At Wholegrain Digital, we are passionate about doing business in a positive way and are always trying to learn and improve. We couldn’t think of a better way to learn than from those who have been there and done it.
That’s why we have started our very own Wholesome Business podcast series, where we will be talking to inspiring entrepreneurs, executives and employees to discover how business can be an integral part of a happy and healthy life, and how it can be used to achieve positive change in the world.
In our first episode, we talk to Fabio Torlini from WP Engine about company values, collaboration, eco-friendly web hosting and much more. This was our first podcast so please forgive a few rookie mistakes, including some mobile phone buzz and slightly low volume.
You can listen using the player below or find and follow our Wholesome Business podcast on iTunes.
If you would like to share your comments, experiences, ideas or suggest a future guest, please leave a comment, tweet us @eatwholegrain or use the hashtag #WholeBiz.
For those of you who love reading, here is the transcript
Amina: Welcome to Wholesome Business, episode 1, a podcast about health, happiness and sustainability in the world of business and the web.
Tom: Here we are in our first episode of Wholesome Business, where we talk to positive and visionary entrepreneurs and executives and employees to discover how business can be part of a healthy, happy life and how it can be used to achieve positive change in the world. This show’s hosted by myself, Tom Greenwood, and my friends and colleagues at Wholegrain Digital, which is a web design agency in London run by me and my lovely wife, Venita. In this first episode, my colleague, Eugene and I, invited Fabio Torlini into our office broom cubbard to talk about how to create a positive team culture, how to grow a business without losing its values, how to reduce the environmental impact of web hosting, the benefits of collaboration, and how to achieve a healthy work life balance.
Fabio’s the managing director of a web hosting company called WP Engine, that specializes in hosting websites built on WordPress. WP Engine are really a really interesting company and we know from working with them that they have a really positive team culture. Fabio’s a great guy with a lot of experience and we’re really grateful that he was willing to come in and be our very first podcast guest. If you want to find Fabio, he’s on Twitter as @torlini, T-O-R-L-I-N-I, and we’re @eatwholegrain. You can also tag the podcast with #wholebiz. Let us know your thoughts. Share your ideas. Suggest future guests and topics. You’ll also find us online at www.whograindigital.com. That’s enough from me. Let’s get started.
You were just talking about WordCamp Europe. You obviously started at WP Engine a few months back. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background before then and where you’ve come from?
Fabio: I joined WP Engine in October last year, so about 8, 9 months ago in total, now. Before WP Engine, I’ve been in the hosting industry for a long time, for about 15 years in total, but the main role before WP Engine was at Rackspace, where I was 1 of the first people on the ground in the UK and I was there for 11 years in total. I saw the company grow from 10 people when I joined to over 1000 people in Europe by the time I left, 4 or 5000 people globally.
Tom: It’s 100 fold increase in people.
Fabio: Yes, 100 fold increase in people and revenue. It was a minnow when I joined and it was a market leader in managed hosting when I left.
Tom: In terms of how that developed as time went on, did you see a change in culture? Obviously at Whole Grain, we’re a very small team and 1 of the things we’ve been worried about over the last couple of years is if we grow-
Eugene: Make too much money.
Tom: Yeah, it could be a disaster if we make too much money. If we grow, it might kind of lose its soul, the relationships we have in the team … We’re all really good friends and there’s this sort of worry that we could become this sort of big, faceless corporation. How was that at Rackspace? How was your experience? I guess being 1 of the first 10 or 11 people probably meant that it was quite an exciting time. You formed close relationships with those original people.
Fabio: It was. It’s difficult, obviously, when the company grows that fast. In the early days, the company’s growing 120% per annum. You disappear. You’ve gone away for a couple of weeks. You come back and there’ll be additional people in the office who you didn’t know. It’s challenging. It’s invigorating in many ways because it’s like working for a new company every 6 months because the company’s constantly developing and changing. The biggest challenge we always have and the area where we put most focus was trying to retain the culture. People love the company, but people who believed in the vision of what you’re trying to achieve and of course, you’re going to work harder. You’re going to enjoy working harder if there’s like-minded people around you who are also involved in trying to drive and push the company hard, so really getting that culture off belief and vision and retaining that culture is a big challenge.
Tom: Rackspace is famous for its strong team culture, isn’t it?
Fabio: It is.
Tom: What’d you call yourselves, Rackers or something?
Fabio: Rackers, yeah, we were known as Rackers. We put out a lot of focus on retaining that culture. I was in charge of marketing at Rackspace, and that included internal communications, so we put loads and loads of things in place over the years to try and retain culture and make sure people understood what the vision of the company was, understood what the values were, celebrated the values of the organization and over the years, we just put loads of different things in place. For example, we always used to apply for the best places to work or best work companies. There’s 2 different ones. There’s 1 run by the FT and 1 run by the Sunday Times and we used to apply for both of those and then do a lot of benchmarking, so we’d go out, look at other like-minded companies who are growing fast, who actually valued employee engagement and try to learn as much as possible from other companies, other companies who’d been through the same thing, who were larger and mimicd, copied, stoles some ideas, and brought those in-house.
We used to have a monthly open-book, so in front of the whole company, we’d bring the whole company in, actually present to them how the company was before me, what the key objectives were, to ensure that everybody was informed and really understood what we were trying to do as an organization. We used to do benchmark employee engagement twice a year, so we ask everybody in the organization whether they understood the company vision, whether people were actually living the company values and then if there are any issues which would be raised, that would pull things together to work on, on any issues. As the company got bigger and bigger, we used to empower individual teams. For each employee, there’s a 25 pounds per month fund budget, and a team could get together and actually decide how they were going to spend that budget. We’d create cross-functional teams as well, so it’s fine actually and it seemed that 1 team is engaged, but then you don’t want teams competing against each other, so we obviously organized a lot of cross-department activity and so on as well.
Rackspace was full on, always a lot of fun, when you walked into the office, the office was all designed, really, around the company’s values and actually demonstrate what the company stood for. You walked into the office, there’d always be a buzz. There’d be some guys with Nerf guns shooting each other, pictures of employees with their babies on the walls. Each team worked hard to try and retain that culture and drive that culture.
