The importance of naivety for big life decisions

In this episode, Tom talks about the importance of naivety for big life decisions, closing the gap between Wordpress and enterprise companies and navigating legal challenges in remote, borderless tech companies.

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Charles Brecque

Welcome to the Legislate podcast, a place to learn about the latest insights and trends in business, technology and contract drafting. Today, I'm excited to welcome Tom Wilmott on the show. Tom is the co-founder and CEO at Human Made, the enterprise WordPress agency, which has worked with brands such as TechCrunch, Google and The Sun. Tom, thank you for taking the time. Would you like to please share a bit of background about yourself and Human Made?

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Tom Willmot

Sure, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So my name's Tom, I'm the CEO of Humanmade. I live over in France with my wife and two kids. Humanmade is a remote company, and has been since its inception about 12 years ago. Hence the reason I'm able to live out in rural France and still run the tech company. We're about 100 people spread across, I think, 26 countries at last count. And as you said, we specialise inkind of high-end WordPress. So that's in the form of our agency work, where we're working usually with big name brands or complicated enterprise clients who are using WordPress usually for kind of mission critical things. Think kind of digital platforms, maybe they're spending half a million plus a year or something and they're using WordPress as part of that and they need to go beyond the kind of default, the default out of the box WordPress experience.

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And then alongside our agency, we have a WordPress powered platform, which is really kind of cloud hosting plus a kind of tool set for marketers. So that's all about  bringing the power of WordPress and the benefits of open source to ambitious enterprise marketing teams who love the ease of use of WordPress, but they wish it had some additional features and perhaps they're struggling to get it past their IT teams and compliance and we kind of specialise in bridging that gap.

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Charles Brecque

That's great. And I guess for our listeners, I'm sure most people have heard of WordPress, but are you able to just give a quick 101?

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Tom Willmot

Yeah, yeah. So it is the world's most popular content management system. And so I think something like 45% of the top 1 million sites are running WordPress. So that's really, it's the piece of software which you, as the owner of the site, log into and edit your content, publish your pages. And so it's got incredibly high market share on the one side, which makes it quite interesting. It's become kind of the operating system for the open web almost.

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Everybody uses it. It's very, very quick and easy to get started, all the way up to the high end. All the Fortune 2000 use it in one capacity or another. And I think the other interesting thing about it is it's open source, right? So it's developed by volunteers. It's a long running project. It's about to hit its 20th anniversary actually this year, so that's pretty exciting.

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And yeah, hundreds, perhaps even a couple of thousand people around the world volunteer their time to build that software. That's a big part of our ethos as a company. We kind of grew up out of that open source ecosystem and have then built a business around it. And you find that's pretty common in the WordPress ecosystem. It's a lot of businesses that kind of grew up out of that open source community and have found a way to offer additional value-add services around that kind of core open source platform.

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Charles Brecque

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Yeah. Thank you very much for the rundown and disclaimer. We don't actually use WordPress.

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Tom Willmot

I was going to ask, I mean, maybe you use it, but you probably had a choice to use it

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at some point.

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Charles Brecque

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I am a bit of a website geek and I do have a couple of domains running on WordPress, but I personally am more comfortable with Webflow, but that is just because it's the first tool I started using and, and therefore, have a bit of a bias towards Webflow.

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Tom Willmot

Makes sense. Yeah, I love Webflow as well. That's also a really great tool.

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Charles Brecque

But I'm impressed that you have worked with companies like TechCrunch, I'm impressed that they actually use WordPress. So, since starting the company 12 years ago, what's been your favourite moment so far?

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Tom Willmot

I mean, that's a somewhat difficult question, I suppose.

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Like it's, you know, running a company for that long has many highs and lows, as I'm sure you'll be experiencing too. Hmm, my favourite moment. I mean, I would say it's difficult to pick one, but I mean, my favourite moments are, we're a distributed company. And so, as I said, you know, there's people all over the world, we're all working together remotely, something that's not uncommon these days at all, but that was uncommon when we started doing it. And once a year, we all get together as a company for our annual company meetup. Those are usually where my favourite moments happen. We work really intensely together all year, but also strangely, the best we can do is video chat. And that always leaves something to be desired. And so usually when we come together as a group.

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We both feel like we're meeting each other for the first time because we've not spent that much time actually in person together. But also we know each other incredibly well because we've been working together very closely and as I said, I've kind of experienced the highs and lows of business that year. So those usually end up being very intense and very rewarding weeks together. We usually try and do them in a different place each year somewhere. We did one in a castle in Italy and another one in Sri Lanka the year after that. We just did one last year in Greece. So yeah, those are usually pretty great and especially because we're so broadly distributed. We've got people coming from all countries and continents across the world.

It's always fascinating learning about each other's cultures and countries, people sharing their stories of where they're from and what life's like, wherever that is. And yeah, those are probably my favourite moments.

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Charles Brecque

And I guess with a team that's so big, it must be quite a logistical operation.

