hear? I don't care too much about that. But every single time I'm at a coffee shop and I'm doing a presentation or I'm having a meeting, that background noise is killer, man. It distracts whoever's on the call. So I never travel. My backpack, anytime I need to go somewhere, it's the first thing I'm throwing into my backpack and it's the first thing that I'm doing in a meeting. So I'd not be able to live without it. I'll be honest, from a tech that it took me a while to get into and now I can't live without, hopefully it's okay that it's in my computer and not just on my desk, but it's gotta be cursor. It seemed super overwhelming in the beginning and our CEO was like, Reggie, gotta just try it, get in it. And I've tried everything around it. There's some vibe coding tools that are web based and a lot less codey looking. But the second you get into Cursor and you just have that conversation and you plan a project and you see it just come live without you having to write a single line of code, it just changes things for you. So that's the one thing. Took me a while to get into it and I just, I don't know what I'd do if Cursor went out of business next week.
speaker-0: Let's hope they don't. That's amazing. Yeah, I know it's always fascinating to speak with guests, find out what is that one thing they can't live without. I've had various different answers. Sometimes it's something as simple as noise canceling headphones. AI tools is always one that comes up. So yeah, that's awesome. Okay, let's see here. Okay, ⁓ let's go in a little bit more. Some, a few fun related questions then. ⁓ Okay, you're in the marketing space, around the marketing space. How many tabs do you have open right now? And don't lie.
speaker-1: Okay, let's see. I've got at least 18 and I've got four tab groups that are closed. So the second I open them, I'm easily into the forties.
speaker-0: That's not that bad. ⁓ no. Okay, that sounds more realistic. That sounds more realistic. Okay.
speaker-1: Tab groups changed it for me. Somebody I think on the company last year told me about tab groups. I didn't realize it was a thing, but now I feel like that's peak productivity, opening and closing tab groups. So I'm focused on task at hand.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. All right. What's the weirdest place you've ever worked?
speaker-1: Mmm. The trunk of my car, I don't know if that's weird, it's weird to me, but we were on vacation.
speaker-0: I guess it depends whether the trunk was open or closed.
speaker-1: It was closed. was closed. Nobody was there except. We had a rental car. We were visiting my brother in DC. We were on vacation and we had like this, meeting that just had to be a part of it. It wasn't going to be something that could wait for me to get back. And we're out at like a shopping district, you know, like what am I going to do? There's not like a co-working space anywhere nearby. The food court was loud at that time. I hadn't found out about my amazing headset.
speaker-0: This is strange.
speaker-1: So I'm like, all right, the trunk it is. Got my phone, my hotspot. They're on the virtual background on Zoom and I don't think anybody noticed. mean, at least nobody brought it up. Maybe they were too scared to.
speaker-0: That's amazing. I've worked in some pretty strange places, I've, trunk of the car, that one caught me off guard a little bit. Right, right, right. Yeah. Okay. All right. A little bit more context makes sense now. All right. I'll let that one go. All right. Finish the sentence. Your most productive when.
speaker-1: Like an SUV, you know, there's... ⁓ Most productive after I've had a bowl of acai and Celsius. So 2 p.m. 2 p.m. Kids are napping so there's no noise around the house too and then I'm just in the zone. Usually last two hours.
speaker-0: a cell cell. I've never tried Celsius myself. stay away from energy drinks. feel like I would be a bit of a wreck if I went down that route.
speaker-1: I'm not a coffee drinker is the problem. I've tried coffee multiple sorts of ways. I just can't get myself to drink it. So like once a week or so, I'll grab a Celsius. I've been told that where Red Bull might knock off 10, 15 years of your life, this one will knock off five to six instead. Better.
speaker-0: Well, yeah, better. That's amazing. OK. Is there anything productivity wise, and we've kind of touched on this as we go, something you've changed your mind on when it comes to productivity, different whether it be a practice, a tool, a hack, anything like that?
speaker-1: probably more of like a core tenant that, you know, growing into a startup environment and going from a startup to selling it to now a new startup, you're always on this go, go, go mentality and wearing multiple hats. And fundamentally, I always felt like context switching is not a problem. You need to be able to switch between what you're doing and the Slack and then an email and an instance notice based on shifting priorities that are calling for your attention. But what I didn't realize is how much less I can actually get done by having to do that because nothing, I'm starting a lot of things, but not really finishing anything. So by the end of the day, I feel so unproductive when that's all I've been doing is having my attention to be pulled reactively into different areas. So by being able to say, like for the next 30 minutes, this was what's on my calendar. Slack, everything goes on, do not disturb my phone's on, do not disturb. And this is my sole focus allows me to not just be more productive and actually finish things throughout the day, but the ability to give my full undivided attention to this decision, this conversation, this email, the quality of what I can do goes out a lot further than what I used to be able to.
