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00:13 Chris Ronan: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is our podcast from Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My username is Rock Chalk, and I am one of the lackeys that works at HQ. Although, for this specific episode, we are outside of HQ, as it turns out, so we may have to temporarily change our name. And I have… I’ll just get right into it with our guest for today, and that is Bryan Roth, who is the president, one of the co-founders at HQ. And, as everybody will notice, Bryan, we are both outside of the office right now.

[chuckle]

00:51 Bryan Roth: That’s true, Chris. Well, it’s good to be a part of it. I’m glad we’re still able to make this happen, even though you’re talking from your house and I’m talking from the guest bedroom in our house. It’s certainly a little strange, but the normal course of events does not have to stop because we are somewhat quarantined, I guess.

01:12 CR: Right. Well, before we get into HQ stuff, how are things at the Roth household these days?

[chuckle]

01:19 BR: Things are okay. We’re getting to spend quite a bit of family time together. We still like each other, which is really encouraging. I mean, the truth is it’s kind of a break from the normal routine. It’s been so many years of going to HQ every single day or every single weekday and working and going home at the end of the day. And so it’s quite an adjustment, I think that Nicholas, who’s 14, has not been in school now for about four weeks, and he’s got… We don’t even know how much longer it’s going to be. I think the dog is the happiest of all, Allie, our Portuguese Water Dog. I think it’s a little strange, because, in the morning, she looks at me like, “Alright, when are you walking out the door and giving me my treat?” And it’s like, “Well, I’m just coming up to the bedroom.” And she’ll come in, kind of sit on the bed next to me, from time to time, and it’s pretty casual.

02:18 BR: It’s strange, because we’re supposed to stick around. We’re not supposed to go out except for essential things. And we can walk the dog, and get some exercise, and things like that, but the social distancing is, of course, really important. Like everybody else, we’re trying to do what we can to keep our community, friends, and family safe. And hopefully, everybody out there in geocaching land, all over the world, is doing the same thing. It’s important that, as a global community, whether within geocaching or external to geocaching, we all kind of come together as a community, support our neighbors, do what we can to get through this. And at some point, we can look back and look forward to getting out and meeting our friends and fellow geocachers back out on the trail.

03:04 CR: Yeah. And one of the big changes for the geocaching community, of course, has been events and Mega-events, for instance. I guess before we get into some of that unfortunate stuff about things being canceled and postponed, you actually did get to go to a Mega before all of this really hit. Maybe talk about that a little bit. It sounds like that that was a really great experience.

03:29 BR: It was a fantastic experience, it really was. I was at the Beethoven Mega in Bonn, and I think there were about 4,000 people. And it was around the time where reports were coming out of Italy, that things were getting concerning. And the event was really fun. It was a lot of geocachers coming together. The organizers did a wonderful job. The whole theme was Beethoven-based, because Bonn is where Beethoven is from, and this year is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth. And so the whole city is doing all these wonderful things around Beethoven. And the organizers from Bonn took it upon themselves to create just a fabulous event. So there was a variety of musical performances throughout. So, you’d be standing in this big lobby, I guess it was, with hundreds of geocachers, and all of a sudden, students were coming through with their trumpets and trombones and kind of marching through, playing music, and…

04:34 CR: Wow.

04:35 BR: Friday night, there was a drumming performance, and on Saturday night, there was another drumming performance, and there was… There was just so much cool music. But then the Adventure Labs, they had a series that were on-site at the event. And there was another series that was in, essentially, downtown Bonn, and it took you to all the cool places. You got to go to Beethoven’s house and the place where Beethoven was baptized, and one of the churches where he used to play. And it was just a really fun, educational use of the Adventure Lab platform, which we really enjoyed. But all in all, the… As always, the food and the drinks, the beer in Germany were fantastic. And the geocachers were kind and welcoming, and it was just such a fun time to get to talk to everybody. And I can’t wait for this to all be over so we can go back and do a whole lot more of it.

05:31 CR: Yeah, that… [chuckle] As you were describing that event, it just sounds amazing, and I’m extremely jealous now. So…

[laughter]

05:39 BR: But you’ve had the pleasure of going to some really good Megas as well. And any time you’re around that size of a group of geocachers, celebrating the game and playing with one another, it’s always gonna be incredible. This one, in particular, with the incorporation of music, and I didn’t even mention the logbook was a grand piano.

