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LATEST POSTS 📚

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

🦜 El Ascenso De Duolingo (The Rise Of Duolingo). The rise, rise and rise some more of the world's most loveable language app.
📮 If CRM + The Future Had A Baby: Attio’s Zero To One. A deep dive look into growing a category challenger in the relationship management space.
🚀 The Philosophy, Traditions & Leadership Behind Winning Culture. A follow up in interview with Dom Pym, co-founder & ex-CEO at Up.

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.

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The CRM I use is Attio. I chose it because it is the CRM built for the next era of companies.

It’s a wonderful experience and one of my favourite products. I use Attio daily for sales pipeline management, fundraising, content partnerships and more.

It only take minutes to set up. Why spend weeks setting up your CRM when you can get it done today?

Loved by fast-growing companies like ElevenLabs, Replicate, Modal, and this newsletter, Open Source CEO.

“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.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Today people across the globe celebrated World Mental Health Day. And at Athyna, every year we give our team the day off to rest, recuperate, spend time with their family, or whatever else it is that gives them somewhat of a massage of the brain.

In the afternoon, my partner and I took my brothers dog, Leonard, down the beach for some good old fashion stick throwing adventures. Then we came home and spent our final dinner together after bunking for the week. Myself, my brother, his wife, and my partner. No better way to finish off the day.

BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

The World’s Most Successful Remote Companies

The whole wide world went remote in 2021, and now it’s rushing itself back to the office again. Whether you are a remote nerd that believes the studies showing people’s happiness spikes working from home, or you side with the data telling you that human’s are more secluded and lonely than ever before, one thing is certain. Remote work, works.

Today we’ll run through a handful of use cases that will show you that some of the best companies in the world thrive remotely. Two of the cases we will go through are the two fastest growing companies in history—Deel and Wiz—along with some technology OG’s like Atlassian, Zapier, Coinbase and more.

One thing I need to say before we dive in is that this piece will likely be incredibly biased. It will be written through remote coloured glasses by me, a guy who runs a company who helps build global teams. But even so, I think you’ll enjoy the read. And if I do my job well enough, you might even walk away with some new insights on what it takes to run a great remote organisation. Let’s get started.

Zap, zap, Zapier

“If you give people the best place where they can do their work, they are going to stick around,” said Wade Foster, when asked about Zapier’s historically great employee retention rate. Yep, that’s right, the tool that holds all of our companies together, Zapier, founded in 2011 by Wade, Mike Knoop, and Bryan Helmig, is one of the most successful examples of a fully remote company.

From its early days, Zapier has been remote-first, a decision that was born out of practicality. The founders were based in different locations, and as the company grew, they realised that remote work allowed them to hire the best talent from anywhere in the world, without being restricted to a single location.

Today, Zapier has grown into a company with over 1,000 employees spread across 17 time zones and 42 countries. Despite the challenges of scaling a remote team, Zapier has implemented several strategies to maintain productivity and a strong company culture. These include asynchronous communication, transparency, and structured processes.

And cool little things like; “A ritual called ReadMe. Think of it as a personal manual where you detail your personal values, what gives you energy, what depletes your energy, your working hours, etc. This is something you create and then share with new teams or colleagues to facilitate one-to-one connections,” says Brandon Sammit, Chief People Officer at Zapier.

Zapier has had remarkable financial success, with ARR said to be north of $250 million as of today. This financial performance is supported by minimal investment—only $1.4 million to be precise—highlighting the company's hyper effective use capital.

The crypto kings at Coinbase

Coinbase, the crypto exchange we all know and love, made the move to ‘remote-first’ in May of 2020. This change was announced by CEO, Brian Armstrong, and was followed up by the closure of their San Francisco headquarters in February 2022 to strengthen their decentralised—yes, there’s that crypto / web3 slogan again—office strategy moving forward.

Remote-first gives employees the flexibility to work from home or from the office, with the long-term vision including hybrid solutions and smaller offices in various locations instead of a central HQ. The company’s mission is to enhance economic freedom globally, and its remote work model is aligned with this vision, enabling it to leverage talent from around the world.

For the first time in two years, Coinbase celebrated a profitable quarter in Q4 of 2023. They did $273 million in net income for the fourth quarter of 2023, putting the net profitability for all of 2023 at $95 million. Funny that.

“Kick rocks, Google nerds” — regards, Wiz

Founded in March 2020, Wiz has quickly ascended to prominence in the cloud security landscape. The name may sound familiar, as they are the company that quite literally facepalmed Google on their $23 billion dollar acquisition attempt in July of this year.

Their CEO, Assaf, did it with this absolute mic-drop-power-move-letter-to-his-employees; “While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz. Let me cut to the chase: our next milestones are $1 billion in ARR and an IPO. Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.” A literal new age techno-gangster.