speaker-0: Amazing. ⁓ What advice would you give someone that's trying to work better, not just harder?
speaker-1: Like we're going to probably go back to AI here and I'm sure you hear that a lot, but 2026 ⁓ chat, chat bots. If that's your interaction with AI and it's getting into a cloud or chat GPT conversation, having that back and forth, you got to take that next step, right? Agents, things that are happening, automatic thing, workflows that trigger as a result. of other things happening, it's really the phase you need to start thinking of when we talk about maximizing productivity and working smarter. I'll give you like one practical example. Feel free to use it if you want to or not if it's too in the weeds of it. But when we, as I mentioned, we move fast, right? If we don't stay ahead of everything that becomes available through meta and TikTok changes and YouTube changes, we get left behind quickly. And so every week there's at least one or two pretty big product improvements or releases that happen and traditionally what would happen is we've got a change log that's customer facing that helps our customers know what's new. We have a blog, we have graphics that need to be made for both side of things, we have customer facing tutorials and guides that need to be updated as a result of it and there was always manual work to be done, right? This product team tells us, we're working on this, now it's released and this all gets trickled down, everybody goes on and works independently. What happens now, we've implemented this system where after that announcement is made with some details, we have individual AI agents that are custom prompted to work on a graphic scope of work that outlines the value statements, the problem that we're solving. We have one that goes out and creates a draft of our knowledge base for our customers, a draft for the change log post. And so at the end of the day, all of this is going to be touched on by humans to finalize. But we've saved at least 30 to 45 minutes of work for every single person that would have touched one of these documents or created a draft for one of these things. So that's kind of that next layer I'm talking about. What someone would probably do if they're trying to do this first is they'll take that, put it into Jadgy BT, type out a prompt, hey, can you make this sound like this? It's going to be a change log or it's going to be a customer facing guide. And then they get that output. You've saved yourself a solid 20, 30 minutes for sure. It being instant, the second someone drops something into a specific Slack channel and it goes out and do all that work, that's the next level I'm talking about.
speaker-0: That's amazing. All right, one last question for you. What is one productivity myth that needs to go away?
speaker-1: Activity myth. There's so many. my God. There's a lot of people, especially on LinkedIn, feel like everybody's either on this side or on this side. They're very polarized there. Yeah, it's crazy. So there's the division of if you want to be productive and successful, you got to wake up at 4 a.m. And then there's the other side of like, no, that doesn't make any sense. You're not going to be productive.
speaker-0: advice in place.
speaker-1: I don't do it to be productive. I do it because I really value the time that I spend with my family and I don't ever want to be in a place as my kids are growing where they have this thought of like, it's work more important than me for my dad. so family time is family time. Work time is work time. To get more out of it, I just have block in the morning that really helps me to get some stuff done. So my afternoon is free. And so I don't believe that waking up earlier has any impact in your ability to produce things. It has to do with Are you able to get focused and stay focused during your day? Create the discipline and the environment where you've got your do not disturbs or whatever it is, you've blocked time out, you've carved time out, and that's your sole focus. And waking up early has nothing to do with it.
speaker-0: Yeah. So, so discipline over the household culture for sure. Absolutely. All right, Rezi. Well, this has been a lot of fun. We'll end it there and yeah, thanks for being on and we'll chat again soon.
speaker-1: Yeah, thanks very much for having me.
speaker-1: Yeah, for sure. Well, Barry, thank you for having me, first of all. Excited to be here. I love Fluggable. I'll be honest, the day that you reached out, probably last year, you changed my world and subsequently my wife. She's grateful that my home office is no longer a mess of cables everywhere. So thank you.
speaker-0: Wow. Great to hear. We didn't pay you to say that, but I appreciate that.
speaker-1: I'm going to be very honest here. It's crazy, right? We've been at this for five years and my CEO and I partnered at a previous similar software company. We were fully remote before. Really it was popular. I joined them in 2016, I believe, and we never really looked back. It's been fun. I don't know that we'd ever really switched to an in-person, at least 100 % of the time, scenario, but it's been a fun ride. have crazy talented people on the team. from around the world and that ability to choose from that talent pool is what's allowed us to accelerate our growth so much faster than we could have expected.
speaker-0: That's great. Yeah, you said, kind of always started as remote even in the previous business as well. Was that by design or was it just out of necessity? Did you choose remote or was just kind of one of those things you were forced into based on the dynamics?
