The following interview is a conversation we had with Marcelo Lebre, President of Remote, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Global payroll, tax and HR compliance platform that’s raised over $500 Million in funding

Marcelo Lebre
Awesome. Happy to be here. 

Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about everything that’s going on there at Remote, can we just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Marcelo Lebre
Yeah, absolutely. 

Brett
So. 

Marcelo Lebre
My name is Marcelo. I’m a COO and CTO Co-Founder at Remote Today. I run pretty much everything from engineering CX in operations, about like 80% of this company previous to Remote, which was found in January 2019. I used to be a VP of engineering in a few startups, and CTO as well, a few times. And my background and career is very much follow the wind. I’ve done many things across many different companies, completely different roles at times, and it just followed, to be honest, my passion and the things that I really like to be doing. I met Yob, my Co-Founder, twelve years ago. 

Brett
Wow. 

Marcelo Lebre
Give or take. And the idea of Remote, such as it is today, starts about that time. It, of course, matured and changed many forms across many years. But that’s my background. 

Brett
Wow. 

Marcelo Lebre
That’s an engineer by trade, by the way. 

Brett
And where did you guys meet twelve years ago? 

Marcelo Lebre
So, you know those stories where girlfriends drags boyfriend into meeting friend with boyfriend was pretty much this my girlfriend today wife at the time. I just moved to Lisbon because I’m from a small city up north in Portugal called Avedo, and I moved to Lisbon. I knew no one. For all intents and purposes. I come from a very small town that you can cross just by walking in ten minutes, maybe 20. Massive to me. So I knew no one. And so my girlfriend said, well, remember this friend of mine from college? She’s in town and she’s with her boyfriend. And I was like, should we go meet them for coffee? And I was like, come on. I don’t feel like it. I’m not that kind of double date person. But anyway, I had nothing better to do. I was about to start working the next day, and it’s like, let’s just go and be easy to kill off the nerves anyway. 

Marcelo Lebre
And then we arrived and Yob was there with his girlfriend. Luckily, we ended up marrying our girlfriend, so we didn’t become awkward to tell the story. That was it. 

Brett
Wow, that’s a great story. Now take me back to the early days when you were, let’s say, ten, 1112 years old, in the small town there in Portugal. What were your aspirations like when you were a young kid? 

Marcelo Lebre
If you ask my parents, they would say that I love to break stuff, and mainly computers and things like that. I don’t know. I was always very nerdy. I was very much into everything. Star Wars, Star Trek, anything Sci-Fi, I would be all over it as much as possible because the ability that we could get all these things in for show about that time, it was especially in small villages, it was not super easy. We would have to travel quite a lot and then it’s all very manual, or it wasn’t easy at all. But my grandfather had a spectrum and I was completely when I saw it used to be covered with this old cloth because in a small village like ours, no one had a computer. Literally, no one had a computer. People would talk about it, but everyone knew what a computer could do or was, but they had them at banks, but no one had one at home. 

Marcelo Lebre
And so my grandfather was also very geeky and nerdy. He had one and he was an accountant, but he loved it. And so I started to read the manuals. And by the way, in Portuguese, I didn’t know how to read English at the time. I was just looking at the command lines and the things that it could apparently do if I typed in a few words. And that’s, I guess, how it started, especially in tech for me. 

Brett
And do you remember that moment when you were like, okay, wow, this is something that I want to pursue as a career. 

Marcelo Lebre
I remember I was playing around with the spectrum and of course I could play the games. Fairly lengthy hefty process. But I remember once I found this page in the book that had like, if you type in this sentence, it’s going to draw a line for you. The function was like plot or something. I was like, what? So I tried it and there you go, you typed the command and something happened. And I was like, so I’m creating stuff. So this is the base for literally everything that is tech related. And to me, that was a bit of a ha moment, and it’s a double ha moment. It was one because I was so excited about it and so hyped for the fact that I could type in a few commands and the computer would do something that I would tell it to do. And then I remember I had a birthday party at the next day. 

Marcelo Lebre
And I grabbed the book and I took it with me. And I had a bunch of cousins there, roughly my age, and I was trying to tell them all about this, and they cared nothing. They were like, what are you talking about? You’re crazy. And I was so in love with that. And I was like, okay, this is different. They don’t really share this passion of mine. I honestly don’t care. And there was a double up moment where I knew that I was in love with it. And second, I knew that other people would somehow see me differently. But honestly, I couldn’t care less. 