Tom: What sort of values? What is it about those values that make a place like Rackspace a really great place to work rather than just generic values that …
Fabio: 1, treat Rackers like friends and family, which were the key values. When you worked with your employees … Obviously, we hope we love our friends and family, so we definitely drove that very open conversation between colleagues and teammates. I think it’s fine to have values. You, of course, need to have the right values and a couple of key values for us was that we treat Rackers like friends and family, passion for our work and these are the key ones.
Tom: That sounds really good. We have a similar sort of concept, at Whole Grain, in terms of treating each other like friends and family. I think that’s why we have such a good time, most of the time.
Fabio: 1 thing which we did, as well, we used to have a straight jacket, which we used to award on a monthly basis. No doubt you’ve heard of Fanatical Sport on Rackspace, so we used to choose the monthly fanatic and that would be announced in front of the whole company. We’d obviously agree to have the nominations and give out how it actually demonstrated some of those company’s company values and how they went above and beyond and then they’d get a picture of themself in a straight jacket, go up on award theme and get 250 Pounds, I think it was. That was something that was always done, so making sure that we’re celebrating with people who are living values.
Tom: It must’ve worked. I think it says on your Linked In profile you won best place to work 6 times or something?
Fabio: Yeah, I think it was probably more than 6 times in the end. Yeah, 6, 7, always in the top 10, top 20, always pretty much up there in the top rankings for best companies or best places to work.
Tom: You stayed there 11 years.
Fabio: I did, yeah. I was the longest serving Racker for a long time on Rackspace and I kind of felt like it was my baby in many ways. So many young people who joined the company as their first role and you just see them develop and grow and it was just lovely to see so many people join the company just grow themselves, from a work perspective.
Tom: I guess a growing company like that, there’s a lot of opportunity for everybody to move up and find their place and progress their career, I guess?
Fabio: Yeah, definitely. That’s the beauty of a fast growing company. It gets harder, of course, as the company gets bigger and bigger and the growth rate slows down. That’s just inevitable, but in the early days, there’s so much opportunity for young people who are willing to work hard and demonstrate their ability.
Eugene: Since you have such extensive experience with a company that grew so much, what would be the best piece of advice for a company like Wholegrain Digital and we’d like to of course grow, but not grow out of proportion. What would be-
Fabio: Best piece of advice, in terms of different things, I guess. Of course, 1 is to make sure you’re retaining that culture and focusing that culture and there are times at Rackspace where we actually put the brakes on growth. You’ve got to be careful you don’t break your company and just focus purely on growth. As I mentioned before, Rackspace was built around the fanatical support and the delivery of fanatical support and there were times in the company when we were growing so fast and we weren’t able to recruit enough people in the support side, where actually the support level was slipping. We actually have to put brakes on sales and actually turn new customers away to a certain extent so that we could actually make sure that we’re providing the right level of support for our current customers. I think that’s probably my best piece of advice. Always make sure you’re [crosstalk 00:11:18] your account base, account customers, and growing. Don’t go for growth, just the sake of growth. Make sure you don’t brake the company whilst you’re growing.
Tom: It’s a common story. You see companies growing really fast and then just collapsing. A company like Rackspace is obviously … They did a great job because they grew fast and became a market leader and stayed there.
Fabio There’s a couple times in my 11 years at Rackspace where the company started going off the rails slightly and went to a whippet rack to show that we weren’t breaking our culture or breaking the service of the level of service which we were giving our customers, so a few times, that maybe happened.
Tom: Now you’re at WP Engine. You’re doing it all again. What lead you to go back to the beginning, really small team, new hosting company?
Fabio: It’s a difficult one. When I started Rackspace and I was going through that journey, I believe that’s a journey I’d never go through, once in a lifetime opportunity, here. Then, looking at WP Engine as a company that’s a company which is a great culture, a great leadership team, again, a great product, a great service and it’s very similar to Rackspace in the early days and to be honest, the best days at Rackspace were in those earlier days. Why not do it again if you’ve got the chance?
Tom: You started the London office all on your own. What was that like?
Fabio: It was very different. Of course, in marketing alone, internationally at Rackspace, had a team of 40, 50 people. I’ve run the cloud vision of Rackspace well to a couple hundred people, so running big teams to being all by myself in a little startup office was a big difference. I enjoy it, which is, again, it’s just a chance to do something different, something new, so always, I think in general, I believe in the principal that you should always be learning something new and hey, it’s a new experience for me and it was great to actually build something from absolutely 0 and open that office and now we’ve got a little team. It’s really good. It’s a lot of fun.
Tom: Already, you’ve gone from, what was it, December you started the office on your own?
Fabio: Yes.
Tom: Now it’s July and you’ve got how many people?
Fabio: Now there’s 6 of us and we’re looking for number 7 and number 8.
Tom: Quite fast, in 1 month, almost, it’s a pretty good go. 1 of my questions for you was, we were with you guys quite a lot. I talk to James a lot, obviously. Every time I speak to anybody, in the London office, they always seem to be cheerful and having a good time, so what’s the secret there, to make your people in a good mood and enjoying themselves?
Fabio: We’ve got a good team. 1, choose your staff carefully. Make sure you choose people who enjoy what they’re doing and that’s a principal which I have, anyway, that if you don’t enjoy your work, you should choose a different role, a different job, which you will enjoy.
Tom: That was something I was going to ask you, when you’re recruiting people, are you looking for those not just literally, “Are you a good salesperson,” or, “Are you good in support,” but sort of their personal qualities, that way they’re going to fit in with the team or they’ve got a positive attitude and personality?
Fabio: Very much so. When you’ve got a small team, choosing 1 wrong person can really sew discord across that whole team. Yeah, always looking for personality traits, probably more so than experience. Getting the right person who’s going to blend into the team, add to the team, have the right level of energy, add the right passion, I think’s very important. If they’ve got the right experience, perfect, but experience is something which they can gain at the company, whereas in terms of attitude, it’s something which will never change. It something, typically, you’re born with.
Tom: It’s said that somebody’s who’s got a good attitude and skills, you can teach them skills, but you can’t teach them a good attitude. When you’re recruiting, attitude has to come first.