speaker-1: You know, and I've mentioned this in the past in some other interviews, the first time my CEO Vitali reached out to me about an opportunity, I didn't know him, hadn't heard of the previous company before. And once I got far enough in the interview and he mentioned that this was a fully remote position, started to feel a little weird. Like, is this a real company? You know, people are probably going to think I'm unemployed. And I've told them this too. I finally decided to take the risk and come on board. spearhead customer support at the company. And the first paycheck time came around and I really like wondered, am I going to get paid? Like this remote work? This is pre COVID, you know, years before COVID. You didn't hear about people working remotely back then. ⁓ but it was fantastic. So it was a culture that he started. He had already brought on some engineers and some marketing folks that were remote. And it all came from just the fact that And there's so many talented people around the world who just don't have access because they don't live here. You know, it'd be fantastic for me to have, you know, eight plus engineers in my backyard. know, growing up in Broward County, Florida, we're not really known as the Silicon Valley of Florida. We're definitely not. But to be able to, you know, execute like eight plus every single day in the product, we're able to bring in engineers from Europe, from Latin America, from anywhere you can think of. And the borders really just don't become a factor anymore.
speaker-0: Yeah, that's really fascinating. Plugable too is a fully remote company. ⁓ Not originally. ⁓ The company started in Redmond, Washington and was fully on site, a small team ⁓ just outside of Seattle. But when COVID ⁓ kind of changed the way all of us work, the decision was made by Plugable to go fully remote and never looked back. I mean, it opened up, like you mentioned, like the talent pool of people. Obviously Seattle is a bit of a hotbed for tech talent, but... ⁓ to have that flexibility to expand across the whole ⁓ country and then into Canada and now into the UK and EU. have some presence over there as well. it's really, really fascinating remote work. Now I've worked remote for going on, geez, 16 years now. So I was remote work before remote work was cool. I started as ⁓ a doing tech support for a company, working the light shift. ⁓ I've never looked back. don't think I could ever go to an in-office setup, but ⁓ one of the biggest things is having the proper setup to actually get work done. But we'll dive more into that later. ⁓ But ⁓ yeah, it's fascinating as a remote company. So ⁓ I wanted to, and you kind of touched on this a little bit, but I want to kind of get your point of view today. Like Reggie, today, how do you look at remote work from the founder's perspective and the leadership perspective? Because obviously there's... There's some bias about remote work still, even though we've been doing it for so long. Now post COVID, there's some bias that, you are people actually getting work done? What's the actual work-life balance look like? How do you balance that kind of, or how do you navigate that? are the benefits? What are the drawbacks you see?
speaker-1: Yeah, very, it really ultimately comes down at least what we've seen to the culture. And I've heard the conversations of, you hire remote and they're maybe putting in five hours of work. You know, they're probably at a coffee shop, whatever it is. And I definitely have seen that in lots of colleagues who went remote post COVID and during COVID at their own companies. But ultimately what it comes down to is the leadership of the company. What's the vision? or how fast are you guys moving? What's the expectation you set? So as not exactly a startup, but a company that operates very similarly to a startup, we are lean and we move quick. And so a big portion of how we're able to establish a culture of there is no kind of slack in and around that stuff is during the recruiting, right? We're looking for people who are hungry to make big moves in their career and they're ready to move quick. You know what I mean? We're transparent that nights and weekends are not going to be rare here. And so when people come in, they understand the expectation. And this is the reality of working at Vista. Everybody is compensated well and we're all growing fast, but it's because the company is moving in that direction. And so once you establish a culture like that, we've rarely found it be the case that we have to be micromanaging the time output of everybody. Like, are they on the computer? Are they working? Are they doing this? So. for us ultimately has just come down to making sure we're spending a lot more time in the recruiting end of things to make sure that the people coming in, are they aligned with not just the direction but the pace that this company operates at.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, that's great. think a lot of companies, especially during COVID and post COVID struggled with that is how do you recruit for this type of work? But it sounds like you guys kind of have that nailed. I've met many members of your team and ⁓ I can definitely speak to the fact that they're all go-getters. They're very on the ball. So I love working with you guys.
speaker-1: I love that.
speaker-0: Let's ⁓ say a little bit more about what you do specifically with Vista Social and tell us a little bit about Vista Social just for our viewers who maybe aren't as familiar with it as I am.
speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So I oversee both the revenue and the customer experience side of things. So when I mentioned that we operate like a startup, we really do. Even at the top level, we're all wearing multiple hats still to this day. We crossed, I believe, getting close to 40 employees at this point worldwide. But that means I oversee customer support, customer experience, account management, the sales side of things, the sales processes, and being able to tie all that in into product as I collaborate with our CEO and who oversees ⁓ product development and engineering. And at Vista, really, we kind of were created from the premise of social media managers, social media marketers, it's a tough space to be in, right? You have this grand dream and desire of being able to plan this beautiful calendar of content, and you're going to be proactive, and you're going to research. But the majority of social media managers are marketers that we work with. They have no choice but to be reactive. There's last minute changes and pressure coming from different areas of the business that makes them shift their strategy almost on a weekly basis. And so building a software around what they need versus what's convenient to the software company has been a big part of our success. And so Vista Social is a social media software that helps marketers and brands to collaborate together, to come up with great ideas, to find those ideas and then execute on. Plan them, publish them, draw inspiration, but also understand what's working. What are the things in our strategy that need to change and twist? And so we try to get the whole life cycle of social media into our platform.
speaker-0: That's amazing. Yeah. Your tool has really been a game changer for someone such as myself. Obviously, I'm on the marketing team here. So when I first started using it post ⁓ our meeting last year at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, ⁓ I got to work with it and I tested here and there. And I found that every time I was in the tool, it just kept you wanting to keep moving forward because you guys built the tool for today, it seemed like, versus a lot of the older tools, which were just new. ⁓ new platforms, new tools, just kind of bolted into an older infrastructure. Vista seems like it's really nimble, really built for today. So that's great to hear that story.
speaker-1: I appreciate you hearing that, but it's the kind of thing where the space moves quick, and if we don't move quick, next week we're left behind kind of a thing.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. All right, a little bit about productivity in your role specifically. How do you, what does that mean for you in your role? How do you stay productive and how's that changed over time?
speaker-1: man, it's so new. mean, if I just look at the last 12 weeks, productivity is defined so differently than maybe last year. And it's all because of AI. I'll be honest, probably every conversation ends up leading here, but the reality is with the rise and ease of vibe coding, every frontline team member at this point could be building solutions to make their end results, their end execution faster. And so for me at the top, it's been figuring out how can I empower these team members. We're not a not-for-profit company. And I like to tell my team that a lot, right? Like, hey, we are a for-profit organization. But one of my biggest tenants in life is I want to make sure that as I bring in people into any company that I oversee and lead, is that I get to have them leave Vista or whatever company better than I found them. And so giving them skills, giving them education, whatever it is so that their resume and their next gig is strong as a result of their time here. And so it would be a huge disservice to them if I didn't empower them. with what they needed in order to become AI powered. Because a workforce that's not AI powered, you look forward another 12 months, is probably gonna be non-existent. And so a big part of our productivity has been, what are those repetitive tasks that we're doing that doesn't require strategic thinking? It's just a time, it's a lot of clicking, it's a lot of filling forms, and what are the things that we can be doing to automate those? And a lot of that has been vibe coded weekend projects that have resulted in just a lot faster execution from marketing to support to partnerships. ⁓ So ultimately that's really what it's been now. It's how can we shorten the time for executing things that don't require too much strategic thinking.
speaker-0: What, obviously the topic of AI, what, and know that Vista has various different AI functionalities baked in, probably leveraging different LLMs and whatnot. What's your personal ⁓ AI tool of choice right now? is there, and maybe not necessarily an LLM or a chat based system, but kind of AI tools are really working for you lately.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. I was big on, on Shad GPT for a while, to be honest, maybe about two months ago, I started digging more into Claude as a result of our CEO. He's big on Claude and vibe coding as part of his, his workflow. So I started using Claude and I haven't looked back. I'll be honest, sometimes I'll go back to Shad GPT and I'm like, man, that answer, it's just, just feels weird. You know? But between that and cursor where we do a lot of our vibe coding projects, that's mainly where I spend. most of my time with AI's cursor and then cloud in itself.
speaker-0: Awesome. Yeah, I hear you on the chat GPT side. They were first, so everyone was bought in. But over time, Gemini and Claude have really taken up a lot more of the lion's share of my use. And I still have a lot in chat GPT, and it's like slowly trying to transition it over. Sometimes you got to go crawling back because that project lives fully there. But yeah, Claude has definitely been big. So what's an average day look like for you? When you get up in the morning, Do you get right at it? Do you kind of ease into the day? How do you structure your day for a productive day?
