[ HTJ Podcast ] Interview with Sean Tierney - Founder of Charity Makeover.

Good, how you doing? I'm pretty good, pretty good.

Yeah, my name is Sean Tierney. I do a lot of things. I run something called Charity Makeover. I've also got a company called Grid Seven where I do sales consulting for startups and early stage companies that are transitioning into that growth mode. And yeah, I live in Lisbon. That's where we met the other night at a digital nomad meetup, and you asked me to be on your show.

Yeah, Grid Seven is really just like an umbrella holding company that I do a lot of things underneath it. The primary thing I'm doing right now is working with early stage startups to get them — well, not early stage, they've figured out product market fit, they're now in that kind of awkward pre-pubescent mode of how do we take this thing that's working and actually start to scale it. I have some good experience. I was five years as the head of marketing and sales for a hosting company, and we grew from eight employees to about 42 employees when I left. So I've got some experience in that mode of how to really ramp up our MRR.

Yeah, I mean SaaS. The company I'm particularly working with right now plays in the WordPress space. It has a caching technology that helps specifically commerce sites run faster. So it's a logical thing: with e-commerce transactions involved, it's just a math equation to figure out what money they're leaving on the table by not being a faster site. So I like things that are an easy sell where it's easy to quantify the opportunity. You just need to go in there and tell the story and do a better job marketing.

Yeah, sure thing. So Charity Makeover — it's funny, I started this as an experiment many years ago. We've done eight of them now. What this is, it's a lot like Startup Weekend if anyone listening is familiar with that initiative, but it's basically a hackathon where we bring people with all different skill sets — maybe 40 people on a Saturday — and you've got developers, designers, copywriters, marketing people, email, SEO gurus, videographers. People from all different walks. And we get together and pick local charities in the place that we're at, and we build stuff to change the game for them in a positive way. Typically this winds up being campaign fundraising type stuff, crowdfunding platforms, email marketing campaigns, whatever they need. These are little local charities that are very good at what they do but not particularly good at the digital marketing stuff. So we basically do a kind of — I think of it like that show Extreme Home Makeover, where they parachute in and fix someone's house. We do that only with the digital aspects of charities. So yeah, I've been doing that for some time. I went full time on it in February, and then of course the pandemic hit and it just changed the game of how we have to operate. So I'm in the midst now of retooling this to be a little bit different. We can't do the big events anymore, but we're going to a smaller event format.

So I had been to a number of Startup Weekends. That event is basically the equivalent of this only instead of helping charities, they bring strangers together and try to invent a conversation together and watch it. It's a super compelling format. It's great because you meet all these people, you learn a lot, you get exposed to different disciplines you never would. And I just kind of fell in love with that format, but I saw a problem with how inefficient it was — wasteful really — because what you had was all these people come together, they get really excited, they build something cool, and then at the end of the weekend they kind of all go their separate ways and this product they just created just vaporizes. It dies. So I thought, could we get that same experience, the same learning benefits and the same fun of the weekend, only instead of it dying after that, if we paired up with local charities then that would live on afterwards and it would help the charities and they'd be thrilled to have it. So yeah, that was the inspiration for it, the genesis of it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's good regardless of if you're a nomad or not. If you're a local, sedentary in your home city, still there's just — it's rewarding. People donate to charity for a reason, but I think the most valuable gift you can donate to a charity that you like is your experience and your unique lifetime of experiences that have culminated in who you are and what you bring. Contributing that towards helping them structurally improve how they do things is far more valuable than whatever monetary donation you're going to make.

So I mean, something that you and I have known about for a while as nomads and remote workers is that remote work is perfectly here to stay. It's adequate, it's — I would argue more effective. And I think this pandemic has kind of brought the rest of the world, it's forced the rest of the world to acknowledge this and to adapt and start to adopt remote work. So clearly that's the biggest trend coming out of this work-wise: people have now powered through that initial awkward phase where they didn't know if they could do this, but now they're doing their jobs remotely. I think that's not going back. I don't think you can put that genie back in the bottle. Once people realize they can work this way and not have a commute, I think people probably miss the office, but there will be some kind of hybrid where there's partially work from home and work at the office a few days a week. But there's no way that you're going to be able as an employer to force people to come into an office after this. There's just too many opportunities for remote work and it's too attractive. So I think that's the major one. I don't know, I'm kicking myself for not buying Zoom stock when it was at 120 when the pandemic started. But yeah, that's the main one that comes to mind.

Yeah, undoubtedly it's not going to be uniform across the board. But I think the important event is you've had enough critical mass now adopt this. And a phenomenon you're going to see is that the best people are always the ones who will leave first and who will demand the remote option. So I think we have enough places that have adopted it. You have companies like Twitter and Pinterest and a few others that have proclaimed, 'Yeah, we're going to offer remote work permanently now, this is not going back.' So once you have enough of those dominoes fall, then there are options now. As soon as enough options exist for those key people who want to be remote, it just forces everyone else to adopt it, otherwise sacrifice their best talent. So this pandemic, this is the one silver lining: it forced this issue. There's enough people that embrace it now where there are enough options, and it's just here to stay. Everyone's gotta fall in line and start at least offering partial telecommuting to be competitive.