Brett
And when you go back to your town now, do you get a hero’s welcome? Does everyone finally understand what it was that fascinated you so much back then? 

Marcelo Lebre
It is weird, yes. Also because when remote grew so fast, we hit all the numbers and all the newspapers. My grandmother, who’s now 86, when we got the unicorn status and were on the news, she bought the newspaper and went door to all her immediate neighbors showing the newspaper. And of course she was super proud. And then she called me and she was like, you know, I showed the newspaper to all my neighbors. They were all commenting that it’s amazing, but no one understands anything nor what it means. And I was like, well, thank you, but do you understand what it means? And she was like, I don’t, but you and your Co-Founder look very pretty to me. I guess that was the best that I could ever hope for. 

Brett
That’s so funny. That’s awesome. Now, something else that you mentioned, there becoming a unicorn. So can you take me back to the day that became a reality for you? That first day where you found out that the company was going to be a unicorn? How did that feel for you as the Founder and the builder behind this company? 

Marcelo Lebre
I don’t think that day has arrived yet. So remote is, as the brand calls it, we’re fully remote. We don’t have any office. The whole team is distributed across the globe and in over 100 countries. But the interactions that happen on a day to day basis, the amount of people that I personally know, probably like 50 people, even though the company today is 1000, is over 1000. Actually, when I think about Remote, in my mind, always those 50 people, maybe 100 tops. And because I work from home, my home and my home office, I never got that sense of walking into a massive building and having your brand in a big logo or something. So I never had that feeling of, holy s***, this is massive. I see the amount of people we employ across the world and the customers that we have and the numbers, the amount of people that we add every single month sometimes day. 

Marcelo Lebre
And it does share a bit of that oomph, I would say, but I never had. And I’ve been interviewed on TV a few times as well. But honestly, hopefully it doesn’t come off as a humble break. I have no idea what it means because to me it doesn’t feel more like the day that we started as our vision is still unfulfilled, right? We’re still starting that. And so, long story short, I don’t know if I’ve ever had that epiphany moment. 

Brett
Do you think you’re ever going to have it? Do you think there is like a finish line or a certain point that you’re going to get to where you’ll say to yourself, hey wow, it feels like you’ve made it. 

Marcelo Lebre
I think that the day that you either end up on IPOing or something similar, that you see the name of your company in a recognized stock exchange, then it will probably start having that holy s***, this is real. But I don’t think that before then. And honestly, I’m a very anxious person and so I’m always looking up to the future and trying to do more and do better, go faster. And so if you ask me about the past and things, I not want to stop and dwell or even linger about past thoughts or situations. But if you ask me if there’s a moment that’s going to make you feel that may be it. And if it doesn’t happen, then I don’t think it’ll ever happen. 

Brett
And something else, you just mentioned there that you’re anxious person and I think there’s a lot of other founders listening in who deal with some anxiety and some stress. What have you done and how have you tamed that anxiety and that anxiousness? 

Marcelo Lebre
So I often say this, it’s one thing that I learned. I’m always very anxious person because anxiety is either a super problem or a superpower. Sometimes it takes over and it’s a super problem and sometimes you can take over it and it’s a superpower. The reason for it. Anxiety exists because your body goes into primordial instinct mode and gives you all the energy to fight tigers and bears and whatever else was around the time where we needed to fight stuff to survive. And that’s why your pituitary gland makes you see and feel these things that don’t exist. So you go into a hyperdrive, your heartbeats faster, stronger, you’re more alert, you don’t need to sleep as much, you don’t need to eat as much. The problem with this is that if you utilize it in a way in short bursts, in the right moments for the things that you can really make use out of it, then it’s going to be amazing because it literally acts as a drug because you’re going to have superpower. 

Marcelo Lebre
The problem is when you allow it to faster and to spread into every single thing that doesn’t need it. If you’re having coffee or tea with friends and all of a sudden you’re all jittery because you’re thinking about work rather than laughing, or you stop taking care of yourself. And that is a super problem. And mind you, Remote is one of the hardest challenges I’ve ever had because we started the company in January 2019. My wife was five months pregnant when I started this company. I became a dad the same week that we closed our first round and a few months later. So my kid was born with club feet, so was a medical condition. His feet were turned inwards, requires a lot of interventions and physical therapy and surgery and all that. The first few weeks and months of life and a few months into it, we had a pandemic going over the world. 

