I mean, in many ways, when we look at the former versions, iterations of online work, this is definitely what it is. And I think you wrote about that in your book, where it was first understood to be something like, oh, I can monetize my task, the skills that I have to make money on the side. But then suddenly you started seeing people very much at the edge of their seat, realizing that they wanted to pursue their craft with autonomy. I think it came from just this desire and this understanding that at the highest skilled level of product builders in particular, and at the highest skilled professionals at large, you have endless opportunities. And that is just a question of, are you doing something that's fulfilling to you? I'm here today with the CEO and founder of A-Team, Rafael Ouzan. A-Team is a members-only network that empowers the world's top engineers, product design, and marketing builders to build things that matter for the world's most exciting companies. Hey, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you. So glad to be here. Hi, Paul. So I've been waiting to talk to you for months, and I'm really excited that we finally found some time to catch up. You were in stealth, and I always start off when I'm talking to founders that are in stealth. Why did you choose to go stealth for A-Team? Yeah, you know, at first it was really an intuition, more than a strategy. When, you know, we've done before, like, the... raise a bunch of money, go to Techron Disrupt, do as much as possible, and right after Gates, you know, be in a bunch of panels with the other entrepreneurs talking about what it's like to run companies and, you know, spreading wisdom that was mostly not acquired yet. But this time, it really felt different. It felt like, you know, our mission is to empower builders to team up, to do the best work of their career with their favorite people while having full autonomy and earning well doing so. And that felt something that was very near and dear to our heart for ourselves as builders and the people that we care about. So to us, it was really a question of, is this really valuable to the people that we know, to our friends, to their friends, to the people that we knew have been waiting on the edge of their seat for so long to escape rigid structures, just like you have, right, and go and team up on those, like, cloud-based teams? So it felt like something that we didn't want any noise would but just signal. So either that would work well and then people would pay for it and people would escape, you know, tech giants and whatnot and go through lengthy application process to be part of the Ateam network or not. We didn't need investors or others or press or whatever to say, oh, this is amazing. So really the inclination and the intuition early on was, let's keep it under radar. But then we also realized, and we got that feedback early on that I think was incredibly meaningful, which was that, you know, kind of like cloud computing early on. When cloud computing started, it was very hard to make sense of it. It felt unsafe. It felt kind of like colocation type of server forms. Best of the type of thing that you cannot really, if you don't figure out the category for it and create a new category around it, people are gonna bucket you in the wrong places, places you don't wanna be a part of. And therefore what started as an intuition of like, let's just start it bottom up and grassroots to build a brand where, you know, the smart people hear about it from their smart friends, it became really our strategy of, let's figure out and build out the narrative to establish a new category. A category that ultimately would become a status symbol for A-teamers, both the product builders that are going independent and the companies leveraging A-teams to accelerate and build better faster. It took us two and a half years really to get to the point where, you know, we already had raised seed in series A and we're already very much in hyper growth and at that moment we were like, you know what, we got a narrative straight. We talked about it with the community probably six months prior and we're like, this is what we're trying to do. We got feedback from the community, we worked with them for months, build it up and then we were ready to then not talk about A-team is great and those type of things, but rather there is a new category and this is the team economy. It's really interesting because it sounds so intuitive. Hey man, why don't we just like let people who enjoy working together, work together and build things, right? Too often times you see a bunch of people that are just shoved together in some org or reorg and you know, it's not the right team and then the executives wonder why it's not performing so well. Let's talk about your teams. How does A-team go about finding groups of people that were one plus one could equal 10? Yeah, you know, I think you're right. Like we all, it's very simple. Like we all know of teams that are working well and teams that are not working as well. And it's kind of just anecdotal slash intuitive knowledge. And in fact, every time we hire people, we think in terms of teams and yet every system, every structure that we have is only focused on the individual. We don't actually look at teams structurally. In fact, there's a lot of science behind teams in sports, but not so much in tech. And that's somewhat mind-boggling. But it turns out it's actually