Certainly you lose what they call creative collisions — having a certain density of folks running into each other completely by serendipity. Yes, you're going to lose some of that. But look at what happened with us, right? We're random people that met at a meetup in Lisbon. I think this is going to continue to happen. I think it just distributes where people are going to be. But it's funny, I read something the other day about this exodus of folks leaving San Francisco, and then all running into each other in Salt Lake City, Utah or something. Because enough San Francisco people all going to the same places, they're still starting to bump into each other. So there are plenty of ways and plenty of side things you can get involved with that will help you network remotely and meet people. Yes, it's going to change, but I don't think it's going to deleverage San Francisco in terms of Silicon Valley losing its unique advantage by that density. If anything, that creates an opportunity for other places to come up.

I'm not an oracle here, I don't have a crystal ball. My opinion is, people will flee those places because there's less of an advantage for being there now that things are so remote friendly. But the people that stay — there's always going to be people that want to stay in New York and San Francisco, so it's going to keep the hardcore diehard fans. I don't think it's going to go away, it's just going to change. I don't really have a better answer than the next person on this subject.

Getting comfortable with remote meetings like this one and doing podcasts. Having a podcast is the new business card. This is literally building up rapport, the ability to connect, get good at interviewing, telling stories, meeting people, expanding your surface area by having something like a podcast that contains your personality, puts it out there, allows people to interact with that asynchronously, they get to know you, and now they want to do business with you. I have a podcast as well — Nomad Podcast. It's a great thing to have.

Sure. Just for the record, it's basically paused right now because I think it's kind of tone-deaf to be promoting nomadic travel at the moment. But Nomad Podcast — NomadPodcast.com is the URL. I've done I think 45 interviews with folks I've met over the course of my travels. I've been to 40 countries over the last five years, so yes, I've gotten to meet a lot of incredible people. I'm always curious what takes people on the road, what motivated them to do that, what did they get from that experience, and how did it impact their business, because most of these people have to figure out how to start a business and then run it remotely. So I think that's super interesting. It self-selects for naturally amazing people. That's the story of it.

I have a hard time seeing us ever going back to normalcy in the sense of exactly the way it was. I think to some extent this is kind of the new normal. I'm not an epidemiologist or anything, but as the vaccine comes out and herd immunity and all that stuff, it may get to the state where we just don't think about it as much anymore. Wearing a mask is just second nature, and this is just how we operate.

This is a perfect example of what you're talking about. I'm a US citizen. I was living in Bali until the early part of August. I came back to Portugal because I have residency in Portugal. But there's all this question: they're not accepting Americans, but it's based on where you're coming from because it's only in America that it's out of control. Bali was under control, but at the same time I had to fly through Madrid to get to Portugal because Portugal wasn't accepting any non-EU inbounds. So you have to learn how to work within the constraints of what exists. There's just going to be weird revocations of travel access, and this is what we have to deal with now.

There's a guy called — what's his name? Sam something — the flag theory. If people listening want to Google it, there's this whole rationale about how you want to diversify in the same way that you want to diversify assets across different asset classes. You want to have flag theory: you want to have a bank account somewhere, a residency in a few places, and options, precisely for this scenario. Who could have predicted this? Yet there's a great reason why I could go to the US, but the US is a dumpster fire right now. So I would way rather be in Portugal.

Not to the degree that that guy does because he's got like five passports or whatnot, but I respect the philosophy of it and I think it's a great idea. I'm a big fan of self-reliance and redundancy, having contingency plans and multiple ways of doing things. If you do any amount of nomadic travel, you naturally start to pick up this idea: I need redundant power, I need a fallback if my computer dies, I need redundant navigation and communication. You start to think in terms of the function of the thing and having a plan B and C for every critical thing. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of that philosophy. Don't have all your eggs in one basket because it could get messy. People who have been separated from their families because of the travel ban, people who can't get to where their banks are — if that little token you have for banking in Singapore runs out of battery, what are you going to do? You can't get your money. Building redundancy into all facets of how you run your business, your finances, your personal residency, citizenships, it is the way forward.

You've got the world's biggest A/B test happening right now. You have a place like Sweden that said we're not going to change much, we'll let this play out, we may take some hit early on but we'll get to herd immunity faster and it'll be a net win for society. Regardless of how that plays out, thankfully we have this diversity of countries trying different things because that can only benefit everyone to see what worked best. In terms of which ones I like, I like how Portugal is handling it. The numbers are terrible, Spain seems to be having a really hard time right next door, and we are doing 10 times better than they are. The EU is a great place to be. Stepping back from the pandemic, I like the EU's approach to privacy. GDPR moved all of humanity forward. It forced businesses everywhere with any EU customers to comply, so it leveled up the privacy standard worldwide. I also think the EU is very progressive on food, like GMO and protecting the meaning of the organic label from lobbyists. The EU is far more protective of what goes into your food. Asia was beautiful — Bali, some of the kindest people there. I love it. All this just to say it can only benefit everyone to have all these radically different approaches and watch how it plays out. If we can retrospectively look at how Sweden went and what the outcome was, we can incorporate those lessons and apply them forward.

Absolutely. You raised an interesting issue — healthcare. As an EU resident, I'm afforded the benefits of the healthcare system here. Not so in the US. You look at what we pay there, astronomical costs. Until you're outside of that, if you grow up in the US, you assume it just costs this much everywhere. But you get to a place like Portugal and realize, oh no, everyone has really good healthcare, it's just part of what you get. The A/B test remains to be seen how it plays out. I saw someone tweeted the number of people bankrupted in Japan through healthcare issues: zero. Sweden zero, Portugal zero. The US last year: 670,000 people bankrupted from a healthcare problem.

Sure.

Yeah man, it was a good conversation. Cheers.