Fabio: I think it’s key also, in terms of when you’ve got a team, is make sure there’s strong communication and that you’re supporting each other as well. If somebody is having a hard time or struggling, the whole team needs to get behind them and help them and it’s easy to do when you’ve got a smaller team. That’s a general principal in the office.
Tom: It must be particularly true in a relatively young team, even though WP Engine is an established company, to some extent. You’re what, 4 or 5 years old, I think?
Fabio: Yes, 5 years old as a company.
Tom: The London office is obviously effectively like a new company, so it must be a lot of challenges that you need to work through together.
Fabio: There’s tons of challenges, and it’s a continual basis. When the mother ship is 6000 miles away and 6 hours time difference, that can cause issues in itself and then simple stuff, getting the right phone system or the typical IT headaches that you normally have and everybody’s going to have a bad day as well, so working through those niggling issues together as a team is important.
Tom: You’re like a small business, like a startup, really, where everybody’s got to throw their hands in the bit for everything, I guess.
Fabio: That’s right, yeah. I’ve got to say James, you mentioned James before. We like teasing James because he can be the first 1 to complain, so when he does complain we call him out and he realizes that and he’s very good about it. We do like to tease him about it. We have fun.
Tom: That’s 1 of the things you guys all seem to have a good sense of humor, get on as friends, but how do you manage it, I’m asking this obviously, Whole Grain Digital’s my company. You’re managing director of London office, WP Engine … How do you manage that balance between being friends with everybody, but also being the boss?
Fabio: There is a line that has to be drawn, of course. If you’re the boss, you’re the boss, which means you need to be very clear about each person’s objectives. I do sit down with the team on a quarterly basis. We do outline each person’s objectives for that quarter and then we have weekly 1-on-1’s which each of my team members or else we actually look at, “Okay, how are you achieving as your overall goals? How are you achieving towards those specific goals for the quarter and so on?” It’s in their interest, as well, for you to drive them, push them, and help them learn and stretch themselves. I think there’s a fair balance there and it doesn’t go against your values and your culture by actually holding people accountable.
Tom: There’s a clear understanding that you’re trying to work towards a common goal?
Fabio: Exactly. Those goals aren’t imposed by me. They’re goals which we sit down, discuss, and jointly decide what we should be focusing on that quarter. If they’re failing against those goals, there’s not a question of saying, “Why aren’t you doing that?” You’ve been sitting down and saying, “What is the issue? What are the obstacles? How can I help,” having that kind of conversation.
Tom: A friend of ours has, he’s a sort of cereal entrepreneur. He has a concept of 0 failure within his teams. It basically means that everybody is going to fail, but we all just need to have a positive attitude as a team that when somebody fails, let’s sit down, talk about it, work out what went wrong, and then try to figure out how we can stop it happening again, rather than sort of blame culture where people are sort of scared to trip up or whatever.
Fabio: I used to have the principal, especially when I was running marketing at Rackspace, that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough. A lot of work is around experimentation. Nobody has the perfect answer, so you have to come up with the concept. You’ve got to try something out. If it fails, you recognize that and you move on and try something else.
Tom: I guess that’s kind of, you know, fundamental I guess, to entrepreneurship and growing companies, is that experimentation and taking risks. That’s great. [inaudible 00:19:26] in America seems to have a lot of women in high positions. Heather, obviously, noticeably … Is it fair to say that there’s a very equal and kind of progressive culture at WP Engine?
Fabio: There is. At least 1 of the principals of the organization, really, is diversity as a whole. It’s a lovely company to work for, from that perspective. The leadership team, overall in the US, is 50-50, so it’s 50% female and 50% male. We’ve got some great leaders. Heather’s lovely. She’s awesome. Our CFO, April Downing, as well, she’s a lovely balance room for a CFO. Most CFOs are termed the CF No’s. She actually really drives the company culture at WP Engine as well. We’ve got Tina who runs customer support and customer care globally, as well. We’ve got some really nice, good, talented [beaters 00:20:16] across the board. Diversity’s definitely something which we focus on as a company. We’ve got people in the office in office as well, working as support. You don’t necessarily come from a degree background. They’re just extremely intelligent, young people who’ve been educated well within WP Engine. They don’t necessarily have a massive, well-educated background, but being able to progress extremely well and extremely quickly for the company as well. Diversity of background is something which we’ll embrace.
Tom: That’s interesting. When people apply for jobs, you’re judging them very much on their ability as relevant to their qualifications. That’s interesting. Do you think that’s true, to some extent, throughout the technology sector more so than other sectors? We notice a lot of people that we work with, no one’s ever looked at their CV.
Fabio: I think that’s probably fair from a tech perspective because you’re off. I guess it’s quite easy to see what some of these technical events [inaudible 00:21:20] technical [crosstalk 00:21:21]-
Tom: You can see what they’ve done and …
Fabio: I mean, I rarely look at somebody’s educational background, now. I’m much more interested in terms of what type of roles they’ve had and how they performed and so on, as well.
Tom: I guess it’s more relevant where younger people who don’t have that experience that you need something to judge them on. Once people get advanced in their career, it fades away.
Fabio: Yeah, it does.
Tom: I don’t actually know the qualifications of most people or [inaudible 00:21:46] that it doesn’t matter. If you’ve chosen space at the European office or WP Engine not just in London, but in near [Brit Lane 00:21:58]. It’s quite a trendy area. It’s not where you’d necessarily expect to see a hosting company set up their office. What was your thinking behind that, both in terms of, you could have gone somewhere really cheap, being on industrial real estate somewhere, in a soulless office with a big car park. Obviously, I’m guessing that you thought that there was value in being somewhere central and quite up and coming.
Fabio: Massively so, yeah. Again, because I’ve been around the block and a little bit too old now to work in a soulless office in the middle of Slough and being based down brick laying and being surrounded by the ecosystem there, which is really good. We’re an office called second home, as a co-working space downstairs for the suite upstairs and there’s just a lovely combination of tech companies and their agencies, BCs and so on and being in the sense of all that, that community’s really powerful. That’s definitely a big plus point, from our customer base. The second one is we’re very close to our customers. 1 of the key reason WP Engine wanted to open up a European office is because they have got a nice customer base here in Europe and growing customer base here in Europe and we want to be close to where a lot of those customers are. A lot of our customers are agencies and they are based towards the central of underneath in London, where we are. It’s a good location from that perspective.