a really hard problem to solve. We got our start by establishing a team graph that captures who works well with whom on what, building what we believe to be the missing dataset of the creative economy. Because suddenly, and that's also why we were waiting so long to come out of stealth and establish in your category, you think we've been thinking about work for generations as something that you do synchronously with a bunch of people that somehow have to show up together and do this type of work, fulfilling their roles. But when you think about the knowledge economy and what truly is valuable, it's about solving challenges, solving challenges of a higher order that absolutely necessitate a group of highly-skilled professionals with different skillsets, with a diversity of backgrounds coming together in an efficient way. So we realize, I think something that a lot of people know, which is that teams, cross-functional, mission, kind of outcome-driven teams are actually the core unit of work of the knowledge economy. Productizing it is really a starting point that we took on building the world's first team formation platform, essentially enabling companies to say, okay, I have this initiative I'm trying to drive towards. I may already have people working on it, I may not. I need to plan out what is the right team that can drive that outcome and then use a team to form that team pretty much right away with people that are not just skilled to do that and not just that it can collaborate well, but also to actually care to solve that actual problem. Kind of framing motivation into work. So to recap, basically, we used to talk about work as jobs, then we talked about tasks, then we talked about projects. Actually, to solve the higher-order challenges, you have to talk about missions, where you talk about the outcome and you frame based on that the work and then you ask yourself the question of what is the right team to accomplish that outcome? If I'm a company and I'm buying into this, as I've read about teams, I know teams are important, I watch my favorite sport, I get the sports analogy. Give me an example where a team and the team graph really shines, give me a real scenario, maybe a customer scenario where you're like, hey, this is the prime example of what I need. All right, let's talk about what just launched, in fact, yesterday. This app called Sharpen, which was built by Magro Hill, a 150-year-old publisher that everyone knows that has amazing content, amazing brand, obviously, but is certainly not known as a technology company. And yet, you have stakeholders and leaders of the company that realize that, hey, their users are on mobile, that they could go directly to them with the kind of digital experience that would actually engage people who wanna study, leveraging the incredible content capabilities and additional capabilities of the company. But it's building it in a way that is, you know, workplace, consumer product type of challenge. It's extremely hard to build something like this. There's like a massive graveyard of startups which try to do that. Magro Hill started two years ago with a product leader from A-Team and then that helped, you know, just even understand kind of the cycle of what that looks like. And then once there was a little bit of activation energy around that, and that required like building bind with the board and different stakeholders, different parts of the organization, then they could use the team building capability to build up the next layer and bring on the right iOS development leader, the right backend leader, and then expand from there to the point where now it's 25 people that are all connected through the team graph, essentially, that could organically expand, shrink, and up and kind of scale up and down based on the myriad of skills and challenges that's building something like this requires over the course of two years. And that's how they could build something that is very clearly industry defining, you know, the type of products that you would expect from a tech giant at best. To me, it's clear they even beat that level. And the only way to do something like this is through team, but not just team at one moment in time, but rather the team evolving over time. Let's talk about the talent for a second. It used to be that, you know, independent work or independent workers may not have been able to get a job at, say, a Google or a Microsoft or an Amazon. And what I've been seeing is a lot of people, actually the best people at some of those companies, are exiting and saying, hey, I want to work in a different way. And so you're able to get access in the independent market to people that were used to only be able to go to big corporations. What are you seeing with your community and your talent network? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, in many ways, when we look at the former versions, iterations of online work, this is definitely what it is. And I think you wrote about that in your book where it was first understood to be something like, oh, I can monetize my tasks, the skills that I have to make money on the side. But then suddenly you started seeing people very much at the edge of their seat, realizing that they wanted to pursue their craft with autonomy. I think it came from just this desire and this understanding that at the highest skilled level of product builders in particular and highly skilled professionals at large, you have endless opportunities. And that is just a question of, are you doing something that's fulfilling to you? Because if you have that motivation in working with the right people, that's a life worth living. That's where you can create literally exponential results both economically, professionally, and so forth. So we started seeing more and more people that are looking at like, wait a second, why aren't I working on things that I care about that I really want to move forward with really good people that I can learn from, learn with, build with? For me, it started from very early on where I was doing my first startup. I was like 23 years old, one of my favorite engineer that I recruited from the military where I was before quit and said, look, I want to go freelance with my best friend. And I did not understand that at all. I was like, what are you talking about? That's ridiculous. Years later, he's still doing that. Obviously it's not in any of the platforms because that would be commoditizing his unbelievable kind of top zero one-man person skill. But he's still doing that and he's having a blast. And you see more and more people doing that. For me, the expression of living autonomously, working on problems that I care about with good people was to build startups. But obviously that's not the only solution. So in a way, we've designed that network, that team-driven network, that unlocks this higher order challenges for the people that kind of qualify to that very high bar of being able to build great things. Now, we've been surprised. We've been surprised to see more and more of the top people at TechGiants and other really sought after jobs, leave those structures to basically say, I want to pursue my career for autonomy. I want to participate in a new way of doing things. Now, we think, you know, we're seeing something that has been not talked about as much, which is the social contract with companies in a way has been broken. That the employee-employer relationship has been fundamentally disrupted. Remember what happened in May 2020 when we thought the world was ending? Companies simply just lay people off. They're like, sorry, the world's ending, the pandemic, where no idea would happen, you got to go. And then a couple of months later, people are like, oh, wait a second, the world is not ending. Please come back. Right? And then people are like, wait a second, what are you talking about? I thought I had stability. I always thought it was interesting that companies, and they backed off of this language, tried to act like it was a family. Oh, come join our family. It's like, hey, families don't kick you out of the house for no good reason because, you know, dad had a bad mom. It was the one they improved our cash flow, right? Yeah, right. No, exactly. You even saw profitable companies lay people off. And by the way, this happened again just now, this year, the downturn again, profitable companies even, right? Let it on the ones that had to fold. A profitable companies are like, look, we have to cut costs, right? So like you guys are laid off. Like what second time in two years that people are laid off? So then you kind of revisit this whole contract when you said, okay, I'm going to let you tell me, employee, what to do, where to be, who to do it with, and you're going to give me stability. Well, there's no stability. So more and more people are like, wait, I'm giving away so much, but I'm actually not getting anything back. But then you also realize that that's the right thing for companies in many ways. So this McKinsey report that just came out, that's absolutely amazing, talks about one third of high skilled professionals earning over 150k a year are now independent, right? And we're also seeing that many companies are not equipped, haven't yet adapted to that. But the ones who do very quickly realize that this idea of pixelated workforce or hybrid workforce, right, is actually really powerful because the surface area of companies is just expanding and the pace is expanding. So particularly in a time where you have a downturn economically, you're asked to build high margin, high growth products very quickly, typically with tech levers behind them, without increasing overhead. That's exactly the type of benefits that you would get from cloud-based teams and those type of hybrid workforce methods. So you see that not only is the talent, is talent is now exiting a lot of the typical workforce and the kind of one job mentality, thinking much more in terms of portfolio, realizing that the opportunity cost is higher than ever and that self-reliance matters so much. We're also seeing companies realizing that that's the way that they can actually excel, build much healthier businesses that move faster and that can draw on expertise and build thoughtful teams in a way and in a pace that was before that, absolutely unavailable. I was down in Dallas a week ago, we actually did a bunch of episodes of the podcast and I was talking to some HR leaders and it was interesting because they almost look shell-shocked and part of it was that for years, their job was to retain. Hey, Ravi was a good engineer, we have this problem, my job is to figure out how to retain him and now they don't have the structure or the tools to go and deal with someone who wants to have a portfolio career, right? So when you come in, you say it's called moonlighting. If you're doing a side hustle, it's