How Wise CEO Kristo Käärmann Makes the Most of His Day

Part of Kristo Käärmann’s day is dedicated to doing someone else’s job. The co-founder and CEO of cross-borders payment company Wise (formerly TransferWise) wants to understand what it’s really like to work in his company.

07:30

I want to wake up naturally. I think if you’re waking up with an alarm clock you are, by definition, a little bit sleep-deprived. If I manage to wake up two hours before my three-year-old and my wife, I like to go for a run or a swim at the pool near us. But to be honest, this is more wishful thinking. The early part of the day is usually me making them breakfast.

08:30

I usually cycle to work. It’s 10 or 15 minutes and especially nice on days when it’s not raining. In London, that’s not so frequent but it’s better than 40 minutes on public transport. I’m a fan of belt drive bikes; they don’t have a chain so you don’t have to think about oil messing up your feet or trousers. I take my son to the nursery when I can. Now he can cycle on a balance bike himself.

09:00

We have subsidiaries in many countries. The first calls of the day are with Singapore or Japan, earlier for Australia. Every couple of months we have a one-hour, Japan-specific meeting with the people who build the product or run operations there. In banking, at the end of the day the Japanese use money in the same way as Westerners; their relationship to money is the same, except that I’ve heard some people in Japan send Christmas cards to their bank managers. This is something to look at through the lens of respect.

SEE ALSO: What Australian of the Year Grace Tame is Watching Right Now

10:00

I try to meet one-on-one with my direct reports at least every two weeks. On this day, it’s the head of our engineering team. Oftentimes we walk while going through the agenda, partly so we have even the moderate physical movement of going to Allpress for a coffee. The engineering team is widely distributed, from Austin, Texas, to London and Budapest. We discuss how to organise ourselves so 600 engineers can work as effectively as 200 did, and how independent units can work on a lot of things in parallel once we get to 1000. We have about 70 teams of five to 10 engineers, all working asynchronously, focused on a country or currency or on a certain feature. They make 100 new releases of code – 100 updates going live in the apps – every day, which is an amazing feature when competitors sometimes talk about quarterly release cycles. How do we make it so everyone can publish features quickly at the same time as growing their teams? This is a common discussion.

12:00

Lunch is not with my direct reports but with a senior leader – today the head of design – and we bring our food back to the office. When you have multiple, different tasks in the day, there are switching costs – you always lose some efficiency if you have to switch between tasks. If I have five or 10 minutes between meetings I sit in an open area, to catch up on email but also to be available to whoever is walking by with something to mention. I knowingly create space for these moments, for quick water-cooler conversations, which are important.

13:00

I spend four hours coding a feature with an engineering team. I’m not so proficient in software building so it usually takes me two or three weeks to get something useful live. I can’t take full time off to do it – I have my day job – but I can create a period of three weeks where I work on a feature that gets released to customers. Sometimes I join the customer support team for half a day and take calls. We have a team of more than 3300 people overall but it started with one, when I had to do every job. Now that I’ve given all the jobs away, in some ways my life is easier. But for me to lead the team, it’s important to remember how it is to do those jobs, to feel what the engineers feel when they build something. There’s so much more we can do now, given our resources and scale, but building software when we were five people 10 years ago is different to now, when we have 600 people building software.

17:00

On days when I have four or five meetings, even if they’re internal ones, it’s a useful trick to write notes at the end of the day and follow up with each person: “Hey, we discussed this and I said I’d do that; I’ll try to do it next week.” I try to get this done in an hour but usually the follow-ups are meaningful so it can take a few hours.

18:30

I try for half the days to get home by 7pm, right after my wife and kid have dinner but before the leftovers go cold. My wife and I play with my son or just follow him doing his things for the hour before his bedtime.

20:00

Address external emails and do any remaining follow-ups. A couple of times a day I check Twitter and scroll through the Google News selection on my Android phone, which has gotten pretty good.

22:00

If my wife and I have energy, we might watch Netflix. We are fans of Money Heist but at that time of day, not too particular. Usually by 10:30 or 11, it’s lights out for me.

Assistants required

Now that Kristo Käärmann is travelling more, he’s appointed an executive assistant. The Wise CEO gave up having one when the pandemic hit London in 2020 and made his own way through Google Calendar, Slack and online booking platforms. “Most people in the world don’t have an EA,” he says, “and they get by.”

Services marketplace Airtasker has recorded growing interest in assistants on demand; there were 20 per cent more callouts using the term “virtual assistant” posted in January to April compared to that period last year and 38 per cent more than in 2019. In May, the average fee for virtual assistant tasks more than doubled year on year.