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Tom Willmot

Yes, yeah, it is, hugely so. I mean, you know, I remember with some fondness, you know, I won't lie, the early days where there was just a handful of us and we really could all just jump on a plane somewhere and hire a big Airbnb and figure it all out ourselves. And yeah, through the years, you know, that became less and less possible. And now, yeah, now it's like akin to organising a medium-sized conference or something. It's difficult to find venues that can take that many people and the logistics of all the catering and the transport and the health and safety

and the structure of the work while we're there.

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With that many people, of course, there's enough people that things always go wrong with some people inevitably. And so, yeah, it's usually something we need to start organising several months in advance. And, you know, it's not unusual for people who work here, you know, that they perhaps are not used to travelling. So remotely, you know, so far also, like I know, when we went to Sri Lanka, we had quite a lot of people who'd, you know, that was a big deal to travel all the way. So yeah, yeah, they're pretty logistically complicated. And to be honest, if anything, we're starting to shift to like an 18 month cycle or something, just because 12 months ends up being a pretty short amount of time to turn around a trip of that size.

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Charles Brecque

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No, that sounds like a challenge, but a fun challenge.

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Tim Willmot

It is.

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Charles Brecque 

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Yeah. And what do you wish you'd known before starting Human Made?

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Gosh.

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I mean, so many things, you know. I've got, in fact, I was chatting to a friend just a few months ago who'd run a company of a slightly larger human made actually, and then had exited that company and was starting again. And I was definitely thinking, "Gosh, imagine getting to start again, but with everything you've learned and all the experience, you know, it's kind of like, that's a pretty attractive proposition."

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Hmm, what do I wish I'd have known if I was starting human made?

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I don't know. I worry actually that had I have known everything, you know, perhaps I wouldn't have gone into it so naively. I'm kind of a bit of a believer in the importance of naivete for big life decisions like that. So maybe actually I would, even if I did meet my younger self, perhaps I wouldn't tell them. Perhaps I'd just give them a little push and say, "Go for it, it'll be all right”. 

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Charles Brecque

Yeah, that's a great tip and obviously before starting your company everyone says it's hard but you never know until you actually start. 

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Tom Willmot

No, and you just don't know which bits you're going to find hard, you know, and which bits are ultimately going to be the bits that are rewarding and, you know, give you the energy to keep going through those hard times. So yeah, I don't know

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I don't know if there's any one specific thing as much as just encouragement to do it.

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Charles Brecque

Yeah, that's a great piece of advice. And you've been around for 12 years. Where do you see yourself and Human Made in the next 10 years?

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Tom Willmot

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting time for the web and I think particularly the open web and for WordPress, which is one of the leading open web platforms. And so I think particularly for enterprise, I think we're kind of coming out of a cycle of some of these really large enterprise platforms like with Adobe or Sitecore. There are several of them, kind of large, expensive, proprietary platforms, which offer a lot of features, but ultimately lock clients in. And, you know, perhaps included a lot of stuff that companies don't actually really need. So they're kind of paying for stuff they don't need. And so I think we're seeing a bit of a shift back to the open web, even in consumer web, it feels like social media is having a bit of a reckoning. Blogging's back. The kind of open web, I think people are missing that more than ever. And I think there's kind of a business version of that too, becoming more and more important to not have your marketing channels and your publishing channels totally owned by one of the big tech companies.

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I think a lot of the prevailing winds are in open source and kind of the open web's favour.

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And WordPress is definitely the best positioned platform to take advantage of that. And so, that kind of mission of closing the gap between WordPress and enterprise companies, I see that as really being the highest impact thing we can be doing over the next 10 years.

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If in 10 years time, the open web and WordPress has really been at the forefront of that, and we've played a crucial role in its continued growth, then I'll be happy.

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Charles Brecque

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- Well, it seems like you're perfectly positioned to make the most of this trend.

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Tom Willmot

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- I hope so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we should be. So maybe it's ours to mess up.

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Charles Brecque

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- I don't think so! And as a busy founder CEO, I imagine you must come across quite a few contracts and legal documents. What are the key contracts you interact with the most?

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Tom Willmot

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Yeah, I mean it's, you know, being a distributed company, it's significantly more complicated I suppose, especially around contracts and kind of legal agreements. Like we have employees across a lot of countries and so there ends up being kind of unique situations with all of those, whether we've got a subsidiary in the country that we can employ them through, or some kind of contract relationship or some third party kind of EPO or something. And then similarly with our clients, you know, again, we're working with clients across the globe and again, maybe that's through one of our subsidiaries, maybe that's through our UK parent. And so usually it's either employment contracts, MSAs, those kinds of things that we're dealing with most and we're usually trying to navigate, you know, generally the legal business environment is not particularly suited to borderless remote tech companies as I'm sure you'll be well aware and so we're usually navigating the friction of that in one way or the other and yeah, trying to understand where, you know, how it can be made to work, you know, where we know we want to employ this person or we know we want to work with this client and trying to figure out a way through to enable that.

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Charles Brecque

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And with those, for example, employment contracts, what are maybe some of the key issues that you encounter and how do you overcome them?