06:00 CR: Oh, I saw a picture of that. Yeah.

06:02 BR: It was extraordinary. It really was. And they gave out paint markers and they had thousands of people sign this thing, and now it’s a work of art. It was really impressive. Super, super-fun event.

06:13 CR: Yeah, that’s amazing. And especially when there’s a theme like that, like you were saying with Beethoven, and getting to learn all of those different things, it’s another amazing example. And we see so many of them, of how the geocaching community, the creativity that they have, and to make connections like that, and to come up with themes like that. And, [chuckle] like you said, a grand piano, that’s just amazing.

06:38 BR: It was amazing. On so many levels, it was amazing.

06:42 CR: So, you get back from that, and it wasn’t really long after that, unfortunately, that things with the coronavirus, COVID-19 became much more predominant. Certainly, here in Washington state, where Geocaching HQ is located, and I believe it was March 5th, if I’m remembering right, that was the first day that the lackeys from HQ were strongly encouraged to work from home. And I wonder if you could just talk through what the company’s response has been, just in how we do our jobs and what the decision-making was like, and the process for you and the rest of the senior management team in making the decisions that you’ve made for the company.

07:28 BR: Sure. Well, I guess I would start by saying that the safety of the lackeys and the safety of the community members is the most important thing, and having just come back from Europe and being a group of people that kind of pay attention to the news, and we’re embedded in this global community, so we hear what’s going on, we started to hear more and more about the reports coming out of Washington, so, in the early days, and that’s the state of Washington, not DC, we heard about the nursing home over in Kirkland, where a number of people were infected, and there were people that were dying. And we said, “Okay, this is not too far from headquarters. More and more news was coming out. And the morning of the 4th, we got word that both Microsoft and, I believe, Amazon were going to be requiring their non-essential workers to work remotely. And maybe non-essential is not the right word to describe it, but requiring some subset of their workforce to work remotely. And we said, “Okay, we know that this is serious. What should we be doing?” And we met as a team, it was on a Wednesday, we have our senior leadership team tactical meeting every Wednesday afternoon, and one of the primary topics was, okay, what can we do to protect ourselves and our community?

08:54 BR: We have geocaching visitors coming from all over the world and they come to our visitor center to find the HQ cache, and come learn more about geocaching and meet with us, and things like that. We also have lackeys who travel. We had scheduled Mega-event travel, and we had scheduled continuing education seminars and business travel schedule. We said, “Okay, at this point in time, if we’re going to do the right thing, then the right thing is for us to have everybody work remotely.” And, for what it’s worth, we’ve been doing this for over 19 years. If you had asked me years ago will there come a time where Geocaching HQ shifts to a remote workforce for an extended period of time overnight, I would have said, “No way, I can’t imagine doing that.” It’d be interesting, as an experiment, to find out, well, how effective can we be as a company with a distributed workforce, but that is a… It’s a dangerous test to do because if it doesn’t work out, who are we letting down? Are we not delivering on the promises that we make to the community? But here was a case where we’re essentially forced to test that theory. And on that Wednesday, we basically said, “Okay, we have to make this decision. Let’s make it effective tomorrow morning.”

10:21 BR: So everybody at HQ, we sent out an announcement over our Slack channel. We said, “Starting tomorrow, you are strongly encouraged to work from home.” And since that time, we’ve had different policies, where we’ve allowed people to take their computer monitors or some technology, try and set up a good remote work location for everybody. And there are… One of the policies, for example, is we have a lot of… We have a lot of lackeys who have children, who are school-aged children, and the schools are now closed, potentially through… Certainly the end of this semester, I think, feels likely. And so we have to make a choice to… What can we expect from lackeys who have to balance childcare? So one of the policies that we put out was, hey, the expectation is that you do your best, find a comfortable balance. We don’t expect you to put your children aside and not pay attention to them while you work. We just expect you to do your best. And as a company, let’s try and get through this as well as we possibly can. Model our values of passion, authenticity, and effectiveness. But we have to be a good company, we have to be a model, and we want all of the lackeys to feel like, as with everything, that they’re being well taken care of, that this company does care about them.

