The conventional wisdom when you’re building a tech startup is that you “have” to move to San Francisco. It’s absolutely the case that the investor pool is easier to meet, local talent is easier to come by, and it’s easy to network. However, I think some of the diversity problems that arise in early tech startups are due in large part to this philosophy. Only certain personality types are going to be willing to move, live, and work in San Fran. There’s a crazy absolute volume of talent elsewhere in the country who can’t or won’t move there. Being able to tap into this pool through distributed teams should allow companies to recruit exceptional people, and maintain a considerably move diverse culture.
It’s worth acknowledging that you certainly miss out on some team camaraderie type things by being full time remote, but I would argue that you can build in retreats and other ways to develop a fun, passionate company culture without requiring everyone in person. It’s also true that there are some tasks which are just better done in person. In my own remote work, I definitely miss the ability to sit in a room with a white board. That said, web tools are getting close. We’re not QUITE there yet with a seamless virtual presence, but it’s getting close. Plus, when the whole team is remote, the whole team invests in tools to be successful. As these tools get better and better, remote teams are only going to continue to be more effective. So, when we’re looking towards the future, I think that investing in the infrastructure and culture to make these types of teams work is going to pay back 10x over the next 10 years.
As an aside, when you do a half-remote thing, there’s a humongous risk of the remote people getting left out (I know that happened in my last role). You can make half remote concepts work, but I would argue that it might be even more challenging to do so successfully than an all-remote team. It’s a big struggle to get the local people to use the remote tools, and then when there’s a meeting with 4 people in a room and 2 remote, it’s easy for the people not there in person to just get run over. When everyone’s remote, you don’t have these kinds of worries.
I personally love the concept of sqwiggle. I know that it freaks some people out, or feels like big brother, but as long as you’ve established that your team and boss isn’t using it to check your hours (especially because on a remote team, our hours probably don’t overlap for much of the day), it can absolutely enable better communication between teammates. It would also be a fun integration with Saent where you could have the software connected to the timer overlay a person’s icon on sqwiggle so that the whole team could know when you’re in a focus sprint and not bother you.
Getting a team to respect those type of sprint boundaries is obviously its own challenge, but I think it’s something that could be particularly effective. There’s no great queue for “I’m busy” on a remote team, because people are generally not great about updating chat client statuses. I know that when I go on DnD, I’m hugely unlikely to remember to flip it back when I’m done. Integration with Saent would help in that regard.
It’s going to be an interesting world to live in. Steve Case and co. already talk about the Rise of the Rest, but that’s still about building teams in local communities. It’s not the same thing as spreading out your team in order to find the best, most passionate, most invested people no matter where they are. Saent’s trying to figure out how to navigate a lot of the issues related to pay and equity and culture when the whole team’s remote, but I think that it’s going to come out as a much stronger company because of the effort put in up front to enable this structure to work. Should be fun!