Marcelo Lebre
We come out of a pandemic and we go into a war and world recession. And so ever since I started Remote, it has been this weird moment where you put yourself to the test almost every three months. And honestly, first year in and a half of Remote, I was used to go all in, use all energy of my body to solve every little thing. I was an engineer, so I was just CTO, as much as just word can mean. But the team, I grew the team from two engineers or from no engineer to 100 engineers, and all of a sudden, it was always massive dialed in. And the problem that comes with that is that you stop taking care of yourself. You realize that you’re always near burnout. You start to neglect the rest of life that is worth living and worth enjoying. And I take a lot of pride in my work, and I really like what I do. 

Marcelo Lebre
I’m I’m really passionate about it. Doesn’t feel like I’m working at all, which is also part of the problem, but it consumes you. Right in that moment, I had to I remember I took a vacation, a week off, and at the end of that week, I realized that I had not taken one single peaceful, quiet moment for myself. I was always either thinking about work or actually on slack on my phone or on my computer while my wife was taking care of her kid and we’re trying to relax on the beach. And so ended up no one having any relaxing time. And to me, the most important lesson was you have to take care of yourself. And when you take care of yourself, doesn’t mean that you go easy or that you go slower, but you have to understand what is your maximum output. And your maximum output always comes with trade offs. 

Marcelo Lebre
You can go at max rotation, like an engine max rev for a short period of time, but if you’re always max rev, you’re going to burn out the engine very easily. And so you have to understand what those limits are, where anxiety stops being a superpower and becomes a super problem. And the more you get to know yourself across the journey and the challenges, the better you’ll do on the long term. That was my long term, long arch of story around being anxious Founder. 

Brett
Well, it’s super valuable to hear that, especially a lot of our listeners right now. All of them are B2B tech founders. And I think burnout is a major issue right now with founders. So having them understand how you’ve navigated that, how you’ve really controlled your anxiety and turned that what’s the saying, a headwind into a tailwind. It sounds like that’s super useful to know, and I think founders will really appreciate hearing that from you. Now, can we talk about the early days? So obviously remote work now is all the rage. Everyone’s talking about it. It seems like it’s actually becoming somewhat of a controversial topic where people are debating it, which is probably good for you. But in 2019, I don’t think remote work was nearly as accepted. So take us back to those early days. Why did you really say remote work is the future, and we’re going to bet on that, and we’re going to build a company around it. 

Brett
What was that like in those early days? 

Marcelo Lebre
We started this company because we had a personal belief. So both my Co-Founder and I come from almost opposing angles in a way, regarding remote. Not angles, but vectors rather. So yo, our CEO, he used to be VP of product at GitLab. As you know, GitLab is pure remote, pure distributed company. They grew a lot. They became a reference for being a distributed company, remote company. But they had a massive issue with not just hiring, but paying people compliantly across the world. And of course it’s hard, and they were doing all the good work, and they laid the foundation for a lot of what we know today to be the textbook good way of working remotely. But there was an issue with fundamental issue with how you hire people across the world, how you pay people across the world, and what work conditions you provide to them. 

Marcelo Lebre
And when you look at the alternatives, they were so clunky, they were so designed either for just treating people as contractors, or going the old fashioned route of employee of record. Very localized, very outdated way of employing someone that is not in the same country as a company. That didn’t scale, didn’t work, was slow, painful, no one liked it, very expensive. And this was in the way of companies that needed to hire and grow fast across the world. On my end, I was VP of engineering at a time, and I felt this pain where I wanted to hire the best people in the world for a role, but for one, I couldn’t convince them to move down to my country, or the country we’re operating out of. That was 1 second. Even if I could convince them, it would take significant amount of cash and then thirdly, what if people move in, they move there all their lives, and then two, three months in doesn’t work. 

Marcelo Lebre
Like, it was a massive pain. You’d struggle to find the best candidates, it would take forever. Especially you have high standards, it would take forever. So there was this whole messed up world, painful even to deal with. And when we started conversations about yob and I had many products and projects across the year that some people, they get together and they go play soccer or go do something fun together. Yo and I, we had fun building products and projects across the years, aside of our main projects and careers. But we never sold anything because we had fun building stuff, not necessarily selling it. So we built, I don’t know, five, six, seven different projects and products that we fully built end to end, front end, back end, mobile experiences. We got to the end and we’re like, okay, that’s on. We’re going to move on to the next one. 