Tom: It’s quite a unique proposition from our point of view, as your customers, because you’re the only hosting company where we’ve ever really had a personal face to face relationship with anybody. Normally it’s just hosting company. You submit a ticket if you’ve got a problem. A random person you don’t know replies to you, whereas you guys, we obviously know you quite well and meet you at events and so on. It’s quite unusual, but it’s very positive, because obviously that means that we work more closely together.
Fabio: It’s much more enjoyable, I’ve got to say, being involved in the WordPress community. I love the community aspects of WordPress, where you can go along to the community events, help sponsor them, where we can work with agencies like yourselves. I think that’s the most enjoyable part of all, to be honest, of being involved in that wider aspect of the community and getting to know people in the more personal level and seeing how we can work together to grow our businesses together. I love that part.
Tom: Where was Rackspace’s space?
Fabio: Rackspace was entirely different. I always used to joke about Rackspace. We were originally based in a place called Stock [inaudible 00:24:33] the data center when I just joined, just off the Bath Road, right next to [inaudible 00:24:37] airport. I did used to joke about, “That’s the first office Americans came to when they got off the plane at [inaudible 00:24:42].” We were based there because that’s where the data center was and then once we were based in the data center, once we outgrew the data center when we’re about 25 employees. We went to [Stockey 00:24:52] Park, which is like a mile or 2 down the road and then we ended up staying in that location. The office, now, is in Hayes, so it moved to Hayes maybe about 4 years ago and that’s where the main office is, now. There’s a good 1000 people, there.
Tom: Just coming back to the Bricklane office, is recruitment also a factor? I’m guessing that it might be easier to attract people to work in an exciting, interesting place in the city and nice part of the city.
Fabio: I think it’s definitely a factor. You’re right in the center. You can obviously get to Bricklane from any direction. You’ve got a much wider pool of people to actually go after and my team love being based down there. They love being based in second home, which is vibrant, but also just off Bricklane, Haver Street [inaudible 00:25:41]. There’s lots of cafes. You can go to a different place for lunch whenever you want. We did do a challenge 1 week, where we went to any “ese” type restaurant, so we want to Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese.
Tom: You get a different 1 every day.
Fabio: Exactly, so it’s a bit of fun. Italianese [crosstalk 00:26:06]. You can’t do that kind of stuff in Slough.
Tom: You either go to the Mcdonalds or the industrial state. That’s 1 of the reasons why we’re here, as well. You’ve got Soho just on your doorstep. It’s nice for us, as a team, to just be able to go out and go to a restaurant or something and it’s got a good vibe to it.
Fabio: [inaudible 00:26:34] in the way long as been developing over the last few years. There are so many nice and up and coming places with good vibes and good energy. [inaudible 00:26:44], there’s loads of good places, now.
Tom: You mentioned the Rackspace data center and I think you’ve got a little bit of experience because of the energy consumption and carbon emissions and all the environmental impact of hosting. Do you want to give us an overview of that, because I think it’s 1 of those things where websites inherently on surface appear to have no environmental impact. They don’t even really exist, because they’re not made out of anything, but behind the scenes, you’ve got these huge data centers, which most people never see. They don’t really have any concept of how big they are. Do you want to give us some insights into how-
Fabio: A typical data center, we use the energy supply equipment to a small city. They use tons and tons. A typical data center will use the same power as a city like Maidenhead.
Tom: For 1 data center?
Fabio: For 1 data center, per year.
Tom To give us some concept, do you know how many data centers there are in the UK?
Fabio: In the UK? Probably not far off 3 figures. That’d be-
Tom: This is a lot of small cities.
Fabio: Not all the data centers are the same size. You can imagine, lots. Google, themself, run over a million servers. That’s a lot of boxes that need to go somewhere and a lot of power that needs to run all of those servers.
Tom: Everybody’s website … I know, obviously, you think it’s just there and it’s just sort if inert, but there’s a computer somewhere that is always on and ready to go whenever somebody types in your address.
Fabio: [inaudible 00:28:25] cloud, of course. That’s more and more service which are coming out people’s offices in these central data centers. There’s a lot of service in data centers, now.
Tom: I guess there must be an efficiency to moving them out of having some service in the corner of your office into a centralized data center where everything’s managed in terms of, [inaudible 00:28:44] scales, I guess.
Fabio: Yeah, there is. There’s an economy scale and then … I think less self [inaudible 00:28:51] sensors, but for managed hosting organizations and hosting companies. There is a benefit, in terms of being energy efficient, because of course, a massive part of your cost is that energy consumption. Companies will spend a lot of the development of the data center, in terms of running that data center as efficiently as possible. There’s something called a PUE, which is a energy efficiency metric, which is 1 being the energy it takes to run a server, so if it’s 1.5, you know it’s 50% more energy to utilize that around the server to run the data center, itself. As close as you can get to 1 as possible is as efficient as you make a data center.
Tom: Is that information publicly available? Could somebody look that up for their hosting company?
Fabio: At Rackspace we talked about our PUE. It used to vary. The Rackspace data centers, they have external cooling systems, so when the temperature drops below 20 degrees, we use the actual outside air to help cool the data center, itself. There’s a lot of stuff inside the data centers you can do. You can have hot and cold aisles, which also would make them more efficient, of course. There’s quite a bit you can do to it when you’re building that data center and running that data center, trying to make it as efficient as possible. Google always tries to push for a very efficient PUE. They get down to typically about 1.2 and so on. Most data centers probably run around the 1.7 mark, Rackspace is probably somewhere between the 2.