speaker-1: I'm an early riser and part of it is having two kids now and part of it is just trying to stay ahead. But usually 4 45, 5 a.m. I'm up at my home office. Luckily, I don't have to commute anywhere. And I really try to block that morning part before family breakfast to just be thinking. It's the quiet time where the rest of the world, at least from my perspective is asleep. So it feels like a perfect time to start thinking strategic. to plan my week, to plan my month, what are the most important things I got to get done? Family breakfast, and then I'm back at it, usually around nine or 10 a.m. And then just execution, having the meetings with the team, any brainstorming decisions that they need me to make. And then ultimately, probably two hours of AI work in some form or fashion, whether it's implementing new things, ⁓ providing proof of concepts to our engineering team to implement within the product. Everybody at Vista in the last probably three months have somehow become either product managers or engineers as a result of live coding. So that's been really cool.
speaker-0: That's amazing. how do you prioritize that? You said you sit down and you do some AI work, you prioritize. Do you actually use AI to kind of prioritize your workflow for the day or is it just kind of the last mile sort of thing?
speaker-1: Yeah, that's a good point. So before the end of every year, I do try to have a better approach of like, what's the vision for next year, right? What are the milestones, the KPIs that are going to be important for the growth of the company? And I'll try to pinpoint the projects, try to kind of work out quarterly, what are going to be some of the things that I'll need and which departments are, am I going to need to connect with for deliverables around this? Now I know everybody's been pitching and talking about AI assistance and those are fantastic, but I do have a human. executive assistant and she is fantastic and the organization around email calendar management, but most importantly helping me stay on task of these are the projects coming to, you know, this is where each of these initiatives are and where they're supposed to be at. ⁓ Probably more of a project management standpoint of anything, but it's really been helpful having her be able to keep me aligned. keep me in check on where things need to be. So a big part of it is collaborating with her realistically on daily syncs, weekly syncs, on where our projects are at, which teams I need to be connecting with.
speaker-0: Do you feel like that's possibly the most fundamental piece of success, especially as a remote company is still keeping that human connection? I'm not sure how you at Vista are structured ⁓ for that type of work, whether it's daily standups, weekly standups, all hands, but you feel like that's one of the biggest success points, especially as AI is dominating the landscape.
speaker-1: It is, it is. actually because of the AI domination, what we're realizing in our standups and our sinks is that the, skill of communication is becoming more and more crucial because one can only get good results out of AI if it could put in good prompts. And we're finding that it's just the idea of, just talk to AI, have it, have to do these things for you. It doesn't work if you don't know how to communicate well. to get what's in your head down on paper, written and communicated. One of the ways we've tried to bridge that gap and one of the things that in standups we've been really pushing the team to do is just having voice conversations, turning on dictate mode and just having free flowing thought going into the AI because it does, it can figure it out. When you got that free flowing thought, can structure things, it can figure it out. But the time that it takes your brain to filter what you're thinking and then you're typing it in, you've already lost so much context. So that's hopefully I answered the question right. I think it kind of went on a tangent there a little bit.
speaker-0: No, that's great. I get that. I really like that. And I hear this from a lot of people, especially in leadership positions, that just turning on voice mode in your AI tool of choice and just having that conversation can let you articulate what you're trying to accomplish far better than trying to do it fingers to the keyboard type deal. So no, that's a great answer. Thank you. All right, let's pivot a little bit. Talk a little bit more about your setup start talking about the tech a little bit. We've got a good idea of you know, who you are what you're all about but First off I want to know and I think I've said I know the answer this question as a remote Company, but where do you do your best work? Do you do it in your home office at home on the go? Do you ever get together with with anyone and you know, just do like a co-working session or does Vista do? Co-working sessions where you bring everyone together and that sort of thing. Where do you do your best work?
speaker-1: Yeah. My best work, you know, I can do my best work. I feel like is going to be in my home office, but if I'm home too many weeks in a row, I need to get, got this thing where I got to get out. So luckily I've got, you know, it's not going to be a shameful product placement, but I got this super cool monitor. That's why, you know, I can bring with me as portable. And so I'll usually work out of a mall locally to me, you know, I'll grab lunch, hang out at the food court, wherever, maybe catch a movie in the evening. But the ability to have that additional monitor, I can't live without a second monitor is the problem. I've got this beautiful setup at home where I've got a big monitor, my laptop's on this little stand that's elevated. And I just feel like that little MacBook screen just doesn't cut it anymore when I'm on the go. So that has been phenomenal. So thank you, by the way, for sending that over.
speaker-0: Yeah. So you mentioned, that's our portable monitor, the USB-C PDmon. It's been huge. It's been a wild success for us. The idea of being able to take it with you on the go and replicate or have some semblance of your home setup when you're not working at home has been big. So I have my home set up here, ⁓ four monitors, including two of the portable monitors. And when I hit the road, if I don't take at least one of those with me, I'm stuck. ⁓ I end up like the meme of the shrimp leaned over your keyboard trying to see the small screen and that sort of thing. So I get what you're saying ⁓ about having that dual setup here, or at least one extra monitor ⁓ set up. So happy to hear it's working out well for you.
