PeopleStar_Tony Perez: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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PeopleStar Podcast Intro:
Welcome to the PeopleStar Podcast. We deliver leadership perspectives from industry experts on their people, architecture, routines, and culture as they solve HRs newest challenges. And now your host Julie Rieken.

Julie Rieken:
Hello, it's Julie Rieken, host of the PeopleStar Podcast, and today, I'm super excited. I've got with me Tony Perez, and Tony and I know one another, we go back because we share commonality with our investment group, and Tony and I got to know one another when he was the CEO of Sucuri, and he has had some super interesting experiences and Tony then moved on, Tony, I believe that you exited your company in about 2017 to GoDaddy and that you're working on some new projects now. Is that right?

Tony Perez:
Yes, ma'am. That's true.

Julie Rieken:
Cool. Some of your experiences, I think, and the history of this transition are going to be really relevant to people today, so I'm excited to talk with you. So let's just get an update on where you're at today, Tony, and maybe give us a little bit of that interesting backstory on how you went from having a startup company into working something more corporate at GoDaddy and what was all that about?

Tony Perez:
Oh goodness, I know. So yeah, so I'll give you the quick too-long didn't read version of this. So I was a former marine, many, many moons ago for a while as a defense contractor, and in that process I was introduced to Daniel Cid back in 2009 timeframe. At that time, he had this project Sucuri and, which is a website security company, and he invited me on. So fast-forward in 2017, I was the CEO at the time, we were about one hundred and ten people across twenty-seven different countries, everybody working remotely, we didn't have a physical location anywhere, it caused all kinds of problems, but we exited it to GoDaddy. And then we went to GoDaddy from 2017 to 2020, where we then took the platform, we integrated it and we grew it within the GoDaddy stack and grew the team to about two hundred and fifty people, some co-located running the hybrid configuration between remote work and co-located, which is another problem in itself. And so that was fun. And then these days, I kind of went back from the corporate world back to the startup world, and I'm running two startups at the same time, thinking that one wasn't enough with CleanBrowsing.org and NOC.org, one being a content filtering platform and the other being a non-authoritative DNS, CDN, WAF, it's kind of similar to what we were doing before so, that's the TLDR version of what's been going on. But it's kind of like this roller coaster ride, you know, start really small, go really big, go even bigger in the back to small.

Julie Rieken:
Tony, that's because you're crazy that you're willing to go back into two startups. But speaking of crazy, let's go back. You mentioned you started Sucuri back when? At least 12 years ago, you were doing some things that hadn't really even hit yet. The idea of 27 countries and people being remote, and there's one thing that I think our listeners could really hone in on here, and I think you've got experience in this space, 27 countries, remote and that was actually specific, people were not co-located. Tony, how did you lead people across remote and what were the challenges that you faced? Can you just talk to us about that?

Tony Perez:
Well, so the times then were very different than they are now. And when we first started Sucuri there were four of us, one was in Brazil, one was in California and one was in Canada and one was in Afghanistan. I was in Afghanistan, so I was a defense contractor, and we couldn't come to agreement on location. And so we kind of tripped into the world of remote work before we knew what remote work was. At the time, I think like the biggest remote organization was probably automatic with WordPress, with some 500 people across multiple countries, you had Basecamp that was pushing a lot of remote work, kind of changing the way we work. It was kind of like a, the early pioneering days. Of course, in a post-pandemic world, everyone is familiar with remote work, everybody wants it, nobody wants to go back into the co-located environment. And so but it was very interesting because at the time, we didn't kind of have a playbook for how to doing this and everything from like, how do we recruit in this world? Do we need to see a person? Do we not? And over time, we kind of started to refine some of our approaches, and I'd like to say that kind of got pretty good and comfortable with this world of remote work. So much so that when we went into the co-located space, it was a bit uncomfortable. We were kind of like, Oh, OK, hi, how are you? We got to do social things now, but there were a couple of different things that we really enjoyed about remote work and one of them being that A, we found that, and this wasn't always the case, but especially with knowledge workers, right? Engineers, developers, even marketers, and salespeople like we realized that we didn't like the burden of having to physically be with someone else to kind of like, are they producing or they're not? In fact, we have to change our mindset and some of the interviewing processes we would always start off with like trust has to be earned, but we're always going to give it to you first, we have to give it to you first, and we're going to just hope that that's going to be returned, and the way we're going to measure that is simply by your results. Now, as a knowledge worker, it's a little bit different, right? Because I can see, like, hey, were they able to build this thing that I need, right? I don't care how long that takes you. I'm going to pay you whatever the rate is, whatever we're talking about, just get it done, and we would be able to see the output of that, right? And if they're producing, and they're getting, they're hitting the mouse doesn't do it, and then we, then we feel like it was a good hire and that's what we would focus on and what we saw a lot when we transition over to the big corporate side was like there was this need to see work being done.