Tom: Most data centers that I hear of just in terms of talking to hosting companies, they tend to be dotted around London or if they’re somewhere else in Europe, they tend to be in Amsterdam. Is there a reason why they’re located in those and they’re not up in Scotland in the cold, where-
Fabio: There is. There’s a couple of reasons. Of course for years, we always looked for different data center locations, trying to find the most efficient location possible. [inaudible 00:30:52] sticking them out to every decent amount. In summer’s it’d be nice and cool. There was even talks, there is a data center in Iceland where it’s cooler and so on, but the biggest factors that you need to bear in mind when you’re building a data center, number 1, is power. As we talked about, they actually do [inaudible 00:31:13] a lot of power and that power needs to be resilient as well, so power is a big factor and the other big factor is fiber. They need to be very well connected, if you want floss going to [inaudible 00:31:25] to the internet as a whole. They’re unrelenting factors. You can just put it somewhere cold and say, “We’re putting it somewhere cold,” if there isn’t the power or it can’t be connected well to internet.
Tom: I guess, in terms of the power grid, if you put a small city on the edge of London, an extra 1 isn’t a huge difference compared to the overall power requirements of London, whereas if you stick it up in the Scottish highlands somewhere, then it’s basically going to need a new power station or something [crosstalk 00:31:55]. That makes perfect sense. What can companies like Whole Grain Digital do and also WP Engine to try and reduce the environmental impacts or the energy consumption of our hosting? Obviously, as a customer we don’t run data centers, so we don’t have any control over it, but also, I think WP Engine, you don’t run data centers either do you?
Fabio: No, we don’t. We take infrastructure from infrastructure providers, particularly [inaudible 00:32:20] companies and then put our platform and our software on top of that. There’s a couple things we can do, obviously we can’t which types of providers we utilize and choose, but the beauty about WordPress and the way we run WordPress, as far as we actually use that infrastructure very efficiently. We offer share hosting at lower ends, so we’re stopping customers once ever per customer is at the lower end and removing that obstacle means that our service as a whole are much more efficient. Caching, very efficiently, means you’re actually getting a lot more out of the service-
Tom: That’s 1 thing I was going to ask you, because it’s clear that if you take a website from a cheap shared host and you put it on WP Engine, it runs faster, presuming it means it’s using its resource and less energy.
Fabio: In terms of [inaudible 00:33:12] which we actually utilize at bottom end. If you took WordPress and just put it straight on their platform then put WordPress on our platform, it can run and anything up to 6 times faster. That’s a lot of efficiency, which you’re getting for managing WordPress effectively and well.
Tom: Even though I’m guessing it already [inaudible 00:33:31], but in concept that could be quite huge energy saving, if it’s up to 6 times, even if it was double, it would be huge.
Fabio: Definitely, our customers come to us who are running on large, complex infrastructure and coming to a much smaller scale infrastructure of us, but running more efficiently and faster [crosstalk 00:33:56]-
Tom: We meet our customers who had dedicated servers with other people and they moved to shared plan on WP Engine and it was still faster, even though they’re on shared plan.
Fabio: That’s going to save a lot of electricity consumption, overall, I would say.
Tom: That’s really good. You don’t hear of many opportunities for energy saving and hosting well. It’s literally a case of the choosing a company, generally based on support and speed and security, are kind of the key 3 things. That’s good. I wanted to talk a little bit about the WordPress community and benefits of collaboration. In business, people are talking about competition a lot and find it a bit mis-understandable way, but I think maybe there’s a lack of talk about collaboration and WordPress and open source, in general, I think is a great example of what you can achieve by working together with people rather than always trying to compete against each other. Similarly, I see what you guys are doing, in terms of being in London, collaborating with your customers and building stronger relationships with them. It’s obviously very beneficial for everybody to work together. What are your thoughts on collaboration and how we can use that more in business?
Fabio: I love it as a principal. A couple of things … It’s a growing industry, so when you’ve got a growing industry it’s a lot of education which needs to be done around the industry and actually collaborating and working together to help educate the market as a whole, is definitely just 1 benefit, and that’s the work in itself. Then, being able to work with organizations to go out there … Typically, 1 company itself is not going to offer the whole solution. Being able to collaborate your companies out there and together being able to offer the perfect package, then it just is much more beneficial to the company that’s going to receive the service and for the companies providing the service and if you can work together and collaborate closely, the [inaudible 00:36:01] is going to get a better experience overall, as well.
I love the aspects of the community where we can actually work closely together. 1 of the things which I like most about the WP Engine is how we’ve been welcomed into the community and how we have been able to work with companies like yourselves. I love the aspects. You guys have always been so welcoming straight away, as soon as we joined. In fact, we talked a little while ago about the migration tool, which we actually launched last week. That came from an introduction from you guys to somebody based and we worked then with both to build a tool, which is very useful for a lot of our customer base.
Tom: That’s Akshat from BlogVault, which is the service we’ve been using for a while, which we really liked and I think it’s been a win win for everybody because now he’s got a relationship with you to a new angle to his business. You’ve got a way of getting clients on and we’ve got an easy way of migrating our own clients, like [inaudible 00:36:56].
Fabio: If we didn’t collaborate and talk, that kind of opportunity would never have come up. I love those aspects. They’re very powerful.
Tom: The WordPress community as a whole, how have you found that? It’s quite unique in a way, compared to a lot of other industries you work in.
Fabio: It’s very unique. It’s very different and there’s a real mix. There are definitely some lifestyle businesses built around WordPress and then there’s lots of smaller, [inaudible 00:37:28] actually growing and the experience from Rackspace, actually working for a company which is growing and gone through a lot of those growth pain points and so on. It’s quite beneficial. It’s actually like [inaudible 00:37:39] service to some of those companies, so I’m helping them out. Overall, it’s a funny mix, but I like it. It’s good. We always go to the WordPress meet ups and we try and help as much as we can, sponsor the meet ups and join in. My sales engineer in the UK, he likes building content and presentations and going along and help to educate the market as well. It’s good.
Tom: We found it’s a very friendly but very diverse community. It always gets interesting.
Fabio: There’s definitely a hippie aspect to this very strong commercial aspects and it’s all meshed together and it kind of works.
Tom:It does kind of work, yeah. It’s got a strange mix, especially when you go to a word camp and you’ve got everything mixed together and people talking about the enterprises of WordPress, but equally you’ve got the hobbyists and people running their personal blogs and things and everybody’s using the same technology. Everyone’s sharing advice and ideas, but they’re on completely opposite ends of the spectrum, in terms of business.
