
$1B Business Where All 700 Employees Work Remotely (2019) - throwaway3157
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he-built-a-1-billion-business-where-all-700-employees-work-remotely/#caffbb02aa97
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sys_64738
If the majority are remote then it can work. Don’t be remote where the company
is otherwise geo-located. Hallway conversations often make decisions.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Seconded. I've had a fabulous experience at an all-remote company, and a
pretty lousy experience where I was the only remote worker.

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iamcasen
It really looks like this guy found his calling, good for him! I'm impressed
his managed to keep his organization healthy with 700 remote employees, that
takes some real business/management talent.

In my own business, we are a remote team of 6 and we do pretty well. The way
we've made it work so far is by doing very little collaboration, and instead
opting to each have our own focus with little overlap. There are times when
I'd really love to have some other engineers to whiteboard with and
collaborate on difficult problems, but that seems impossible to do remotely.
At least very easily.

~~~
sytse
Thanks! What we do for remote brainstorming is using indentation in Google
Docs. We find that most ideas can be represented by a tree structure. We use
indentation to indicate what is connected. You can't easily do arrows between
different ideas but I've seen it work on almost every case.

BTW We're trying to bring real-time collaboration to GitLab issues so you can
do the same in GitLab. I spend some time on that this weekend
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301465115)

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ng7j5d9
Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to
executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?

Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're
still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.

Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe
even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able
to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?

~~~
throwaway5752
If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros
lighting money on fire".

I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.

\- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory
(obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their
homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.

\- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team
functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be
remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and
widespread outside of tech.

\- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain
number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be
universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE
work).

Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing
practices.

~~~
ng7j5d9
> If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros
> lighting money on fire"

Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more
productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to
put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid
to go the remote path there.

~~~
throwaway5752
I did take your comment in the intended spirit! My response were answers in
that same spirit (points you might give that executive to say "we're a remote
organization already").

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sytse
I'd be happy to answer any questions about remote work. We've published
extensively about this subject [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/guide/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/) and
today we released a remote work emergency toolkit
[https://twitter.com/darrenmurph/status/1237771768020054016](https://twitter.com/darrenmurph/status/1237771768020054016)

~~~
ksec
>We've published extensively about this subject

For entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of All-Remote culture I think the hiring
page is better [1]. And a list of countries that they dont hire due to legal
reasons. [2]. And list of countries they have listed as cooperate entity for
Payroll [3]

I think a lot of the issues and problems with All-Remote is not in the
communication or working style ( which can be adopted ) but actually in the
hiring and legals where smalls startups have absolutely no time, idea, nor the
energy to do it themselves. I remember reading HashiCorp's founder saying the
same thing where its was the hardest part of hiring across the world.

This may actually be startup idea to solve this.

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
remote/hiring/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/hiring/)

[2] [https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-
guidelines](https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines)

[3] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/blob/master/dat...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/blob/master/data/contract_factors.yml)

~~~
sytse
For sure that is a big problem. I blogged about it in 2016
[https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-
payrolling.html](https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-payrolling.html) and
I'm excited to be an investor in Remote.com that tries to solve that problem.
It is started by our old VP of Product Job van der Voort.

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kuharich
Prior comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011)

------
cpach
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011)

------
PunchTornado
given the majority of coworkers are now remote due to coronavirus, I hate it.
I miss just grabbing someone to my computer and have a chat about my problem.
now I'll have to arrange a meeting, share screen and all, do you see it, do
you hear me?

plus in meetings remote workers rarely get the chance to speak. otherwise
opinionated colleagues are now silent.

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dominotw
I think gitlab has a huge advantage in remote work as in their mission is
clearly understood by their employees ( to clone github.com). Its a very
outsourcable class of problem where requirements are clearly understood and
employees aren't required to really come up anything new or innovative.

I am yet to see a 100% remote company thats doing something brand new and
innovative.

~~~
agustif
C'mon that's just unfair. GitHub is Microsoft now, I for one I'm glad gitlab
exists even if I don't personally use it much, but it's a nice replacement if
centralized microsoft-owned github goes down like it has been in the last
weeks/months...

Basecamp has a lot of competition and probably some frontend clones maybe, but
I don't think it could be called unoriginall or a copycat of any of it's
competitors (Todoist,Asana,Etc)

They also have great (free) books on working remote like REWORK. Maybe you
like that example better?

Anyways nothing in life is black or white

~~~
dominotw
yes gitlab is nice, i use it personally. i wasn't implying otherwise. Gitlab
is a copy of github, everything was exactly the same as github until few yrs
ago. Like feature by feature replication. I really don't think they did
anything truly innovative like github did.

>Anyways nothing in life is black or white

yea ofcourse, you seem to drawn a false implication that copycat = bad, which
is obviously not the case like you pointed out.