called moonlighting and they have compliance for good and bad reasons but they have compliance things that say you can't do that. Your company computer, remember the days when the company owned the phone, like companies don't own phones anymore and so there's these really interesting lines that companies just don't have the tool sets to do that. It leads me to the question, when you're out talking about the world that you're building, what is the main challenge to a customer to buy into the idea that, hey, I have some of the world's best talent who already comes hydrated to be able to work together, let's get going. What are the blockers in that conversation? Why isn't everyone signing up for ATEAM today? Well, first of all, you have to get in, you have to be approved to be a member of ATEAM and the same way that ATEAMers are qualified and vetted through long processes, and to get in similarly with companies because we're trying to build this kind of a topia for builders where the most interesting things are being built from companies ranging from startups to Fortune 5 render it, incumbents and tech companies alike. But the challenge often what we find is when faced with the older model of thinking of companies, which is based on headcount and departments, because it turns out talented people don't wanna be part of a spreadsheet that says, like, I need 300 product managers, engineers, whatever, because I don't wanna be engineer number 257, doesn't matter how cool your company is, and your company may be really cool, but the bigger it gets, the more diluted it becomes, the connection between my work and the value I'm creating and the overall mission of the company. So the transformation that we're seeing by some of the most forward-thinking leaders and HR leaders in particular, now start to think in terms of outcomes and initiatives instead of thinking in terms of headcount, because the question really becomes not just what have you budgeted beginning of the year and hiring a bunch of people based on that spreadsheet, but rather what are the outcomes you're really trying to drive towards? And what is the team that you need to maximize your chances to actually accomplish that outcome? When you start thinking that way, that's when you can attract people, even internally, even from your existing workforce, forget moonlighting, but people you already hired to actually sign up and say, yes, I wanna go on that mission, I wanna help improve monetization, reduce, improve margins, or build this new product, absolutely, and I'm gonna sign up for that, right? Similarly, you're gonna retain them because they committed to that very tangible outcome and you let a group, be autonomous, cross-functional, ideally, to be able to accomplish an initiative, an outcome, end to end. When we get them to think that way, a team is incredibly powerful in supercharging their existing teams or creating new ones. When you're stuck on like, I need an engineer this and that and that, that's a little bit, that's commentizing even for, like we were even concerned about bringing this up because a team is gonna be like, wait a second, like I'm not a code monkey, right? I'm not like writing lines of codes, I'm trying to solve problems here. It's interesting, cause we all know in the back of our heads that a clear, concise mission or an outcome is what everyone wants, right? And I've had to learn this hiring freelancers, like you have to be, you have to do a bunch of upfront thinking. Hey, this is kind of what I'm thinking, this is what I, hey, well, changes we go, but this is my hypothesis that I'm running with. Where did it all break down in companies where you're completely disconnected from the mission. There's 55 different KPIs. Every time you turn around a new exec comes in and shoots KPIs and you've got people that don't understand, you know, what they're working on. How did that happen? Yeah, that's a great question. I think more often than not, even asking the simplest question, and it happens also with founders of startups when the organization are tiny, let alone when they're massive, where you're just like, okay, what are you top initiatives here? Like they can recite the roadmap and there are a list of things to do, but when you are asked to zoom out, like even if you ask me right now, like one of my top outcomes that I really need to reach, it takes a second because it's hard to zoom out and actually think about the why I'm doing what I'm doing, even though that is the main driver and motivator, right? I mean, at the end of the day, if you want to summarize high functioning teams, it's mission focus and trust, right? But just having that mission focus is challenging to your point. I think the question is scale of how do you, like the scale that we know is a supply chain type of chain, type of scale, where it's like, you do this and then that other link will do this and that other link will do this. To work in an integrative way that actually goes towards a goal is something that is cross functional by nature and therefore harder to isolate. But I think that change is happening because there's no choice. There's no choice because every other method is either a repellent for good talent and people just living in your company because they're like, I don't want to be a part of this thing or you can't hire the right people. Well, similarly, you can't move fast enough. So I think you're seeing many companies going