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Tom Willmot

Yeah, often it's, I mean, all the way to quite simple things like, you know, employment contracts in some number of countries that we have employees in, you know, they require hard copies and wet signatures and notarized documents and things like that. Like, you know, that's a, still a common side mission I have on most of my international trips is that, it's an opportunity to pop into a notary wherever I am and do, you know, update my notarized documents in that country so that we can then continue to use them. And that can get pretty complicated. Like I'm going through that at the moment with our Australian subsidiary, I need to notarize my passport and a bunch of other stuff, to satisfy their requirements of being a director of a company there and they are not well set up for doing that online with someone out of the country.

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So yeah, that tends to be a fairly simple thing, but the difference between being able to sign something online or like email a scan versus hard copies can actually have a big impact. There have been occasions where we have literally had to fly to another country in order to sign a contract or something, which is ludicrous in today's world. And then probably the more complicated answer is, is the end of that is like the amount of local jurisdiction law knowledge we end up needing. So a not so nice example, but we recently went through a round of layoffs and we had to work with like a HR advice team in every single jurisdiction. And so that massively complicates any situation like that whether it's hiring or changes to our employment policies or whatever.

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There's a huge amount of local law work that we need to find partner law firms in those local jurisdictions and usually pay a lot of money for a bit of specific advice, which is frustrating.

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Charles Brecque 

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- Definitely sounds complicated when you're in so many locations, but I'm sure the benefits outweigh the costs.

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Tom Willmot

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- Yeah, I mean, one of our principles of, you know, being a distributed company and hiring people remotely, you know, we really work hard to abstract away that complication from our employees. Like it's kind of not their fault they're being hired by a remote company. We take that responsibility on and we try and offer, as much as we can, a kind of universal experience to employees and a kind of fair and balanced set of policies across all those jurisdictions.

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So again, we're the ones eating the cost always of the complexity of trying to, yeah, trying to balance all of those different, sometimes competing local jurisdictions.

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Charles Brecque 

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- Yeah, well, one thing that we've encountered is we set up a branch in Spain because cause our software team is in Spain and there's obviously a difference between holidays, but there are all sorts of Spanish laws that we weren't aware of that our local advisors have told us about. And that's been a very interesting process.

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Tom Willmot

Yeah, absolutely. And it can quite quickly become like a significant part of,or it adds friction to everything that you're wanting to do then around holiday policy or whatever, yeah.

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Charles Brecque

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- Yeah, well, thank you for sharing. Tom, I'm conscious I've already taken a lot of your time so I'm going to ask you the closing question we ask all our guests. If you're being sent a contract to sign today, what would impress you?

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Tom Willmot

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- I mean, I think the thing that impresses me most is like the brevity and conciseness and kind of level of ease of understanding. I was a big fan back in the day when I was a freelance web designer prior to founding Human Made. And I forget his name now, but there was a web designer in the UK, Andy Clark, his name was. And he'd shared the contract he developed for all of his freelance work. And it was like a one page, nicely written. So I was always a fan of, as little kind of overly legally speak as possible. You know, that's definitely not reflected in most of our contracts these days. I've had to give up on quite a lot of that as we've grown. So yeah, I think probably the thing that would impress me the most would be the brevity, conciseness and reasonableness of the language. And then I mean, it's definitely comes down to just like the ease of then interacting with that, like the difference between being able to just sign something online and, you know, being pointed to exactly which bits of the contract you need to fill in. That's something that's another simple thing, but like I get, I'll get a big pack of documents through the post. I don't even know, you know, I missed a little bit that highlights these are the fields you need to fill in. I don't even know what I'm supposed to fill in, you know. So yeah, those are probably the two things that are incredibly valuable.

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And you know, the difference between a slick kind of concise contract, which tells you exactly which fields to fill in, and you can do it on your phone, I mean, that can be a five minute interaction versus, I've got to block out half a day and deal with this paper version and go and FedEx it across the country. And, you know, that's actually a huge, huge difference between those two experiences.

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And as someone who runs a remote company, I'm excited by this shift to remote we've seen in the last few years, because I feel like that's gonna drive a lot of innovation in this kind of thing where like, this has been very high friction for quite a long time and it hasn't really been the innovation you'd want, I guess mostly because there was only a few of us who really all in on remote. Now it's kind of everyone's problem.

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I think we're going to do a much better job of solving it quickly. So that's quite exciting.

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Yeah, I definitely think the pandemic helped accelerate the shift towards e-signatures and I do think there's also been quite a lot of lobbying to, make digital signatures more accepted. Especially for things like witnessing where ultimately the, the server is witnessing you sign.

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Tom Willmot

Right. Why, why do I need to get someone else to do it? 

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Charles Brecque

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Yeah, exactly. So nice. Yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, hopefully countries

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like Australia will follow them. 

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Tom Willmot

Hope so. 

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Charles Brecque

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Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Tom, for taking the time to be on the podcast. Best of luck, growing human made and I look forward to staying in touch. 

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Tom Willmot

Cool. Thanks very much, Charles. Appreciate the invite to be on and best of luck with everything you're doing at Legislate.

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