Marcelo Lebre
And we started debating. We know enough, we’ve been around enough. We are advisors to other companies. We are mentors to a lot of professionals. What are we missing? What are the things that are worth solving and worth betting your career on? And we both share this pain around how employment happens and how people are hired and who you can hire and how you bridge this gap between talent and opportunity. And the discussion around remote, sort of like that, even without the name behind it. But we knew we had to solve and sort the remote work. But you had a lot of companies going fully remote, and it was a very clear trend. You go to all the job boards out there and you see the amount of remote job ads at the time growing daily. And so we saw into it, there’s no solution for this, there’s nothing. 

Marcelo Lebre
The companies that were in the space were still doing the same things that they used to be doing, like 20 years, if not more. And we knew it would be a big endeavor, but the moment we decided to start it anyway because were stubborn. And I remember the day that we announced what were doing, I think on Medium, we both wrote each blog post and said, well, we’re starting this company. We don’t know exactly the details of it yet, but we’re going to start this. And I remember that we had this massive influx of people wanting to buy from us. And were so early, I don’t even think you can call it early stage, that we knew for a fact that was hit. It was going to be a hit because of the demand and the need of the people reaching out to us even before we launched the company. 

Marcelo Lebre
And that was the beginning of it all. 

Brett
Wow, that’s so amazing. Now talk to me about the domain. At what point in those conversations did you decide, okay, we’re going to buy this domain? I have to assume it wasn’t $10 on namecheap to buy the domain. What was that like? Yeah. 

Marcelo Lebre
So we started to debate the worst discussion ever of either an entrepreneur or someone working in a product development. Naming things and naming things is always a problem. And we’re like, okay, what’s the word we’re going to call it? I don’t know. We’re working on a remote space. Remote. It was, like, near impossible. Harry and we looked up remote, and remote at the time was historical job board. Someone was running a job board for, I don’t know, four or five years on the domain remote. But the platform felt a bit outdated and somewhat stole, I guess. So we reached out to the founders at the time and said, well, hey, we’re so and so love to meet you. What are you doing with this these days? We have this idea. We would love to give it a shot. And they were gracious enough to reply, and we realized they had started another company at the time, a very successful company, still today in the crypto space. 

Marcelo Lebre
And they were not actively developing on it. They were maintaining it because it used to be a hallmark and it used to be a past project of theirs. And we said, look, we have this idea. It’s a crazy idea. We have no investment. We are just starting out. What do you think? And from then on was essentially negotiation how we could take over their business, essentially bought it, and that was it. As far as the cost goes, I usually jokingly say it was a kidney to the value that it’s warranted today. It was more than one kidney, probably many kidneys. But it is well worth, at least within this context of figurative kidney goes well worth it. 

Brett
So obviously a lot of companies benefited from COVID-19 in a way where it, I think, accelerated trends that were already taking place and just made them move even faster. And I’m guessing Remote was one of the companies that benefited from that. But that would have been, what, like spring 2020, maybe mid 2020 for that to happen. So let’s talk about that time period between January 2019 and before COVID Were there ever any moments of doubt where you were questioning what you were doing? Were there ever any moments where it just felt really hard and you were like, s***, maybe we’re just going to have to throw in the towel? Did you ever experience any dark moments like that pre COVID? 

Marcelo Lebre
No, fortunately not. So as I said, we started the company, and soon after we launched this website, very basic one, and it didn’t say much, just said, hey, employee everywhere across the world globe with remote. And we got so many inbound requests for sales, and we’re a very tiny team. I guess we’re at the time like, I don’t know, 1020 people between Engineers, Ops, HR and Sales Finance. We had so many requests for inbound that we had over two months back to back sales calls. And we had people reaching out on LinkedIn saying, hey, I want to buy from you, but I only have a scheduled call in like, two months. I need it faster. Can you make it happen? And so we knew because if this was happening, then with the growth and the trend of remote work growing, it would just get better. 

Marcelo Lebre
And were not even anticipating, of course, the pandemic and the strength that remote work had or gained through it all. 

