Collection: Hybrid, On-Site, Remote & Why?

A collection of thoughts from a collection of leaders. 🌱

Author

Bill Kerr
June 06, 2024

👋 Howdy to the 103 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 31,094 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are of some of our recent editions.

💰 Media + Tech = Negative CAC. How the smartest companies are building a lead gen machine that pays them.
🤳 Whitney Wolfe Herd Deep Dive. Founder at Bumble. We swipe right on her excellent career to date.
🗺️ The Four Type Of Managers & How To Manage Them. A leadership performance matrix to assess your team.

PARTNERS 💫

“We need a front-end developer for Tuesday, but it will take months to find someone in the US.” If you are looking for your next remote hire, Athyna has you covered. From finance and ops, to creative and engineering.

The secret weapon for ambitious startups. No search fees. No activation fees. Just incredible talent, matched with AI precision—at lightning speed. All up up to 70% less than hiring locally.

Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.

HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Had some pretty exciting stuff go on this week. At Athyna, we had another product launch, this time our AI-Powered Job Search Tool, Ava. It was quite successful actually, we got our first paying user almost immediately, very few bugs, a few hundred downloads.

This was the soft launch, friends and family-ish. Next week we have our internal creators plus a bunch of TikTok creators ready to pump it out to their audiences.

To be honest, the paying customer was huge. It was $5. We have a nominal fee for users if they want to optimise their LinkedIn, resume or run our Matching Index across jobs more than 50 times.

But you can imagine the delight of our team. They’ve been building Athyna AI for a year or so, and although that’s awesome, it’s an internal tool really for the moment. This was the first time a user has ever shelled out money for something we built.

As I mentioned, it was $5, or $4.99 in fact. But it was the most meaningful $4.99 anyone has ever spent with us. Anyway, that’s a little update for you.

COLLECTION 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

The age old question. What is the best way to grow a company in 2024? Is there some magic to having people under the one roof? Does having happier, healthier people working from home trump the benefits that the in-house osmosis may give. And what of hiring—the best talent does not live in one city. That’s needs to be factored in as well.

We’ve all been there.

It’s clear where I stand. I have only ever run remote orgs. And Athyna, as of today, averages 93% engagement, which is insanely high. But I may be in a bit of a remote work echo chamber.

Deel was, for a time, the faster ever company to grow from $1M to $100M in revenue, and only a few years later it’s closer to $600M—fully remote. But are they the exception, or are they they rule.

Do you work fully in-office, hybrid or remote?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

It’s been proven that great businesses can be build in offices and working remotely. So I think the real answer lies in philosophy. What company do you want to build. Let’s hear from a handful of the best founders about how they think of their remote or in-office strategy.

Immad Akhund - Co-founder and CEO at Mercury

We're remote-first. We do have three offices in SF, New York and Portland, and we encourage people to go in if they’re close but it's very optional. So I don't know what that's called, remote-first with some offices? At the end of the day, getting the best talent is the most important thing. And I think if I had to force everyone to come to San Francisco, I would just not get the best people. So that's the biggest factor for me.

There are pros and cons to all of these things. And you have to know, if you do choose remote, you have to kind of mitigate it with some other things. For example, even though we are remote, we have three to four off-sites every year, where we all get together and brainstorm, and work on problems that are hard to do in a remote world.

Ross Chaldecott - Co-Founder & CEO at Kinde

We have the incredible advantage as a company of being born during pandemic years. And so we’ve always just naturally been remote. Our team is used to thinking and operating this way. And so, in general, we operate as a remote company. In reality it’s a little more complicated than that, in that we actually really want to encourage people to work where most makes sense to them.

For most of our team this is remote. For some people this is in the office. And so we give every person the choice about where they would prefer to be that day. More specifically:

  • You can work from home.

  • You can work from a WeWork anywhere in the world.

  • You can work from anywhere with an internet connection.

  • You get to decide every day.

Waving when entering and leaving a Zoom call - big tick in my book.

It’s really that simple. And we find that this works for us.

