Safia on Workforce Management: 'You Don't Want to End Up Like an SOE'

This week on the program, I sat down with a founder and CEO to discuss workforce management. The interview was billed as a serious conversation. The interview was not serious. ^[1]

My guest, who I will refer to here as “Safia” — that is the name given during the interview [UNVERIFIED: the real identity of the person identified as “Safia” in the interview, including the company they founded] — answered the question “why should I care about my workforce?” with a line that has appeared on approximately seven thousand LinkedIn carousels: “Your ideas can get you so far. You need people to actually put those ideas from paper to reality and convert that to something actually tangible.” ^[2]

This is the universal startup-founder answer. It is the answer that ends every demo day pitch. It is correct. It is also the kind of correct that makes you want to leave the room.

The next line was the one that mattered. “If you don’t care about your workforce, you might end up being like an SOE. You don’t wanna do that.” ^[3] An SOE — a badan usaha milik negara (BUMN), or state-owned enterprise — is a company owned and operated by the Indonesian government. To say “you don’t want to end up like an SOE” in this country is to say, in compressed form, “you don’t want to end up like the place where every form takes forty-five days and the photocopier is always broken.”

Safia did not have to spell that out. Safia did not spell that out. The audience did the rest.

I asked the obvious follow-up: “But they’re so expensive though. Can’t we ask them to do it for free?” Safia considered the question with the seriousness it deserved and answered, “I’ve tried that. You can get away with free labor, but then the tax man comes after you and then that’s a big hassle.” ^[4]

This is, to be clear, a joke. It is also, in this country, the most efficient two-sentence summary of why startups still have HR departments. The tax authorities are not, generally speaking, an institution one wants coming after one’s books. Free labor is, accordingly, a strategy best left to the side projects of college students. Safia knew this. Safia, by her own admission, had tried it. The tax man had other ideas.

I then asked how, in practice, Safia takes care of the workforce. The answer came in the form of a company principle so widely adopted in startup culture that it has its own parody accounts: flat structure. “We have this really flat structure. People don’t complain about bureaucracy or slowness. The workforce is motivated and that in turn motivates me.” ^[5]

Safia also noted, with the confidence of a person who has not yet been audited, that “every single person we’ve ever hired has been with us till today.” ^[6] In fairness, that could mean a lot of things. It could mean the company is a wonderful place to work. It could mean the company is small enough that one hire is the entire workforce. It could mean the vesting schedule is generous enough that leaving would be financially irrational. It could also mean — and I am speculating here, please note the speculation — that no competitor with a budget has yet made an offer. None of these interpretations undermine the claim. All of them are funnier than the claim.

Then came the line that, in retrospect, I should have let pass without comment. Safia said: “When I look out there at the sea of all the heads and I see that these are the lives that are dependent on what we’re building, it gives me a sense of purpose, right? Makes me more motivated to do funny interviews.” ^[7]

It is a beautiful line. It is the kind of line that gets pasted into Notion docs and then forgotten. It is also, in this country, the kind of line a CEO says at an all-hands meeting right before the company announces a hiring freeze.

Safia then clarified: “There’s nothing funny about this interview. Yeah, I’m sorry, I mean I’m at a serious interview. Interviews from distinguished journalists.” ^[8]

Safia, it turns out, was conducting a serious interview. I apologized. Safia did not, on camera, accept the apology.

I asked, with the practiced calm of a person who has ruined an interview and has nothing left to lose, “Who did you vote for?”

The interview ended. ^[9]

I will note, for the record, that the question was asked sincerely. I will not note, for the record, whether the question was answered. Make of that what you will.