Brett
Now, can we talk a little bit about growth? So obviously you’re growing fast. I’ve read some numbers in the news, you never know how accurate those are. A lot of speculation there, but can you just tease us a little bit and just give us anything that demonstrates the amount of growth that you’re seeing? Because quite clearly you guys are growing at an insanely fast rate. 

Marcelo Lebre
Yeah, so not going into a lot of details. I’m not one to go fully public and brag about every single thing because twitch their own. But what I can tell you is that someone told me recently that were the fastest growing company in Arab ever in four years of existence. We’re 1000 people remote. We’re in over 100 countries, the team, and we’re serving the whole globe in terms of employment, paying contractors, helping employers, paying people. We have dozens of thousands of people across the world employed through us, and even more so being paid through us, which is for a company that it feels often that. And I say to this, to the team, that we’re like a 6ft tall four year old baby because in one end you feel like you’re growing. We were valued the last round at over $3 billion as a company in the first, not even three first years of the company. 

Marcelo Lebre
And we’ve been growing insanely even through the pandemic, through a downturn. I don’t know. Sky’s the limit, I guess. 

Brett
Nice. That must be a good feeling to have as a Founder. 

Marcelo Lebre
Yes. So I’m not going to say otherwise. I couldn’t ask for more, to be honest, but I will say that it almost pushes the boundaries of what you can do with a certain short amount of time. Because there’s a Portuguese saying you can’t get nine women to deliver a baby in one month. There’s so much you can do with physics. Not that this saying is very accurate to the day, but there’s so much you can do with physics. 

Brett
I love that. Now, something else I want to talk with you about is this idea of category creation. So what are your views on category creation and what are your views on the market category or market categories that remote is part of? 

Marcelo Lebre
Well, I can say that the play or the market that existed when we started does not exist today. Or at least not in the same way. That is one the reason why I’m saying this is because the companies operating in this space, they used to operate in such old fashioned, manual, outdated way that once we showed up and started building things that creating a product out of a service in the employment space and payment space. That meant that it is roughly the same experience as after the first iPhone came about. Then there was the iPhone and everything else. And that was what we felt, because the amount of customers that we started having and putting on and onboarding were so many. And the feedback that we got was that there’s honestly nothing like this. And to me, it felt a bit like, of course, this is egotistical thinking in Narcissistic past, that it felt like a different market altogether, because you couldn’t even compare our solution to what existed. 

Marcelo Lebre
But second, as far as market, of course then the market became there are a few more companies started in the space that also grew quite fast. And the reason why everyone is growing super fast in the space is that the total addressable market, it grew significantly. It grew because all of a sudden, you had only a percentage of the market that worked remotely. But now, all of a sudden, you have the whole market, the whole world that wants to work remote, or at least in part, hiring remote, not just because it’s doable, but because you hire the best people and it’s a good financial use case. And so the market itself changed, not just in format, but in size, and massively in size. That’s at least my perception to the day. And it’s not shrinking, quite the opposite, still expanding. The opportunities are unraveling and revealing themselves as time progresses and I feel like. 

Brett
Opportunities must just be flooding your way at all times. How do you decide which opportunities to pursue? Because I’m sure it just has to be endless at this point. 

Marcelo Lebre
Yes, and we learned a hard lesson over 2022 at some point. We had so many different initiatives across the company happening that I always had this motive of should always keep it simple and focused. But one of the worst things you can do is assume that you don’t need to hyper prioritize your work. Because as I said, the growth was so much was so fast, honestly unprecedented levels that no one in the company, even the past execs we had experience with the sort of growth. And so you get sort of mixed up in the weeds of your own hubris thinking that you don’t need to hyper prioritize and that you can pursue every single avenue of product of service, of new experience, of new thing to do. And in our space the possibilities are endless. You can expand to any vertical, to any horizontal, to any functional areas that are crossing the kinds of. 

Marcelo Lebre
Businesses that we’re building. And at some point we looked even at our financial plan and said, well this doesn’t make sense, we’re a massive company, we’re growing super fast. But the fact is that we have so many products in the pipeline that we need to be faster bringing them to market. And so we had to take a moment to breathe and say, no, we’re not going to pursue this amount of different products, we’re going to hyper Prioritize and we’re going to focus on the things that we really believe in and what is the vision for Remote? And so hyper prioritization is one of the best important things that if you were to say that the only thing that matters running up any kind of business letter on a fast growing one, which is look at the end of the day at the amount of things that you want to do, and you say, what are the top three things that I can do to really change the game and to bring it up where I want it to be? 