I am still a big believer in face-to-face time and so, from time to time we do try to bring larger groups or the whole team together to spend time together. We had a retreat towards the end of last year to bring all of our people together. The intent of this was less to work together, more to spend time together and get to know each other. The team loved it and I genuinely think it made us better and stranger as a team.

In this regard I think that offices are actually quite interesting. They’re a terrible place for people to do focus work, but a really great place for working together on problems. And so we do really think about offices in future—at least for Kinde. But we think of them more as being a place for collaborative work. Get rid of the fixed desks and replace them with whiteboards and couches and comfortable places for time together and encouraged creativity and play.

I also feel there’s an interesting opportunity to welcome our customers into our workspace in future. Make it a place where they can come to be supported and spend time with the team, and give the team opportunity to learn from them directly. Feels like a win both ways.

Tony Jamous - Co-Founder & CEO at Oyster

Oyster is a distributed and fully remote company. Being remote allows us to hire incredible talent all over the world and tap into a diversity of experiences and perspectives. This is our superpower as an organization.

Oyster runs a well-oiled remote-first organization.

Because we’ve been able to hire everywhere, we have been able to grow to 600 employees in three years. We’re also able to be more inclusive because of the way we hire. 50% of Oyster employees identify as women, and we also have Oysters in 70+ countries and counting.

We’re able to do this because we have a strong asynchronous work culture that allows us to collaborate effectively no matter the time zone difference.

We’re a hybrid team. To make it work we’re structured as if we’re running fully remotely. All meetings are Zoom meetings and friendly for timezones from Auckland to Perth. Most of us are based in our three offices though in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

Remote love - Startmate style.

If I were to give one tip here, it would be: don’t try to build a hybrid culture. If you have a remote team, lean into going remote-first. That means that even if we have conversations in the office, we always write them up on Slack for everyone in the team to see.

Instead of shoulder tapping we ask questions in publicly visible channels. You never want the team to feel left out and deteriorate the trust. You want everyone to feel included.

Jennifer Phan, Co-Founder and CEO at Passionfroot

We’re a hybrid team as we want to provide our team both the ability to connect and work with your team in person—which is especially crucial in the beginning—and the flexibility to work from home or somewhere else if needed. The majority of our team is in Berlin and we try to be 2-3 times per week in the office. We also make sure that people feel connected by having daily stand ups, socials and regular off-sites.

‘3-2-1 airtime’.

An in-person strategy session.

I’m based out of San Diego, but the company is remote. We’re building a service that solves the problem of lack of communication and connection in a virtual world, and so it only makes sense that we virtually conduct our business as well, which is also how so many of our members are working on a day-to-day basis.

Teamwork mates the dream work.

In a remote environment, we’ve found that being intentional about bringing the team together for unstructured working time is as important as regular meetings. We hold what we call virtual Teamwork Dreamwork sessions that are intended to mimic an open office working space with the spontaneity of you never know who’ll you’ll run into. The full team is invited and people drop in and out of it as it works with schedules. We also do meet up in-person often, which are always some of my favorite times with the team.

John Howard - Founder at Slingshot

Most is on-site because we own the 3PL (third-party logistics) which is a glorified warehouse. We need people on site because of that operation but we allow you to work from home if your work can be done there. Most everyone is in the office about 75% of the time but it’s totally up to you and your role.

Huge believer in planning on-site and then getting the planned work done remotely or wherever you choose.

Emmanuel Nataf - Co-Founder & CEO at Reedsy

We’ve been fully remote since the beginning and love it. It increases our chances of finding ‘All-Star talent,’ creates a more diverse team by nature, allows everyone to organize themselves more freely, pollutes less, etc.

“Say cheese”

Olympia Yarger - Founder & CEO at Goterra

Our waste operators, farm production people and service technicians need to work on site due to the nature of their roles. We have people employed in these positions across Canberra, Albury-Wodonga, Sydney and Melbourne. For the rest of the team we are 100% flexible depending on the role and project.

Our HR/Head of People works full time remotely from Western Australia. And we have a number of people who choose hybrid and others who work 100% onsite or home by choice.

Goterra run hybrid but highly value face time and team building time when possible.