Fabio: They are, and it’s also that wider community, which means that WordPress continues to develop at such a fast pace, what’s really made it the market leader, the amount of bloggings and the speed of development to run those bloggings around the themes. You’ve can obviously contribute massive amounts into that WordPress ecosystem as a whole.
Tom: When we ask Eugene a while back what you thought was the thing that made WordPress successful, you said, “Undoubtedly the community.”
Speaker 4: Community is number 1, 2, and 3, really the same [inaudible 00:39:18] for, as you said, collaboration. It’s about collaboration, about development, it’s power. I found when I joined, I come from a Microsoft background and I found that the most appealing thing of WordPress was accessibility. It was really easy to get going with a website in no time. You can get the most of your coding skills, but even if you’re not so much into code, you can still get a decent website going because as you said, there are people that create [inaudible 00:39:57] plugins for free that cater for all those technical aspects that otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to achieve.
Tom: Are people willing to give you advice for free and support for [crosstalk 00:40:11]?
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. People are really open minded, really eager to help. That [inaudible 00:40:19] rewarding.
Fabio: We’re obviously a commercial organization, as yourselves are. It’s great to be able to give something back to community and recognize that we wouldn’t have these businesses if it wasn’t for the sake of the community as well. As you guys do run in your meet up and we try to by getting involved with as many clubs as we can [crosstalk 00:40:39]-
Tom: That’s another great example of it. You guys very kindly sponsor our WordPress London music week and it’s been good for everybody.
Fabio: Giving something back, it’s great. I do like it.
Tom: This brings us nicely to our question from [Hranin Havieay 00:40:55] who asked on Twitter, “What’s your opinion about what’s happening around the #wpdrama?” I don’t know if you even knew about the #wpdrama.
Fabio: I’ve read some of it, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s something in America, so try not to get too involved.
Tom: We don’t get involved in petty arguments over there.
Fabio: I don’t know the full details around it to be honest, so I can’t really comment too much on that. I don’t specifically what happened, there.
Tom: I think there’s a whole bunch of things have happened in the WordPress community that people have got a bit upset about and felt, maybe, the WordPress foundation who earned the copyright and control the release of new WordPress [inaudible 00:41:43], that maybe they’re not listening to the community and that maybe, the WordPress foundation and Automattic as a company, are doing things that are maybe just not really even the community spirit. There’s very mixed opinions on it, to be honest.
Fabio: It’s a balance. The community is like a family and there’s always going to be arguments when you’re family. There’s always going to be people that disagree with what you’re trying to do.
Tom: When it continues to get that big, there’s always going to be things that a big chunk of people just don’t agree with. I think we’re talking about Matt [Melowick 00:42:15] and his leadership in WordPress, earlier. I guess that’s where you see that you do need a leader and not everybody’s going to agree with that person and sometimes they’ll get things wrong, but ultimately, there needs to be a vision and a driving force.
Fabio: That’s right. He wanted a commercial organization as well, so he needs to not just keep [inaudible 00:42:38] happy, but also keep all his stakeholders happy. There’s a balance that needs to be found on that perspective. I guess it’s a challenge for Matt, in particular, from that side. I guess he does what he thinks is best, and in terms of ultimately, he does depend on more aggressive driving WordPress forward was obviously core on everything which he’s thinking about.
Tom: It’s 1 of these things that’s on Twitter now. It’s just like the nature of Twitter. People are very fired up about it this week, all last week, but give it a few more weeks and no one will be talking about it anymore.
Speaker 4: [inaudible 00:43:15], do you have any opinion on the acquisition of WooCommerce by Automattic?
Fabio: We know Woo very well. We host with Woo. We’re a partner of Woo’s, so I was actually chatting some of the guys from [inaudible 00:43:26] just last week. Overall, we’ll see how it pans out. In terms of the acquisition, they haven’t really announced a solid plan of exactly what they’re going to do with Woo. I’ve got a few assumptions of what they might do, but for now, it’s business as usual. We’ll continue to work with Woo. Obviously, Woo, too, makes WordPress very important. It does give us that eCommerce on WordPress and it’s something which is growing in this. They say there’s more sites now running on Woo than there is on Magenta and so on. It’s definitely an important aspect of WordPress. What we need to do is make sure that it remains in the open arena available in helping the whole community, rather than just Automattic. We’ll see what happens on that, overall.
Speaker 4: In terms of hosting, how does that differ from a regular website?
Fabio: When you’re running Woo, it can make the site more complex. Caching’s much more difficult when the site is all dynamic and so on. You do have to look at resource constraints and obviously, security’s key as well. Edmund [RIC 00:44:35] did a presentation at a WooCommerce meet up last week in temple of scaling WooCommerce, so there’s definitely things you need to do around [inaudible 00:44:42] scale. It’s not as easy to scale Woo as a standard WordPress site for sure.
Tom: We went to WooCommerce last year, sorry, [Wooconf 00:44:52], the WooCommerce conference in San Francisco last year and there was a presentation there by a guy from [Peachly 00:44:59], which I guess is 1 of your rivals as a managed host, and he was sort of scaling WooCommerce and basically saying, “This is a real challenge for the hosting companies, but it is primarily a hosting issue rather than a website owner, developer issue. Is that a fair assessment?
Fabio: Not necessarily. It’s definitely on the development side, which can be done to ensure the site’s as efficient as possible, so of course, I’m not a developer so I can’t really go into detail as to it, but when I went through it all with Edmund just last week, I’d probably say it’s 50-50. There’s a lot which could be done on the development side to ensure it’s efficient. Hosters, fair enough. They can throw more hardware at it, but I don’t think that’s the right solution.
Tom: That would be good to see it in this presentation, actually. When we’ve got time, I’d love to have a look through. 1 last question, in terms of career progression, you’ve obviously had fairly [inaudible 00:46:06] career. You’re now managing director of a very well respected hosting company. Especially when you talk to younger people, they think that people in higher positions must be quite cut throat to get to a higher position. Obviously, there are people there who do that. There was a study came out last year which said that a certain percentage of senior managers had psychopathic personality types. Personally, I think that there’s probably some truth in that, but there’s also that sort of publicity. It’s quite damaging to young people who might actually think, “I want to pursue a career in management or something.” It sort of makes them think that they have to behave in a negative, cutthroat way. We love working with you. You’re obviously not like that, so what are your thoughts on how you can succeed in your career, but be a nice guy at the same time?