after this and actually you see very large enterprises making headway into this faster than at some startups. In fact, we started working with Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School who is the co-managing director of Future Outwork there because the rate is research from a few years ago that was talking about that transition happening with some companies that are starting to map out actually the missions within the company. So you see that if there is one defining moment to rewire the way companies build, to change the models of company building, it's now. And I think that will make the difference between the companies that stay behind and over time die and the companies that actually accelerate despite all the challenges that are happening because there's one thing that's certain is that uncertainty is here to stay in building resilient models. And we talk about anti-fragility and so forth, building moat to bring and retain top talent whether they're contractors full-time employee does not matter, right? And to get the buy-in from the 10x type of people that come together and actually drive the results that will help you crush it is absolutely paramount. And it's a conversation today that's happening with HR leaders that more and more are becoming those pioneers of new company models to boards, to every leader and every thinker of company building. People often ask me why I do this podcast. And I think it's to help people who believe there's a better way start to understand, especially with founders like yourself, start to understand what they could do. So if you're out there and you're listening and you're on a board or you're an executive and you're saying, hey, I'm having a challenge retaining people or getting the right people. Models like A-Team are a great place to dig in. So I just wanted to plug and try to be tactical so that hopefully more and more people go to companies like A-Team and start experiencing because once you go there, you don't come back. Once you start in finding, once you find the right freelancer or the right independent worker and there's a system or platform that allows, makes that easy, you don't go back. You look at the sort of archaic staffing and hiring models as something you did in the 80s. Yeah, totally. One of my favorite- We can give you a code for to jump the wait list. Happy to. And I would say that, you know, we start with having the conversation even on building your mission map and sending what are the outcomes because that can be helpful even with your current teams, even without bringing on A-Teams to supercharge existing teams or create new ones. And that's already very helpful. So we're happy to have those conversations and would highly encourage people to think about the outcomes that truly wanna drive, particularly at a time where we need to cut the things that are not essential to focus on the things that are and really drive the outcomes that we need to get. Yeah, saying no is often the most powerful thing. Yeah. Sounds like a SaaS product. Literally, you could just start a software product that helps people prioritize and get to outcomes. This is my favorite part of the show that I recently added. It's a section where my daughter, Sydney, gets to ask you a question. I love that. I'm Sydney. I like to build Legos. When you were my age, what did you like to build? Okay, wonderful. Prime time to learn about object-oriented programming. Actually, the best thing that you could possibly learn because as kids, and you know this, you are asking questions all the time and you're asking the best questions. For some reason, we forget to ask this question as we grow older because we get somehow, we just already know we're not gonna have all the answers, but asking this question is so powerful. So to have a way to make sense of the world like a system, like a machine, where you already know that most of it you don't understand but you understand how things interact between one another is the key that enables you to then look at reality, look at the world around you, that you may not fully understand. In fact, most of it we don't really understand, but still gives you a way to systematize it so you can impact it, so you can change it, so you can improve it. And that is the most liberating thing that can happen. So I would encourage you, Sydney, to talk to your dad about teaching you very, very basic programming, get you to books or the games or the coding languages and get you a start because you're gonna basically create lenses and frameworks to view the world in a way that lets you control it and lets you improve it. I've asked that question, I've done this segment about seven or eight times and I think that is the advice that she's gonna listen to the most because you said, go out and let me play games. I think that's what she's gonna hear. Have your dad buy me coding games. So, hey, thank you so much. If somebody wants to learn more about the work that you're doing, what's the best way to get in touch with you? Rafferlade.team, otherwise, A.team, I'll create a link for you particularly so that you can have your own link to refer people and so that we make sure that we speak with them ASAP. Sounds great. Thank you so much for your time and again, congratulations on the success and look forward to seeing the amazing work that you and the A-teamers do in the future. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you.