Julie Rieken:
Interesting.

Tony Perez:
Versus this acceptance of like just wait for the work to be done, right? And like there's a separation between management and the people actually doing the work. There just, sometimes you get really fat up top and everybody's got ideas and we all kind of forget there's actually only a few people that are actually doing, right? So it's really easy to create to-do lists and you're like, why isn't it getting it done? I was like, well, there's this one little guy down here with three managers and four directors and five VPs, that's like just getting collapsed. And so when we started, we were very adamant about having a very flat structure, allowing us to kind of really kind of see what the world was doing in the organization. Now, we had a lot of pressure to do a traditional triangle, right? Where we started adding multiple middle layers and stuff like that. But what we noticed is we actually added a lot of roadblocks and just issues in productivity by adding all those additional layers. And so for us, it was just simple because we we're so small. And so even when we exited at one hundred and ten, we were actually very flat. And the way we approach the problem was, the way we like to think about it is, we just we would instill trust in the individual even before they had earned it and just we're hiring you to do this job, we assume that even if you don't know how to do this job, you're going to figure it out, good luck. Kind of like the equivalent of throwing them in the deep end of the pool and I hope you can swim and whether it's right or wrong. I think that this approach kind of became the staple of how we operated and worked with our teams. And what we found is a lot of the team members really enjoyed that, and it actually helped us refine the type of individual who we are looking for, which we're like self-driven, right? Creative. Like, we weren't looking for people that had all the answers, but we were looking for people that were creative enough to find the answers, which is what was more important to us than anything else. I don't care what books you read or what degrees you had, but like, are you creative enough to figure something out? In fact, what's really interesting is that it's actually blended to how we hired.

Julie Rieken:
I was going to ask that! How did you, how did you see that when you were hiring? Because you're seeing, I mean, there are 27 countries, they are remote, and you're looking for creativity, how did you find that?

Tony Perez:
Well, so when at Sucuri specifically, it was very weird, because when we first started, we kind of brought in a lot of friends and people that we had relations with and where we would do it is based on, we brought in people that worked in retail, we brought people that were just completely disconnected from tech, they didn't understand tech, but they were very interested in it and were really creative, and the reason is they had no biases, right?

Julie Rieken:
Interesting.

Tony Perez:
So, in the Marine Corps, for instance, they love it when somebody comes into the Marine Corps and doesn't know how to shoot a rifle, right?

Julie Rieken:
Why?

Tony Perez:
Well, because they have no bad habits, they have no biases, they have no ways, that, you know, no uncle or dad that showed them how to shoot that was incorrect, that you now have to fix. You have somebody that comes in and says, hey, I approach this problem with, they have nothing blinding them to solutions, right? Our experiences over time, build up how we see the world, what we do is the same with our employees and with employers, et cetera. And so what we found and I actually found this later on as well, as, like when I went to go hire a marketing person or a salesperson that was just ingrained in doing this. They're like, I need the system, I need this tool, I need this thing, I need this process, you will have this, it was all these things that they needed to get their job done. When I went to hire somebody that was new to the space, that didn't understand the space but was hungry to do the space, they were like, oh, could I do this? Could I do that? Like, sure, go do that. They had no like needs that they needed to get the job done, which I personally loved. In fact, with Danny on the engineering side, it was like, it wasn't so much about who you worked for or what degrees you had, but like, what open source code have you contributed to? I mean, Dan is a big open source guy. You know, a lot of the guys that came in early on were some of the early contributors to Ozark, which is what his open source project like, hey, I know this guy, he's been pushing code and he's, he's doing this for free, like he's got to be great if we pay him, right? It was a lot of that kind of thinking that helped us build the initial foundation of Sucuri, and what's really interesting is that at Sucuri, we barely lost any employees through the entire time. I think we had in the 10 years about six employees that left willingly.