speaker-1: It's huge. It's huge. And it's been a transition because my, my RCEO, my co-founder, he was always, I mean, man, this is like what 12 years in the making of me trying to convince them to get a second monitor. And it's like, come on Vitaly, like you're not going to understand until you just do it. You know, there's this level of productivity and his, his take has always been like, man, I get that. But if I get used to it, I travel so much, but by the time I'm at the airport or somewhere else, like I'm going to feel like my productivity is going to be cut in half. So like that's even unlocked for him, this ability of whether we're at a conference, whether we're doing a team team or that somewhere that he can just pull that out. Right. Like, and that's helped me, you know, we're going into that in a couple of months knowing that I can have that monitor with me in the hotel room or at breakfast. That's huge. Yeah. So now he's got five monitors at home. You went from back to like, he calls it the command center for when he's by coding.
speaker-0: That's amazing. That's amazing. I'd love to see a shot of that. ⁓ Just a quick tangent then or aside from this, where do you think computing's going when it comes to remote and being mobile? Like there's devices like the Samsung Galaxy, now there's the tri-fold and then there's the dual folding screens. Those devices are becoming more powerful, pluggable, has products that can interface with those devices. What do you think we're headed towards? Do you think the laptop will always be the go-to device? Or do you think we'll ever get to a place where Maybe not the iPad, a more powerful phone can replace all of that and be your device for at home and on the go.
speaker-1: Yeah, you know, I probably see a little further because with the meta glasses, the meta display, Apple's vision, I really am seeing a world where we are getting rid of these bigger clunky iPads, laptops, and it just becomes the glasses. ⁓ If you pair that with the fact that, you know, for me, the biggest waste of time that I feel like is when I'm commuting somewhere. If I, you know, I've got to go down to the studio to record something in Miami. It's always something where I feel like I'm wasting my time by sitting in the car. So when we pair that with the advanced technology for self-driving, I 100 % see a world where in the short term, wherever we're going, we take that device with us without having to pull anything out, whether there's watches or whatever, and we're interfacing with something. within our glasses. That would be super convenient for when I am commuting. I have been taking the train a lot more to Miami now and having a gigantic display like that, you know, just in your field of view, probably be humongous. But that's ultimately where I'm seeing is like us getting further and further away from having to have these like mega intense, gigantic displays, big laptops to things that interact with us a little bit closer to our field of view.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. So you almost see something like a hybrid in between Apple's Apple vision and maybe the meta display is something a little bit more powerful than the display, but not quite as locked down as the vision. Yeah, no, I can see that that future for sure. All right, back up a little bit to your your working remote at home. Do you have to kind of flip a switch to be like, okay, I'm in I'm in home mode, I'm in work mode, or do you find that the lines are constantly blurred between home? mode and work mode when you're working in the house.
speaker-1: When I was first getting started, was tough, right? I started by working out of the dining room and then eventually the couch on the living room. And I realized very quickly that there has to be this physical separation, almost as if, you know, if I'm in the office and the door is closed, ⁓ it's as if I had driven out of the house and I'm in the office. And so, you know, being able to set boundaries with the family and if they're friends over, whatever it is, like, hey, if I'm in the office, I'm working. I'm across the city right now, right? I cannot be disturbed. And that's helped me to kind of create this, not necessarily a space that's quiet, but a space that's focused for what I need to accomplish, what I need to do. I try to carve out some time within my day to go out for a walk or get some lunch. know, most days I've been skipping lunch, which is how much there is to do. But yeah, there's definitely this need to have a discipline and boundaries around your home environment where you're going to work. or else you're not really gonna get much done.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ You kind of touched on this. What is your exact home setup like though? Like, so you have two monitors, three monitors, what's the Regi command center look like?
speaker-1: I call it a two monitor setup, but really what it is is I've got my main monitor, and I'll send you a picture later. I've got my Dell 4K, I think 120 hertz, supposed to be like a gaming monitor. I don't remember the last time I brought my PlayStation out. And then I've got my MacBook on the left, but it's elevated on an arm, so it kind of acts as a second monitor pretty close to my main one. But I've got an external camera that I'm on right now, the Opal C1 that's USB-C. I've got a podcast mic that my kid just broke, so it's... ⁓ no. be in repair soon, which is also USB, wireless mouse, wireless keyboard. So it was a lot of plugging in 50 different dongles into all the different USB ports on my MacBook in order to start the day and end the day on plugging everything.
speaker-0: How do you connect all that stuff now?