Fabio: I like to think I’m not a psychopath. I’ve seen lots of different management styles over the years [inaudible 00:47:12]. I’ve got a principal that you need to try and bring your team with you. I focus on team engagement and you can, actually, get a high performing team by pushing, bullying, driving really hard, but I don’t think that’s sustainable in the long term. Look, you can’t have successful managers that do that. It’s not the way I like to work and it’s not the way I think most people like to work. Definitely, bring a team with you and work around clarity of vision, clarity of what you’re trying to do, making sure that you’ve got a highly engaged team. Ultimately, you’re going to have a better performing organization and an organization which is sustainable as well.
Tom: [inaudible 00:47:52] time is what you’re saying earlier, about retaining staff and building that strong team culture where people want to come to work every day. They want to stay there long-term. They don’t want to just work there for a year and then hop off to the next company.
Fabio: That’s right. They’re all [inaudible 00:48:07] employees like that, as well. [crosstalk 00:48:10] highest salary and they’re not looking for a long term job in 1 company and they’ll just bounce around and so on and I guess you have managers that treat employees in that way. Personally, that’s not the way I like to work.
Tom: It’s good. It’s really good to see a company like WP Engine in which you can see everybody’s enjoying working there and you’re growing fast and you’re obviously doing very well for yourselves. On a day to day basis, other than the stuff you talked about, how do you find a happy work life balance, because obviously you talked about how you create a positive environment at work. How do you create that balance with your home life and your family?
Fabio: It can be tough. I’m lucky and in fact, I’ve got a very understanding wife and she’s at home. She looks after the children. Not everybody’s in that position, I guess. I’m very [inaudible 00:49:09] that she’s understanding. Half times, at Rackspace, she was doing 2 jobs, running multi international ads for [inaudible 00:49:16] in the UK, but also running US branding and PR and so on. That’s when you’re working long, long days and it’s a little bit unfair on the family and that’s not sustainable in the long term. I did that twice a week to help the company out, but it’s not something that I wanted to do long term. You do have the try and make sure you’re balancing it and not thinking about work, work, work on a continual basis. Make sure you’re taking time out for the family as well. It’s always a challenge, especially when you’re working for fast growing companies.
Tom: I guess it’s probably a bit like with us. There must be sort of waves of pressure where sometimes, you’ve just got to chip in and get stuff done. It’s not constant.
Fabio: It is. On Friday … I’m helping her out at the moment on an issue in the US and I was invited to [inaudible 00:50:10] schools. At 6:00 we’re finished that, 8:00 and another 1 at half 10 that finished at 12:30 at night. It’s a 1 off. If that was every night, it wouldn’t be sustainable, but it’s a 1 off every now and then. I think that’s fine, but then there’s days where it’s a little bit quieter and you can work from home for the day and maybe finish a little bit earlier and [inaudible 00:50:31]. It’s just trying to make sure we get that right.
Tom: I guess there’s pros and cons as well to working in a company where you’ve got an office in the US and you’ve got an office in the UK in the sense that on the 1 hand, you’re in the same time zone as your customers, which the US guys wouldn’t have been [inaudible 00:50:47] London office, so they were trying to deal with European customers from over in the US, which it must be quite stressful for them. I guess the support guys still are.
Fabio: Yes.
Tom: Then, the flip side is, now you’re in the UK. The main company is in the US, so you’ve got to speak to them in their time zone sometimes.
Fabio: You do, but they’re quite understanding as well. Heaven knows that we’ve got families and we actually have a leadership team in the US, all having young families as well, so they’re quite understanding. We try not to schedule conference calls at 6PM and 7PM. They’ll try to do it first thing in the morning so it’s in the afternoon for us and actually, there’s a company, there’s aren’t tons and tons [inaudible 00:51:27] that go out over the weekend as well, but consciously actually write an email, then send it out on a Monday morning rather then send out on the weekend.
Speaker 4: That’s very considerate.
Fabio: I’ve had bosses before who’d gone out of their way to send emails at the weekend.
Tom: Trying to see if anyone’s actually there paying attention.
Fabio: To work for an organization that actually has that understanding is really good.
Tom: I’m not sure if this is true, but somebody told me that in Germany, they’ve actually made that illegal, now, to send emails to employees over the weekend.
Fabio: I think I saw something about they were talking about making it legal. I’m not sure that it’s made illegal. They’re talking about making it legal. Yes, that’s right.
Tom: I don’t know how they enforce it, but it’s an interesting [crosstalk 00:52:12].
Fabio: Work-wise, now, it kind of grays, it kind of blurs, doesn’t it? With email now, we’re always online, especially if we work in American companies. I have a habit of checking my email on a continual basis.
Tom: I was going to ask you, are you checking your emails on your phone, evenings or weekends and things?
Fabio: I do. Also, I’d probably get bored if I couldn’t.
Tom: There’s pros and cons there. You’re worrying about something, but you can just look and you’ve got the answer in your inbox.
Fabio: Exactly, hooks me up. “Oh, look somebody cares. I’ve got email.”
Tom: How do you manage emails, in general? I think for most people at desk-bound jobs these days, email is great in terms of you can obviously get a lot done and it’s a great communication tool, but it’s also a nightmare because you’re just barraged with messages that you’ve got to respond to.
Fabio: It is. I’ve got to say it was worse at Rackspace, working for a larger company where I used to get 3, 4, 500 emails a day, which is really difficult to control and you just need to set some time aside and be strict about it to yourself and say, “Look, these time-frames, 9 to 10 or whatever, or 8 to 10, I’m going to focus on my email, clean my email box out, then have my meetings, do work and then maybe 3 to 5, back to email again,” and just try to control it that way because otherwise, you can be a slave to email. You can just be sitting at your desk, waiting on the next email to come in and you believe your job is just responding to emails.