Julie Rieken:
Wow, that's incredible.

Tony Perez:
We had really, really strong retention and we approached it just very open, right? So we weren't open about finances and sensitive data. We were, Danny and I are kind of old school about that, but we try to be as receptive as we could and we try to be like as flat as possible. Like we try to create an environment that we wanted when we were coming up, when we were working at places like, hey, trust me to do my job, which is the biggest thing, more than any perks, et cetera, it was like, hey, we're all dependent on you to do this piece, if you don't do this piece, we're not going to go anywhere and people would come through and they would appreciate that level of respect and I don't know if that helped or not, but I think that, I want to say that that was probably one of the biggest things that we had to like mentally unlock in a remote environment because we're so used to like physically seeing each other, we're so used to like, oh, he must be sitting in his computer, so he must be doing something versus like, hey, you have till Friday, I don't care if you do it on an hour, I don't care if you do, it takes you all week, as long as you get that done, you're being part of the team, we're happy with that. That was a big mental thing we had to get over. And I think it's very hard for folks these days.

Julie Rieken:
It is. I've got two follow-up questions to the stories that you've just told. One is about strategic alignment. Let's just say that you empowered somebody with trust to go do something and suddenly your strategy, you have to pivot, how, and you're far away, right? OK, so and you're flat, so OK, so how do you trust them to go do this when and make sure that they're aligned with what you want? Maybe I should say my other one for the, after that, let's just start with that strategic alignment. How did you achieve that?

Tony Perez:
Well, so OK. Strategic alignment is an interesting thing, right? Because stretegic, for me, when I think about strategy like there is no straight line, even when Daniel and I work, right? So Daniel and I each owned a different piece of the business, and we just trusted each other to do the thing, right? Ok, you know, we kind of want to go in this general direction. And so our strategy is always kind of like, you know, if you squint, we kind of want to be over here in this area, I think, and we both had a very strong opinion of how we wanted to get there, right? Like we would get into the baits of like, I want you to believe what I'm saying, you know, and each of us would get into this head. And so we would kind of like agree to each other space and then do our own thing. And so like strategic alignment is never what people think in the sense of like, yep, we shook hands. We were good after that meeting and the train is moving. But in reality, we both agreed on a general outcome like it was very blurred and we both kind of just moved in that direction. And I would argue it was all our team's function the same way.

Julie Rieken:
Well, that's why you needed creative people who could sort of see, I sort of see the destination and I can figure out my path to get there.

Tony Perez:
That's exactly right! And so like, we had to lend our same thinking kind of bled into the rest of the organization. And so it was, when we got a little bit bigger, it started to become a little bit more finite, like, hey, we're looking for specific things, specific targets, but we didn't start thinking that way at all. And when we were first building, it was just kind of, engineering has this really cool thing that they want to build over here, and I would kind of look at it and say, well, how, how are we going to disseminate that? How are we going to engage? How we're going to tell people about that? How are we going to leverage that? And it'd be more like, OK, sales, what do you want to do? Marketing, what do you want to do? And I always used to tell the team, like, I don't have an issue with a bad decision, I have an issue with a bad decision that isn't recognized to be bad fast enough, right? Like don't double down on your bad decision just because you're afraid that you made the bad decision. I want you to correct it, right? And for me, it was more like constant movement, constant moving and then quickly just assessing, like, we didn't have these finite meetings that we would go to in three weeks. Oh, you know, here's what we did, and I think it's failing. It's like, no, I want you to tell me immediately, if you think it's failing, this failing, cut it at the knees, and let's move on to the next thing. We were we were producing at the same rate that engineers were, right? At that high level of velocity, so we're kind of just moving in the general direction and same with engineering. They were kind of moving in that general direction. And over time, we kind of just aligned ourselves, people, you know, the leaders on both sides, obviously, we were very small, very flat, and so we were able to maintain our teams moving in that general direction. Things got a lot more, and I noticed that while I love that way of working, it changed dramatically, we went into a big corporate setting where the dynamic shifted, where I was like, well, here are our organization strategic objectives, and you must now align to that. And it kind of like it's siphoned off a lot of creativity and forced us to.