Marcelo Lebre
And you assume that everything else can just go down in flames and that’s it. Hyper Prioritization is only active or in play when it hurts, when your brain is playing tricks and telling you but you can also do this in parallel and right away you can also do this and you should also try that. And you know, if you’re hyper prioritizing and doing it correctly when you are indeed choosing to do those things that you will be doing that play a part in the vision of the company. 

Brett
I think you’ve captured the internal voice there that many founders have in their head of hey, you can also do this, you can also do that. You’ve captured that quite well. 

Marcelo Lebre
Yeah, hopefully. 

Brett
So now when you started, there wasn’t a lot of competition, it sounds like, but today the competitive landscape seems to be getting quite full. We had Oyster on a couple of months ago and chat with them and we’ve had a few smaller companies, but there’s definitely a lot of money flowing into this space. But I think arguably you could say remote is just dominating this and you guys are just really killing it right now. What are you doing right? And what have you gotten right so far that’s just really allowed you to break through the noise and just really dominate this space? 

Marcelo Lebre
So for one, we’re designing an experience or product for people. We’re not in the business of creating an intermediary step between the employer and the employee, between the talent and opportunity. Our vision is to bridge that gap, is to create the opportunities for everyone across the world and to help redistribute wealth. That is our core belief and this is why we started Remote. And it’s one of the reasons why we still win so much when going head to head with even some competitors in the space is because there’s a fundamental lack of understanding of what it is to serve what it is to provide employment or the facilities to pay someone and bridge the gap between talent and opportunity and doing it in a way that is transparent to everyone, that is clear and that optimizes for what the future of work should be. The future of work should not be another EOR solution or another middle step. 

Marcelo Lebre
It should just be you getting the best job you can possibly get around the world, your employer doing the best hire they can possibly hire across the globe for their budget, and that should be it. Anything else, it plays no part. So all the things that you can do to make that better. And of course, there are so many different details along the way. Today, we’re the most company that has most security and privacy certifications in the space. You have to take into consideration that you’re taking the most private, considerate, and confidential information of everyone across the world. Like all our platform is PII. You have personal, identifiable information. You have people’s addresses, their contracts, their payments, their salaries, their social conditions and contributions, health care issues as well. So you have to take into consideration every single item and variable that makes for a very complex puzzle and abstract it in a way that it’s just simple. 

Marcelo Lebre
And if you create a great experience out of a great product, there’s nothing else that you need to be worried about, to be honest. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. Now, on the topic of remote work, and I’d mentioned this earlier in the interview, it’s a heavily debated topic. It’s impossible to go on LinkedIn and not see people fighting in the comments about if you should be remote or hybrid or everyone should be back in the office. Even just today, or maybe it was yesterday in the news, Amazon announced their return to office plan, and I think it was like 16,000 20,000 workers are now petitioning to not have to go back to the office. So how active are you in those conversations of really trying to be an advocate for remote work and defend it and evangelize it? Is that top of mind and something that you consider part of your responsibilities as the Founder of this company or the Co-Founder of this company? 

Marcelo Lebre
My biggest responsibility is helping to bring about the future work. Anything else is, I would say, secondary, in a way. Ever since we started, we’ve become advisors to really big companies, even companies that are not our customers. And so because we possess the knowledge and the skill sets, the people and the products to solve a very important pain that is suffered across the globe in every single area. I’ve never created any sort of gatekeeping mechanism. Over it, meaning we’ve always done, and we still do, quite a lot on a weekly basis, on advisoring, mentoring, supporting even people, as I said, that are not our customers. Because I think we do have a duty in that respect. We started to build out possibly the best future we can for the people that come after or the people that are still in need of it. Because if we live in comfortable countries, cities, locations, we have no clue about what’s going on in the rest of the world. 

Marcelo Lebre
And I think we have that of gratitude towards each other, but also of kindness. And I think the future of work is very much towards improving how the human race is evolving and spend their best time on. And as a company, I really believe, fundamentally, that we have to play a role in it, and we are playing a role in it. We did quite a lot, and we’re still doing quite a lot in the war for Ukraine as well, to support everyone we possibly can. We work with governments across the world, too. And so it’s an ongoing journey to make this better for literally everyone. 