Tom: You become just an email [inaudible 00:53:57], basically and as soon as you reply to somebody, they reply to you and you reply to them and then, the day’s gone.
Fabio: That’s right, especially in management and I don’t know. I think for my team, I try and make sure that they don’t focus just anywhere because if there are just work and email, which is a great communication tool, that they’re not picking up the phone and not thinking about stuff. They’re not talking to customers. You’ve got to make sure that they’re putting some time aside that’s not email specific.
Tom: That’s true and also there’s a lot of things where actually, you could communicate a lot quicker if you just picked up the phone, but you’re sitting there waiting for their email and they’re waiting for your email. It can drag on. You could just pick up the phone, 5 minute chat and this way, you’ve got things done.
Fabio: If there’s a customer issue you can have so much easier to just pick up the phone and have a conversation and get the issue resolved for them, rather than waste tickets, bounce around back and forth in emails [crosstalk 00:54:45].
Tom: I think it makes customers happier as well if, especially when you’re dealing with an issue, if you pick up the phone, they talk to you, then it’s much more personal and they feel that they’re being looked after. It’s something that we’re [inaudible 00:54:58] struggling with. It’s just finding that balance with emails, because we get so many and you want to give your customers good service by not making them wait too long, but at the same time, you can’t just sit there all day and send and receive emails.
Fabio: I know, it’s [inaudible 00:55:13] 4 of us. I think it must be a [inaudible 00:55:16] 4 businesses I’ve found out there.
Tom: What do you love doing outside of work?
Fabio: A couple of things, of course, young family … I spend my time with my family I can do … On Sundays, I always like to go out for bike rides. I am-
Tom: You a roadie?
Fabio: A roadie, yeah. I do probably if I can, if I’ve got the time, 40 or 50 miles on Sunday mornings, go out there, go for a nice ride. That’s probably a good 3 or 4 hours that way, every Sunday morning, so that takes up a lot of my spare available time.
Tom: It keeps you fit [crosstalk 00:55:55].
Speaker 4: Is that along the way you live?
Fabio: Yeah, I live in [Hartsfordshire 00:55:58], so I go straight down to the countryside. It’s really nice.
Speaker 4: Along some [inaudible 00:56:01].
Fabio: Yeah, very [inaudible 00:56:04] exactly, so I circle around and through St. [Alburn’s 00:56:07] church every Sunday.
Speaker 4: You’ve got to take part with a cycle event in London, taking part.
Fabio: Next weekend, I think, is it?
Speaker 4: Ride 100 or something.
Fabio: No, its-
Speaker 4: No, go ahead, not awareness, but to make London more of a cyclers friendly place and they take over half of a city, cycling from east to west, I guess.
Fabio: They close up a whole chunk of the city off and you can cycle around that ramp. I think it’ll come up with the wife and kids. I think it’s next Saturday. Yeah, I looked at that.
Tom: That would be nice. It’s amazing when you go to a big city and they’ve closed off the roads for an event and you just see it in a completely different way and it’s quiet and you can be in the middle of the road and it’s really nice.
Fabio: I’ll probably do that. Been through a few cycling challenges before as well. Been down to [Tabaras 00:57:04] before and I’ve done coast to coast [inaudible 00:57:07]. I do that.
Tom: You got any challenges that you’re itching to do?
Fabio: Yeah, a few actually. I’ve got my mind set on doing coast to coast in Spain, across Spain, which I’d like. My wife’s from San Sebastian, which is in the Atlantic coast and her parents got off the boat place on the Mediterranean coast, so I quite tend to cycle between the 2.
Tom: How far’s that?
Fabio: About 300 miles across. It’s along the Pyrenees, as well, so it’s a little bit heavy.
Tom: A little bit heavy.
Speaker 4: It’s an understatement for Pyrenees. What are you cycling? Is it a mountain bike or hybrid?
Fabio: Road bike [crosstalk 00:57:52].
Speaker 4: We’re currently … [inaudible 00:57:55]?
Fabio: No, it’s a whole [inaudible 00:57:57] nice, Italian bike. Has to be Italian …
Tom: With a curly bar?
Fabio: Yeah, with a curly bar.
Tom: That’s the technical term for the curly bar. Is it called curly bar? What’s it called? No? Short bars [crosstalk 00:58:14] of course.
Fabio: Manual, you’ll have to tell mammal, no? Middle aged man in lifer?
Speaker 4: No.
Fabio: [inaudible 00:58:24] mammal. That’s why I said, “I’m a mammal. [inaudible 00:58:29].” Anyway, you digress.
Tom: To continue that kind of theme, if money was no object, what would you do? I’ve heard there wasn’t the [inaudible 00:58:42].
Fabio: I’ve got a significant 1. It’s so difficult, because I guess if I had loads of money, I could go out and have lots and lots of fun, but if everybody else is working, it’s going to be really dull.
Tom: You’ll be cycling on your own from San Sebastian, so that’s the issue.
Fabio: If money’s no object, you can do whatever you want, but if you’re doing it by yourself. I like company, so I could get you guys to come with me. Go have some fun, cycle for the year or whatever. It definitely is a [inaudible 00:59:18] to do the coast to coast in Spain, cycle along the Alps. There’ll be lovely stuff to do. I do want to go to Peru at some point and time as well to [inaudible 00:59:27]. I like ancient history, actually, so I read a lot of historical books around the Incas and the Romans and the Greeks. I love all that kind of stuff as well.
Tom: A bit of traveling, too.
Fabio: Probably, yeah. From a work perspective, I’m ready for my satisfied from a work perspective. I don’t think that’s [inaudible 00:59:48] running company, [inaudible 00:59:51] splashing out and having fun. Sorry, Heather.
Speaker 4: You’ve got an Italian background of course?
Fabio: Yes.
Speaker 4: What part of Italy are your roots from?
Fabio: Mainly [foreign 01:00:06], where the [palmahan 01:00:07] and promise and cheese and the kitchen of Italy, as my parents like to call it. They’re very biased. That’s where all the best food comes from, apparently, no offense. My mom’s side of the family moved to the [gordio 01:00:21], which