Julie Rieken:
Oh, wow!

Tony Perez:
It forced us, like now it was, it was a system. No, no, no, no. These, all the cool things, everything cool that we did on the marketing, sales, engineering, product side, all came before the acquisition, the minute the acquisition happened and we became part of a corporate entity, it all pretty much died because now I put guardrails on every group.

Julie Rieken:
You used the word finite, and I think that's a really important word here that it became finite instead of more organic. That's super interesting, Tony.

Tony Perez:
So that was 10, we operated like that for 7-8 years, very organically, like a team member would come in and I was like, wow, yeah, you're going to be the leader of this now. Like, what are we doing there? Like what? Like, what are we doing? I don't know what we're doing, that's why I hired you! And so it was kind of, it was kind of one of those things, right?

Julie Rieken:
Yeah.

Tony Perez:
But they loved it. And what they would produce, some stuff would be really awesome, stuff-stuff would be just horrible. And I'd be like, wow, that sucked, right? But it was never about, for us it was, you know, we wanted them to treat their functions the same way we were treating the startup. And it's just continuous repetition, continuous building, continuously trying like failing is just part of the process. Just be quick enough to say, wow, that was probably a bad idea. Let's not do that one again, you know? And that's, that's kind of how we approach that.

Julie Rieken:
I love that story. That's super interesting, just thinking about the differences in terms of structure and process, and Tony, my second question that I alluded to earlier, it's maybe not as direct connected with this thread, but I really am interested to know it, and so if you'll indulge me in the last question here, I'm just thinking about, here you've got this strategic alignment, you've got high creativity, high trust, how did you build connections between people, between time zones, cultures, alignment? How did you build human connections? Because you said over the course of however many years, you had six people, maybe, ish that decided to leave voluntarily, those connections must have been strong, and the human element is what I'm interested in here, that's a bit related to this whole conversation. And how did you build it?

Tony Perez:
When you go to war, you build these amazing connections when you experience these crazy things, a firefight, a bomb going off, you know, you save someone else, like you build these connections that last a lifetime, even if they only were for a few seconds, right? Well, why do I tell you that? Well, in the business, one of the things that I was taught early on is like as a leader in the Marine Corps, it's like you never assign someone to do something that you yourself are never willing to do, okay? And in fact, you should always be the one front and center doing the work showing them, like if we're going to build a six by six fighting hole, I'm in there digging, I'll be the first one, and I'll be the last one in even after you've quit, okay? That same mindset is pretty much how it applied to almost any management position that I've ever been in. Now, how does that translate? At Sucuri, our battle zones were continues to remediating websites, right? And we would have days that were just out of control. And we're a very slow hiring, and so what that would mean is that a lot of the pressure would come on Daniel and I to do a lot of the work ourselves. Well, somebody would come in, they would do their shift, they would leave. They would come in and they know nobody else is around, but it got done. Well, how did it get done? So our connection again, I think that our connection with our people were very organic and the reason they became, and the fact that they're organic it just takes a lot longer is that we built that bond through in-the-weeds work. It wasn't, I have some magical position that I wear on my collars and then I just say, you will do these things and then they see me on Instagram surfing or doing whatever and doing all this crazy things. We lived and breathed the brand, and I think what happened is a lot of people started to feel that and see that, and they saw that we were in the trenches with them. And I think that they respected that, they may not have like some of us, but they respected that. And they're like, wow, it's 2:00 in the morning, the queue's out of control and they're in the queue with us and they're working with us.

Julie Rieken:
Wow.