Brett
Nice. That’s so amazing. Now, last couple of questions here for you. So the first one, Marcelo, you’ve obviously reached a level of success here. The company is huge, but I wonder what motivates you day to day? When you wake up in the morning, what makes you say, okay, I’m going to go put in the long hours to work? What’s your main day to day motivation? 

Marcelo Lebre
Well, I don’t believe in a working schedule. We don’t apply that remote. So I believe in solving the best possible problem that I have or that I can. And then if I can, then I’ll print people that can edit. So that is my motivation. I’ll get up every day to solve that one thing that I can help solve, and then I move on to the next. It’s a pure, simple optimization process. You go down and you look at all your processes and systems, you identify the most problematic ones, and you just fix those. Once those are done, you improve the rest. And doing that will get your system much more optimized. So that’s me. 

Brett
Amazing. And final question here, and I guess there’s two parts to it, so maybe two questions. You’ve touched a little bit on that vision for the future of remote work. So can you just paint a picture for us? What does that future of remote work look like? And then in terms of remote, the company, what’s that vision for remote, the company? 

Marcelo Lebre
Well, the future of work, it’s the inversion of live to work and work to live. Right. The future of work should be somehow grounded in the principles of you should do what you’re passionate about and what is the best thing you can bring onto yourself and others. Because as a species, that’s how we evolve and we make each other better. Now, the reason why we don’t do it today is because we need to put food on the table and in order to do that, we need to get money. And so we’ll take all kinds of jobs and do all kinds of things, not necessarily because we enjoy it, but because they pay for our lifestyle, the things we need, the things we want. And so if we have a leveled world where you apply principles like universal income, you level the playing field and you remove. 

Marcelo Lebre
Of course, you can always get more if you want to do more. But if you apply these principles, that means that everyone has a shot at being rather than engineer can be the best woodworker your country can possibly have. And today we know for a fact that we’re missing out on so many jobs and roles across our civilization that certain areas are skyrocketing in demand, in price, because of that need. And it’s not like everyone is happy. Most people are really sad and depressed when they go about their daily jobs. So the future of work is bridging the passion and almost removing the money out of the equation so you can focus on being your best version of yourself. As far as remote goes, my ambition is that we help bring that about by allowing companies to not think about the problem of how to do things when they should just be focusing on how to do business. 

Marcelo Lebre
Companies today, they still go through the hoops of how I’m going to scale my team, how am I going to pay these people? Where can I hire people? How can I get the best person for this job? This shouldn’t be an issue in the same way that today, for instance, you grab your phone and if you want to talk to a friend, you just immediately think about imessage WhatsApp, whatever. 20 years ago, there was no WhatsApp. And 20 years ago, you would pay heavily for a text message. So you would probably even consider just get off your a** and take your a** from the couch and go a few streets down and speak to someone, because it was cheaper. Today, it’s just unthinkable. You don’t even think it. Just grab your phone and do something. So this is the same mindset we want, that the world has an expectation for work or handling and managing work that is just seamless. 

Marcelo Lebre
It’s just done. It shouldn’t be complicated. Companies shouldn’t have to think through payroll. Companies shouldn’t have to think through social contributions or helping people get a visa process in. That should be it just simple. 

Brett
Amazing. I love that. Marcelo, I know we’re up on time here. We’re overtime, so I’d love to keep you on and ask you another 50 questions, but we’ll have to save that for part two before we wrap here. If people want to follow along with your personal journey as Founder here, I think they already know where they can go. Remote, that’s obvious. But where can they find you personally? They want to follow along. 

Marcelo Lebre
Well, I’m on Twitter. I’m a massive s*** poster. Just follow me on Marcelo Lever. My name is quite unique, I think. I’m only disputing this name with someone else in Brazil, I believe, and is not very active. So I’m very easy to find and LinkedIn on Twitter. If you just Google me, Marcelo remote very easily find me. 

Brett
Who owns the domain for your name? Is it you or the Brazilian guy? The big question. 

Marcelo Lebre
I do. 

Brett
You do? Good. So you have all the domains. Marcelo, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and talking so openly about all of this stuff and really sharing the vision for what you’re building. This has been, I think, my favorite interview so far, out of about 150 interviews. So thank you so much for taking the time. 

Marcelo Lebre
Appreciate it. All right, thank you. 

Brett
Keep in touch. Take care. Bye.