Communication and inclusion are key, we work asynchronously using Slack as our main communication tool, and all discussions are documented in channels so no-one misses out on the conversation. We have team-building activities online and in-person, and our remote team members are encouraged and supported to spend regular time at our HQ in Canberra, with Canberra based team members regularly travelling to our satellite sites.

Being flexible with how and where work is performed also means that we can prioritise inclusion and diversity which we believe is integral to our success. And as I spend a lot of time travelling for Goterra, my own role needs to be a hybrid of remote and on-site, and model that it can work successfully if the commitment to making it work is there.

Niki Scevak - Co-Founder & Partner at Blackbird

Blackbird is hybrid and always has been; we have offices in Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne and team members across Australia and Aotearoa in places like Orange, Wellington, Brisbane and more. We’ve always believed that flexibility is key to our culture and while we have annual rituals such as offsites to bring everyone together, we want our team to have the flexibility to work wherever they want.

Flexibility + off-sites = Blackbird’s secret cultural sauce.

Ajay Prakash - Founder & CEO of EntryLevel

We are 100% remote but we have a cluster of team members in Sydney, Australia who meet occasionally for dinner. We’re remote because it’s more effective for us as a company that has customers in 182 countries to cover multiple time zones whilst also not limiting amazing talent by geographic bounds.

Test your knowledge

Which of these big tech companies is fully remote?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Alexa Grabell - Co-Founder & CEO at Pocus

We’re currently hybrid as a result of starting the company during COVID, so everyone is everywhere! But there is definitely appetite for in person.

To support hybrid we have a few rituals to keep the team connected, such as; quarterly offsites for the entire team to work together in person, weekly team hangouts in Zoom for more casual time and promoting a culture where folks in cities with more people, like SF and New York, can go and hang out.

Team Pocus, 2023.

Even though Pocus is a remote company, we take every chance we get to meet in person. And every time we do, I’m reminded of how important - and fun - face-time is. I’m so proud of the team we’re building and super excited about all the plans we’ve laid out for 2023.

Ananda Aisola - COO and Co-Founder of Composer

Composer was formed during the early days of COVID. At the time we had no choice but to start as a remote first organization. Over time we’ve leaned into the advantages of remote work, particularly the ability to hire the best employees located anywhere. We tend to favour hiring people in North America for time zone reasons but have employees based in Europe as well.

While remote work isn’t perfect it has advantages that we’ve leaned into as an organization. Apart from the ability to hire the best talent we also can hire outside of major urban centres. To succeed remotely we select for employees that are intrinsically motivated and have a bias to action.

Bill Kerr - Founder & CEO at Athyna

We are a fully remote team, spread across a number of different countries so really we are remote-first. However we do have co-working passes, meaning, we are a little hybrid as well. The plan for us as we continue to scale is to build out more 'hubs' around the world. We are very top heavy Argentina and Brazil at the moment, which is great as we have some chances to have the team get together but it also means there is a risk for others at Athyna to fell 'less than'. And that doesn't sit well with me.

Team vibes.

Dogs allowed.

One of our Product Manager’s hiking Everest Base Camp.

It's my firmly held opinion that the best teams are built remotely. Better access to talent, happier & more productive employees and costs savings on desks and office space.

In sum

As you can see, the jury is split, kinda. We actually have seven fully remote companies, six hybrid, including Mercury even though Immad did use the words “remote-first company,” and a solitary small team, Slingshot, that work primarily in the office. Interesting times we live in.

And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

A cool read from HBR something I wholeheartedly believe in, good onboarding. Check out the very aptly named piece: Your New Hires Won’t Succeed Unless You Onboard Them Properly.

I've seen plenty of new hires come and go, trust me, proper onboarding makes all the difference.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Welcome to 2024 people. Rock stars are out. Chip manufacturers are in.

The Ad Professor is a good follow on the platform formerly knows as Twitter.

And this is too funny not to share.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting PostHog - product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, data warehouse and more.

Apollo: We use Apollo to automate a large part of our 1.2M weekly outbound emails.
Taplio: We use Taplio to grow and manage my online presence.
Megaphone: We use Megaphone to amplify our impressions on socials.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you—hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
🏡 Looking for a personal board of directors: Check out Sidebar.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️

Reply

or to participate.