Tony Perez:
Right? They're the first ones to respond, they're the first ones to help us, they're addressing my ticket and they've done these other 15 tickets as well, plus doing their job, right? And we were constantly there doing and feeling the pain. And whenever they would feel something, we would address it like, wow, that's a really painful, and so the fact that we were in the weeds, we were able to see the things that were inefficient, the things that didn't make sense, the processes. And so I would always tell people, like everything we've established from a process standpoint, is not set in stone, these aren't the Ten Commandments. So like if you see something that doesn't work, do what you need to do to get around it and then let us know so we can address it and fix it for everyone else. And I think that that early on became the core, the nucleus of how our leaders that grew within us started to function and act. And so when people would come in, they would bleed through like positive peer pressure. So like, hey, I'm not going to tell you like, hey, you should really come do these things, I'm going to keep doing it and show you, and then if you don't recognize that you're not carrying your weight, it might be a conversation to say that this isn't the right place for you. And so we had a very, very tight knit group of one hundred and seven people all around the world, across multiple geographies, languages, religions, because of that reason, we were very sensitive to what was going on around the world. So we had some guys in the Philippines that got hit by a couple of typhoons, we had earthquakes, we had fires, like it was one of those things and we would all rally like, hey, this guy's got to go take care of this, I'll jump in, let me take care of the cue, his position to get that done, right? It was just constant, like in the weeds, in the trenches, in the war, and then the relationship came after that, right? But not.

Julie Rieken:
Interesting.

Tony Perez:
Not granted, this was startup, right? And even though we got a little bit bigger over time, it might be harder in the larger organizations. But that's what's always worked for me, like this servant's leadership, right? Like this idea that, and you'll notice I never like lean on my titles or my position with my people. I always say it was my pleasure to serve you like and it's constant reminder myself like, I am here for you, you know, without you, this company doesn't exist. What we're doing doesn't exist, and I would always kind of lean into that, and I think, and Daniel's very much the same way, and I think they respected that. I think that's what brought about those relationships and that connective glue that you're talking to, that so many of them wanted to stay.

Julie Rieken:
Such an interesting perspective, I think, on being in the trenches and gaining, alignment's not the right word, but maybe even excitement and people being willing to be with you on the journey. That's a super good story, Tony. So thank you for that. This has been really challenging for me as a leader, as I think about the way that I lead and compared to the way that you do and the stories that you've shared really have helped me think a lot, and I hope that it's helped some of our folks think about leadership, remote, growth in new ways. I just want to wrap up on the idea that you are still crazy, that you are working on two startups right now, CleanBrowsing and NOC, NOC.org. Both of those are super exciting and that you have added a new thing to your skills, which is being a part-time rancher. Is that true? Yes, could you just give us a short rundown on what your day outside of technology looks like real quick?

Tony Perez:
Yeah!

Julie Rieken:
Because I think it's, I think it's cool.

Tony Perez:
Yeah, so I have seven heifers. These are cows and haven't had babies yet, and then I have seven horses and we're getting some chickens and I'm looking at some donkeys. And I just kind of like that ranch lifestyle. So I'm not a farmer, so I don't, I don't have thumbs to go grow tomatoes, right? I kill everything that I kind of touch, but I love animals. And so I wake up early in the morning, probably like around 6:30/7, I go out in my feed, then I come in, I do tech to about 3 or 4, and then around that time I go and I kind of work on my horses. So I have a couple of mustangs, they're wild horses that've never been touched, and so I get thrown around a lot. And then sometime in the evening, I'll go check on the cows, feed them, see how they're doing, make sure there's no injuries. But I spend a lot of time like fixing fence because, you know, livestock likes to destroy fencing. So I had to teach myself how to weld, so I can get that done. But that's kind of my day. I mean, so I'll spend about 6-7 hours in tech during the day, and then I'll spend about 4-5 hours, depending on the day, on the livestock. And that's just been something that I've been doing, around kind of when the pandemic started, and it's, it's just it's a great way to just disconnect from tech, right? And just get into something else, and in fact, it's actually where a lot of the creativity happens, like where I think of new things that we want to do or try or explore, it's when my mind isn't in it, is when the best ideas come up.

Julie Rieken:
Ah, super cool! Well, OK, Tony, thanks for being a guest today. Good luck with all things technology, all things ranching, and all the other things, and I'll look forward to staying in touch and just hearing how all of these new adventures are going, so thanks for being a guest today!

Tony Perez:
My pleasure.

PeopleStar Podcast Outro:
Thanks for listening to the PeopleStar Podcast. For the show notes, transcript, resources, and more ways to get a seat at the table, visit us at TrakStar.com/Podcast.

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