Rethinking Teamwork with Range

**Dan Pupius** (0:00)
Work is becoming much more complex.
And there's the impacts of mobile, the internet, AI. All those trends were changing this nature of work, and we're coming out of this industrial area where management was designed around factories, and we have a lot of hangovers from that industrial area to this much more complex, organic type of work. And we just don't have the tools to support that. Official management practices are still very tied to scientific management and Taylorism, and really what we need in the 21st century with these agile teams is a very different way of approaching work.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
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**Dan Lines** (0:47)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by the CEO and co-founder of Range, Dan Pupius. Dan, thanks so much for joining the show today.

**Dan Pupius** (1:00)
Happy to be here, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:02)
Yeah, absolutely. Now we're gonna dive into Range a bit, but before we do so, I wanna dive a little bit into your career path and maybe some things about your leadership style.
I know you spent about six years as a staff software engineer at Google, which seems really interesting and cool. You're also the former head of engineering, VP of engineering, I think, for Medium. Could you walk us through your career journey before you founded Range?

**Dan Pupius** (1:33)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I guess it all started as a teenager. We didn't have, my dad wouldn't buy us consoles, so we had a real computer. That meant that I was just like, was playing around with games and I started coding, I mean, QBasic, just hacking around, making things visual, and then got really into Quake and made QuakeMods. And that was really like the first far into real programming.
And then I got this opportunity to work with the local design company making websites and screensavers as a teenager, which paid way better than a paper round. And that was really like the beginning of the end. So after that, I went on to university at Manchester, did a degree in artificial intelligence. Then following that, did a degree in industrial design from Sheffield Hallam.
And at that time I was working part-time in e-learning. So building web-based learning material for GCSE, which is the high school diploma in the UK.
Also, one funny project was the guidance, training for guidance system on a military frigate or a Navy frigate. That was a fun project. But then, the UK was very different. So I was pretty much all set to give it up. I had a Canadian visa. I was gonna go be a Snowboard photographer and then got called by Google. And I was in April. And then in October, I moved out to California and blue skies, H1B, worked at Google for a long time. I was amazing, just like working on Gmail, UI code, front-end infrastructure. It's just a completely different world. And then, yeah, and then after Google went onto Medium to run engineering with F. Williams, and that's really where the idea for Range was incubated.
And I met Jen, my co-founder at Medium, and then after Medium, started Range.

**Dan Lines** (3:04)
Did you say you were gonna be a Snowboard photographer?

**Dan Pupius** (3:08)
Yeah, so I was working in London, and it was really dreary and commuting across from Putney to Shepherd's Bush and Putney to King's Cross.
And I was kind of done. So I had a Canadian visa, was gonna go out, work up in BC and just take civil photography. But the Google offer came along and that was way better.

**Dan Lines** (3:24)
That's amazing. What's it like to work at Google?

**Dan Pupius** (3:28)
In 2005, it was just like so different. So I remember I was doing a contract in London and showing the manager Google Maps, and it's like, look at this, it's amazing. This is all in the browser, this is web-based. Look, there's a map of the entire world. You can scroll it and everything. It was like, I'm changing. And then in 2005, 2006, at Google, it felt like there were just no limits, and we were just like pushing the boundaries. And we had a lot of freedom and there's lots of users. And it was just like, it wasn't like work. It was like being at university almost, but then they're building these things that millions of people were using.