11:44 BR: It’s the same thing for the community. While it’s painful to close the visitor center, we know that’s in the best interest of everybody. So we closed the visitor center. All the lackeys were effectively sent home, and what we did up until… I think it’s still there today, but if you can get into the building, the building is technically still open today. That may change at the end of the day, given the new guidance from Washington state… Today.

12:10 CR: I think it actually did change, Bryan. I think today was maybe the first day that the building is closed to anyone who doesn’t have a badge. And so, therefore, the HQ logbook, which was outside the visitor center, up until now, unfortunately, will not be accessible to people. But as you said, this is changing all the time. And I think that today was the first day for that.

12:35 BR: Yeah. And in the grand scheme of things, when you think about all of the effects that this pandemic is having on people all over the world, moving the logbook inside and making it unaccessible for some period of time is kind of the least of our worries. There are people out there that are suffering, there are jobs affected, there are so many industries that are affected, and I think, from all lackeys, our heart goes out to all of those people. And one thing that we’re all looking forward to is getting back to some semblance of normal, but between now and then, we have to, both for ourselves and for everybody else out there, just encourage everybody to follow the guidelines from your local health authorities, and stay inside, stay home, stay safe. If it means that you can’t go out geocaching, that has to be the case, because everybody’s health is more important. So, for now, that is the case. This will not last forever. We will be back, and we’ll be able to see everybody on the trails, and there will be Mega-events again. Ideally, it’s over in time for our August 2020 celebration. We can talk about that for a brief moment, but, as of now, that is still months away.

13:51 BR: We’re optimistic, but we’re also realistic. At some point, if this continues at the current pace, and things are on lockdown, and we cannot host an event in Seattle, well, we’ll be considering other options and we will certainly over communicate to the community, as it gets closer. At the moment, thankfully, we have some time. Hopefully, things improve. Hopefully, all of this social distancing will help, and getting more testing out there. And ideally, we can ramp up production of the medical hardware that’s needed to take care of people. Between now and a few months from now, we’re all gonna witness what happens next.

14:38 CR: Well, you talked about this being almost a forced experiment for HQ, as something that you maybe couldn’t have foreseen, this notion of everyone working remotely, but I’m just curious what your take has been after three weeks now. My personal sense has been that the people are adapting very well, and I’m very encouraged by all of the interactions that I’m seeing, and the projects that continue to go forward. It’s not as though we’re standing in place. There’s lackeys that are continuing to work on tools for the community that will hopefully be of great use once this whole thing passes.

15:20 BR: Absolutely. It’s interesting, thinking about it as an experiment, if we had been planning to do the experiment, we would have said, “Okay, on such and such a day, we’re gonna start this, and here’s how we get ourselves best set up to handle it.” Well, in this case, we really didn’t have a lot of notice. For the lackeys, we really had about less than 24 hours of notice. And what I can say is I am beyond delighted with what I have seen, in terms of the performance from the team, the efforts being made to not skip a beat. The truth is I would expect nothing less from the team that we have, because this is really a great bunch of people. And I know that so much of it is driven by just caring about what we do, caring about the community that we serve. We know that this is important especially now and especially for those people who can still go outside and who can still sort of recreate. There are a lot of people that are signing up for geocaching right now because they’ve heard, “Wow, this is something I can do with my family while we are… While I’m not able to work or while the kids aren’t in school.”

16:39 BR: Now, that obviously transitions when people are required to stay home, but it doesn’t make anything different for us. We have to keep working. Having the luxury of being able to work remotely is something that not everybody, not every company gets, and we don’t take it for granted. And I think that’s really been demonstrated through the efforts of the lackeys and kind of hitting the ground running, so to speak. It was… Wednesday, we were all in the office. Thursday, we’re all figuring out how to effectively do video conferencing, and just learning the dynamics of, essentially, a new paradigm in operation for companies. So, if this is a forced experiment, I would say that the results are really positive so far. Hopefully, we can keep it going, and I know that, as a company, and as individuals, we’re determined to do well during this time. We don’t wanna falter. We wanna keep doing our very best to serve the community. And I think this is a good example. The Inside HQ podcast is not exactly inside HQ [laughter], but we’re not stopping. And so I think that it’s another example of how, even though there’s a lot of companies out there that can’t effectively do what they do, we’re not exactly one of them.