speaker-1: Ah man, very intelligent. Plugable will save my life. So I went from cords everywhere and having to unplug stuff. And I have a Thunderbolt dongle now that I actually placed underneath my desk and I've got a standing desk. So everything routes beautifully under the monitor arms right into it. And it's got the USB-C, the USB 2.0s. I think I even got an HDMI and it powers my monitor as well through the USB connection. I went from like five, six different things plugging into my laptop to one cable that I unplug when I'm done or I need to go somewhere. And that one same cable is what I plug into.
speaker-0: I love that. Especially when you know the way you've described your your MacBook being up on an arm. The last thing you want is cables, cable spaghetti hanging off of it. amazing. ⁓ Is there any tech on your desk or that you use day to day? You you cannot live without it. And then on the flip side, ⁓ is there any tech that you were, I probably don't need this until you tried it. And now it's also a must.
speaker-1: Okay. Because of my, not necessarily need, but because I so often go work out of coffee shops and the malls or whatever it is, I have this Epos headset that I bought and it is by far one of the best noise canceling microphones on the market. noise canceling is like, you you Google noise canceling, it's always about the sound and can it cancel the noise that you hear? I don't care too much about that. But every single time I'm at a coffee shop and I'm doing a presentation or I'm having a meeting, that background noise is killer, man. It distracts whoever's on the call. So I never travel. My backpack, anytime I need to go somewhere, it's the first thing I'm throwing into my backpack and it's the first thing that I'm doing in a meeting. So I'd not be able to live without it. I'll be honest, from a tech that it took me a while to get into and now I can't live without, hopefully it's okay that it's in my computer and not just on my desk, but it's gotta be cursor. It seemed super overwhelming in the beginning and our CEO was like, Reggie, gotta just try it, get in it. And I've tried everything around it. There's some vibe coding tools that are web based and a lot less codey looking. But the second you get into Cursor and you just have that conversation and you plan a project and you see it just come live without you having to write a single line of code, it just changes things for you. So that's the one thing. Took me a while to get into it and I just, I don't know what I'd do if Cursor went out of business next week.
speaker-0: Let's hope they don't. That's amazing. Yeah, I know it's always fascinating to speak with guests, find out what is that one thing they can't live without. I've had various different answers. Sometimes it's something as simple as noise canceling headphones. AI tools is always one that comes up. So yeah, that's awesome. Okay, let's see here. Okay, ⁓ let's go in a little bit more. Some, a few fun related questions then. ⁓ Okay, you're in the marketing space, around the marketing space. How many tabs do you have open right now? And don't lie.
speaker-1: Okay, let's see. I've got at least 18 and I've got four tab groups that are closed. So the second I open them, I'm easily into the forties.
speaker-0: That's not that bad. ⁓ no. Okay, that sounds more realistic. That sounds more realistic. Okay.
speaker-1: Tab groups changed it for me. Somebody I think on the company last year told me about tab groups. I didn't realize it was a thing, but now I feel like that's peak productivity, opening and closing tab groups. So I'm focused on task at hand.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. All right. What's the weirdest place you've ever worked?
speaker-1: Mmm. The trunk of my car, I don't know if that's weird, it's weird to me, but we were on vacation.
speaker-0: I guess it depends whether the trunk was open or closed.
speaker-1: It was closed. was closed. Nobody was there except. We had a rental car. We were visiting my brother in DC. We were on vacation and we had like this, meeting that just had to be a part of it. It wasn't going to be something that could wait for me to get back. And we're out at like a shopping district, you know, like what am I going to do? There's not like a co-working space anywhere nearby. The food court was loud at that time. I hadn't found out about my amazing headset.
speaker-0: This is strange.
speaker-1: So I'm like, all right, the trunk it is. Got my phone, my hotspot. They're on the virtual background on Zoom and I don't think anybody noticed. mean, at least nobody brought it up. Maybe they were too scared to.
speaker-0: That's amazing. I've worked in some pretty strange places, I've, trunk of the car, that one caught me off guard a little bit. Right, right, right. Yeah. Okay. All right. A little bit more context makes sense now. All right. I'll let that one go. All right. Finish the sentence. Your most productive when.
speaker-1: Like an SUV, you know, there's... ⁓ Most productive after I've had a bowl of acai and Celsius. So 2 p.m. 2 p.m. Kids are napping so there's no noise around the house too and then I'm just in the zone. Usually last two hours.
speaker-0: a cell cell. I've never tried Celsius myself. stay away from energy drinks. feel like I would be a bit of a wreck if I went down that route.
