Master The 4-Day Workweek with Natalie @ WildBit.com - Escape Velocity Show #26

About this video

Dan Martell interviews Natalie, co-founder and CEO of Wildbit, maker of Beanstalk, Postmark, and Conveyor, with her husband Chris as CTO. Chris started 19 years ago and she has been involved 16 years. Beanstalk launched in 2007 as hosted version control when few hosted tools existed, grew largely by word of mouth and a Basecamp integration, and by mid 2008 covered a team of four or five people; Postmark was launched to Beanstalk customers. The remote-first company has around 30 employees. Natalie stresses paying yourself: founders who do not become tired, vulnerable, and open to poor acquisition offers, while their profit sharing removes anything she and Chris take out so the team is not penalized. She describes their equal partnership at work and home with two daughters, buying help at home starting with house cleaning every other week, a four-day work week in its third year inspired by Cal Newport’s Deep Work and the idea that deep work fatigues after about four hours, experimenting with turning Slack off, staying flat until January 2019, and hiring a coach to split CEO and CTO roles and stop being bottlenecks.

Key takeaways

• Pay yourself: Natalie says not paying yourself makes founders tired and vulnerable to bad outcomes, and it gives Wildbit a high number in acquisition talks because they do not need the deal
• Wildbit’s profit sharing removes anything Chris and Natalie take out of the business, so their salary does not reduce the team’s share
• Focus is the operating principle: the books Deep Work and Getting Things Done are sent to new hires, based on the idea your brain is for creative thought, not a repository for memories
• The four-day work week, tried as an experiment, led the team to get more and better-quality work done by forcing choices about what to work on
• A coach helped Natalie and Chris define separate CEO and CTO roles after years of making every decision together in a flat company

Episode details: published April 23, 2020 · 48:18 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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