18:00 BR: And again, we’re not gonna take it for granted. We’re gonna keep pushing forward and we’re gonna do everything we can to make sure that this experiment… That the results of this experiment are positive, both for the game, the company, and the community.

18:14 CR: I think something that’s also been very encouraging to me, personally, has been watching the community’s response to all of this. And not surprising to me at all because of how great the community is, but just seeing how people have been patient and have kind of been trying to go with the flow as best they can. And then just seeing examples of… We shared it in a blog post recently. You probably saw the video from Italy, that would be… Italian geocachers.

18:39 BR: It was

18:42 CR: What a wonderful video, and just seeing examples like that of how the community is rising to the occasion in their own ways as well.

18:52 BR: Yes, absolutely. The video out of Italy was really inspiring, and I started watching another one that somebody shared this morning, coming from New Zealand. And then just watching the community on social media have the… Continue the dialogue, continue speaking about geocaching, and how we are adapting as a community. You’re seeing things on Facebook, of course, the Instagram, you’re seeing it on… TikTok has a really interesting geocaching presence, and there’s a lot of engagement taking place there. It’s exciting to see that while… I guess that, in a way, it is not required for us to be on the trail, physically geocaching, in order for us to be a geocaching community. And that’s inspiring. It truly is inspiring.

19:47 CR: Yeah, and as part of that blog post recently, we did list several different ways that you can try to still stay engaged with the game, and that is, again, one of the great things about our game, is that, “Okay, if I can’t leave the house, maybe I can work on these puzzles that have been driving me crazy for a long time, or maybe I can plan out a maintenance run for the future, when I am able to get back outside.” There’s a lot of different ways that you can still stay engaged with the game and then look forward to being able to do more once you’re able to have full movement again.

20:22 BR: Absolutely, and another thing I would suggest is while some people don’t have a very hard time adjusting to this new normal, there are others who are struggling with it. We know, whether it’s friends, family, community members, and so, as individuals, we can reach out to those people, whether it’s on social media or through message center, or something, and just check on, “Hey, how are you doing? Do you need anything? Do you wanna talk?” Here’s a song that I like, that makes me feel better. Here’s a piece of art. Or you see some of the folks doing, together at home, concerts on Instagram. I know Chris Martin from Coldplay did one, and John Legend did one. And there’s really a lot of avenues for maintaining a sense of joy. And so, if you know somebody out there in the geocaching community who might not be doing so well, think about some of the things that are working for you and maybe try and find a way to share them and try and find a way to pick each other up.

21:26 BR: That’s one of the foundational elements of community. It’s like mutual support, mutual encouragement. And so it doesn’t just have to take place on the trail, there’s plenty of ways that every one of us can help, so maybe that’s another way that people can think about it.

21:44 CR: Well, I think we covered a lot today, and hopefully, this… Again, I’m recording this right now. I hope it’s working [laughter]

21:52 BR: I hope so too.

21:53 CR: I’ve had my fingers crossed the whole time. This is our first time using this particular way of doing our podcast. We usually have the pleasure of being able to be right next to each other, and do it right there at the office. And hopefully, this will work out. And if it does, then I will have many other lackeys that are gonna get a… Not a knock on their door, but a virtual knock on their door.

[laughter]

22:17 BR: Well, hopefully, it doesn’t last too long, but if it does, everybody stay safe. Do what you can, wash your hands, practice social distancing, pay attention to the health guidelines, and together, as a community, we will get through this, I have no doubt.

22:35 CR: Okay. Well, thank you, Bryan. And if you’re listening to our podcast, and you… Well, and you are, if you heard me say that, that was a stupid thing to say [laughter] If there is something that you would like to hear us talk about on the podcast, you can drop us an email to podcast@geocaching.com, that is podcast@geocaching.com. And I will see who else I can rope into one of these conversations. And until next time, from myself and from Bryan, and from all of the other lackeys at HQ, happy caching.

23:10 BR: Happy caching, everybody.