An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Disrupting is a good thing when the frameworks we’re using no longer fit the world we’re living in. Here’s an easy example: The 8-hour workday.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matt Redler.
Matt Redler is the CEO at Panther. There, he’s working on building the economic infrastructure for the remote world. Through remote work, Matt believes that talent across the world — no matter where they are — can get access to great work opportunities. And that people can start living lives with more agency to be where they’re happiest. Prior to Panther, Matt founded Chefit, a personal chef startup. Matt is passionate about speech and debate and boxing.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Panther was born out of two realizations. One, you should be able to hire the best talent for any given position. And, two, that the best talent is global.
I realized this when I was working on a startup called Chefit. My co-founder, Vasil, and I had put together an incredible international team. Then, the pandemic hit. We had to call it quits at Chefit and that meant we had a talented team of international people who were desperately looking for work.
In the following weeks, Vasil and I played startup matchmakers, trying to get work for the brilliant people we’d been working with. But we quickly realized that most businesses don’t have the infrastructure to hire internationally. It requires lots of time, and money, to do so.
At that point, the idea became clear: There needed to be an easy way for businesses to hire great talent globally. And that’s what led to Panther being started. We’re on a mission to empower a world where talent has no borders.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
At Panther, we’re building the economic infrastructure for the future of work — that future being a remote one.
Here’s why that’s disruptive:
For decades we’ve been working in offices from 9 to 5 and hiring in the cities that our businesses were located in. Because of labor and tax laws, it was really damn expensive to hire in other countries.
So even though the best talent lives all over the globe — not just in your city — it was almost impossible to reach that talent.
But with Panther, we’ve built an infrastructure that lets businesses hire almost anywhere in the world in just a couple of clicks. People don’t need to worry about being legally-compliant or setting up subsidiaries. Teams can focus on finding and working with the best talent, wherever that talent is.
This is disruptive to the way we’ve traditionally viewed work. And in a world where people can work from anywhere, teammates get more agency to live their life the way they want. We can lose strict working hours and synchronous communication to let people have more freedom and flexibility.
And, of course, happier people get more done. So it’s a win-win-win, and we’re building the infrastructure for that world.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The biggest mistake I made was working on a business called SZN Pass. It was a subscription-based product for live events. You pay one monthly fee, you go to as many live events as you want (like concerts).
Long story short: People said they wanted to buy it, I built it, and nobody bought it.
Lesson learned: There’s a difference between what people tell you and what they’ll actually pay for.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
The mentor I’ve had that stands out the most is my now-best friend, Aaron Froug. Aaron taught me a key principle: That people make decisions with emotions but justify those decisions with logic.
This has changed the way I think about relationships and problem-solving. For example, I now say things like “I feel”, because it’s something that can’t be refuted. Understanding why people make the choices they do is a huge part of building good relationships.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disrupting is a good thing when the frameworks we’re using no longer fit the world we’re living in. Here’s an easy example: The 8-hour workday.
In the United States, the 8-hour workday was mandated in the 1800s to help prevent people — almost all of them doing manual labor — from being overworked. There was no science on productivity or employee agency involved in that decision. It was a simple labor protection.
But, more than 100 years later, we’re using that framework in a completely different context. And this is an example where it’s good to be disruptive. Where it’s good to understand that, no, 8 hours is not the optimal time for all workers.
With remote work, you can give employees the agency to work when it’s best for them — and you can stop focusing on vanity metrics like hours worked.
This goes further. We can recognize outdated frameworks in things like local hiring (you can now hire globally) and synchronous communication (some of the best teams work asynchronously).
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
First: Build something people want. That’s the most important piece of advice I’ve learned on my journey. And it’s been personal to me — this is something I didn’t fully realize when I was first working on my first startup.
It was called SZN Pass. It was going to be like the MoviePass for live events: Pay a fee every month and go to as many of these events as you want.
I got really motivated for SZN Pass from an online survey where I asked about 1,000 people if it’s something they’d pay for. About 70% of people said yes, which was crazy. It felt like a huge green light.
So I spent 10 months building this thing. And when I launched, nobody — literally, nobody — opened up their wallets for it.
Which leads to the second point…
Second: Asking people if they want something is not the same as asking them to pay for it.
I had so many people saying they wanted SZN Pass, but nobody actually paid for it in the end. And that’s because there’s a huge difference between someone telling you they want something and actually paying for that thing.
When you build a product, you want to have a painkiller — not a vitamin. Panther is the first serious painkiller I’ve ever worked on. It’s solving a hair-on-fire problem and that’s the type of problem that people will open their wallets for.
Third: Team is everything.
I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. But having a team of people who are motivated, people that you trust, is key for our success.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We’re building for the future of work at Panther. Not a future where people just outsource work to lower-cost countries, but a future where people hire globally because that’s where they can find the best talent.
And we’ve got a lot of things in the works as we build towards that. Most recently, we’ve been working on a contractor platform. It’s a platform that’ll let anyone hire contractors, almost anywhere in the world, in a couple of clicks.
You’ll be compliant wherever you hire and you can pay all your contractors in one click, in the local currency of their choice.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
The Manager’s Handbook by Alex Maccaw. He’s the founder of Clearbit and this book has some of the best pieces of advice on managing a team that you’ll find anywhere.
The best piece of advice in that book: The idea of Radical Candor, an idea from a book that Kim Scott wrote. It focuses on giving people clear, concise, and humble feedback about their work. A key principle of Radical Candor is building a relationship with people first. They’ll be more likely to take your words to heart if you’ve put in effort to know them outside of giving feedback.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Life’s short, have fun.
In context for Panther, you also want your teammates to have fun. Nobody’s doing great work if they’re feeling down and don’t have the time to get out there and enjoy the world.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Remote work is the movement we’re building Panther for. And it’s not just about people being able to work from their bedrooms — that’s not the big picture.
The future of work is really a place where talented people, all across the world, can get hired by any company.
It brings great work to places that historically haven’t had great work. It means teams will be more diverse than they’ve ever been. It means that people have the agency to live their lives the way they want instead of tying their entire existence to a cubicle.
It’ll take time, but that’s where we’re headed. And we’re building Panther to be the economic infrastructure for that world of remote work.
How can our readers follow you online?
The best place to follow me is on Twitter. That’s where I post most often about the future of work. You can also find me on LinkedIn here.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Matt Redler Of Panther On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