speaker-1: I'm not a coffee drinker is the problem. I've tried coffee multiple sorts of ways. I just can't get myself to drink it. So like once a week or so, I'll grab a Celsius. I've been told that where Red Bull might knock off 10, 15 years of your life, this one will knock off five to six instead. Better.
speaker-0: Well, yeah, better. That's amazing. OK. Is there anything productivity wise, and we've kind of touched on this as we go, something you've changed your mind on when it comes to productivity, different whether it be a practice, a tool, a hack, anything like that?
speaker-1: probably more of like a core tenant that, you know, growing into a startup environment and going from a startup to selling it to now a new startup, you're always on this go, go, go mentality and wearing multiple hats. And fundamentally, I always felt like context switching is not a problem. You need to be able to switch between what you're doing and the Slack and then an email and an instance notice based on shifting priorities that are calling for your attention. But what I didn't realize is how much less I can actually get done by having to do that because nothing, I'm starting a lot of things, but not really finishing anything. So by the end of the day, I feel so unproductive when that's all I've been doing is having my attention to be pulled reactively into different areas. So by being able to say, like for the next 30 minutes, this was what's on my calendar. Slack, everything goes on, do not disturb my phone's on, do not disturb. And this is my sole focus allows me to not just be more productive and actually finish things throughout the day, but the ability to give my full undivided attention to this decision, this conversation, this email, the quality of what I can do goes out a lot further than what I used to be able to.
speaker-0: Amazing. ⁓ What advice would you give someone that's trying to work better, not just harder?
speaker-1: Like we're going to probably go back to AI here and I'm sure you hear that a lot, but 2026 ⁓ chat, chat bots. If that's your interaction with AI and it's getting into a cloud or chat GPT conversation, having that back and forth, you got to take that next step, right? Agents, things that are happening, automatic thing, workflows that trigger as a result. of other things happening, it's really the phase you need to start thinking of when we talk about maximizing productivity and working smarter. I'll give you like one practical example. Feel free to use it if you want to or not if it's too in the weeds of it. But when we, as I mentioned, we move fast, right? If we don't stay ahead of everything that becomes available through meta and TikTok changes and YouTube changes, we get left behind quickly. And so every week there's at least one or two pretty big product improvements or releases that happen and traditionally what would happen is we've got a change log that's customer facing that helps our customers know what's new. We have a blog, we have graphics that need to be made for both side of things, we have customer facing tutorials and guides that need to be updated as a result of it and there was always manual work to be done, right? This product team tells us, we're working on this, now it's released and this all gets trickled down, everybody goes on and works independently. What happens now, we've implemented this system where after that announcement is made with some details, we have individual AI agents that are custom prompted to work on a graphic scope of work that outlines the value statements, the problem that we're solving. We have one that goes out and creates a draft of our knowledge base for our customers, a draft for the change log post. And so at the end of the day, all of this is going to be touched on by humans to finalize. But we've saved at least 30 to 45 minutes of work for every single person that would have touched one of these documents or created a draft for one of these things. So that's kind of that next layer I'm talking about. What someone would probably do if they're trying to do this first is they'll take that, put it into Jadgy BT, type out a prompt, hey, can you make this sound like this? It's going to be a change log or it's going to be a customer facing guide. And then they get that output. You've saved yourself a solid 20, 30 minutes for sure. It being instant, the second someone drops something into a specific Slack channel and it goes out and do all that work, that's the next level I'm talking about.
speaker-0: That's amazing. All right, one last question for you. What is one productivity myth that needs to go away?
speaker-1: Activity myth. There's so many. my God. There's a lot of people, especially on LinkedIn, feel like everybody's either on this side or on this side. They're very polarized there. Yeah, it's crazy. So there's the division of if you want to be productive and successful, you got to wake up at 4 a.m. And then there's the other side of like, no, that doesn't make any sense. You're not going to be productive.
speaker-0: advice in place.
speaker-1: I don't do it to be productive. I do it because I really value the time that I spend with my family and I don't ever want to be in a place as my kids are growing where they have this thought of like, it's work more important than me for my dad. so family time is family time. Work time is work time. To get more out of it, I just have block in the morning that really helps me to get some stuff done. So my afternoon is free. And so I don't believe that waking up earlier has any impact in your ability to produce things. It has to do with Are you able to get focused and stay focused during your day? Create the discipline and the environment where you've got your do not disturbs or whatever it is, you've blocked time out, you've carved time out, and that's your sole focus. And waking up early has nothing to do with it.
speaker-0: Yeah. So, so discipline over the household culture for sure. Absolutely. All right, Rezi. Well, this has been a lot of fun. We'll end it there and yeah, thanks for being on and we'll chat again soon.
speaker-1: Yeah, thanks very much for having me.