Wiz itself operates under a flexible remote work policy where; “Employees can choose to work from one of our global offices, fully remote, or a mix of the two.” This model has been important not only for scaling operations globally so quickly, but also for attracting top talent from around the world who prefer the flexibility of remote work. The ability to work from anywhere has allowed Wiz to build a diverse and dynamic team, which is crucial for innovation in the rapidly evolving cybersecurity field. One of the hottest markets for talent in the world.

Leadership at Wiz emphasise a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, driven by a mission to simplify cloud security for their clients. The remote work model supports this by fostering a flexible, inclusive work environment where employees, referred to as "Wizards," are encouraged to contribute ideas and solutions regardless of their physical location. Sounds smart right?

The magic for Wiz is in the product, the market opportunities in front of them, and the incredible team of ~2,000 Wizards. As of 2023, the company achieved a valuation of $12 billion after raising $1 billion in a Series E funding round.

The next Salesforce, Deel

Some months back I wrote about the meteoric rise of Deel. I said they were on track to be the next big player in SaaS. And I stand by that. I firmly believe that when we are looking at Deel, we are looking at the next Salesforce. A soon-to-be $100 billion dollar juggernaut, that also happens to be remote at it’s core.

Not only is Deel fully remote, the company actually is a driving force behind the remote work revolution, providing services that allow businesses to hire anyone, anywhere, simplifying the process of complying with local laws. This includes managing payroll, taxes, benefits, equity, immigration and more for global teams. For those that aren’t aware, they do this by having their own global entities in hundreds of countries and effectively ‘employing’ your team on your behalf.

This is an incredibly evocative solution for startups and enterprises alike. Enterprises need compliance when building our their offshore capabilities, while startups need to, well, stay alive long enough to get to be an enterprise. And one of the fastest ways to extend your runway—hire global talent.

I may be speaking out of turn here, but I saw something really interesting happen in this market in late 2022. Deel had just raised their last round in frothy times at 112x revenue, and Oyster and Remote were not far behind. All three of these industry leaders have fully remote teams, and once the market crashed I noticed a distinct change.

With the VC fire hose being turned off, but all three needing to grow into valuations at 60-112x revenue, I saw a shift in how they hired. Deel, Oyster and Remote all seemed to be dogfooding their own solution, and hiring only in cost effective geographies where the labour arbitrage was largest. Deel and Oyster in particular went from hiring globally but with many open roles in the US, UK, APAC etc., to almost exclusively from South America, Africa, and South East Asia where you can find the same talent for up to 80% less.

_{*Note: This is an observation of mine, and although I know plenty of people at these companies, including the CEO of one, I can’t 100% confirm my assumptions here.}

When speaking to Dan Westgarth, COO of Deel, he told me; “The key benefit is flexibility. I’m able to walk my dog any time of the day, attend a family event, and travel to any location around the world whenever I like.”

What’s also interesting is how Deel has built hubs within their team. “We've done a good job of clustering teams. Most of our fintech team is either in the Americas or Western Europe, like London to the Americas. For the R&D team we have Ukraine, Israel, the Americas.” This ‘clustering’ allows Deel to have more overlap, more events, and more off-sites to add value to their global employees.

Australia’s tech darling, Atlassian

Do you know which company’s founders hold the record for most stock held at the date of their IPO? It’s not a trick question—It’s Atlassian. Did you also know that Atlassian has a unique approach to remote work called ‘Team Anywhere’? This approach is centred around giving employees the freedom to choose where they work every day, whether from home, a co-working space, or even from different locations around the world.

Implemented in 2020, Team Anywhere transformed Atlassian into a fully distributed company with employees working together from over 10,000 locations worldwide. The company emphasises flexibility, allowing employees to work outside their designated home base for short periods each year, encouraging exploration and work-life balance.

Atlassian’s ‘Team Anywhere Lab,’ staffed with behavioural scientists, is constantly conducting experiments to improve their remote work practices. One such experiment involved restructuring meeting times to take up no more than 50% of a given day, giving the team more dedicated deep work time. The change led to improved productivity and sustainability of the teams workload. It proved that intentional time management meaningfully enhances the effectiveness of remote work.

Give him a follow if you want to live on the bleeding edge of what is going on in the world of remote first organisations.

The hostess with the mostest, Airbnb

Another company that has remote work coursing through its veins is the world’s favourite—save the cleaning fees—getaway app, Airbnb. During the pandemic, Airbnb made the shift to fully remote via a tweet from Brian Chesky, their founder, and they have never looked back. “The world has become more flexible. Our business wouldn’t have recovered as quickly from the pandemic if it hadn’t been for millions of people working from Airbnbs,” Chesky tweeted.

And although a lot of big tech have been walking back their move to remote, forcing people to come back in and work in the office, Airbnb have doubled down. Chesky himself, a long-term bachelor, has spent time himself travelling and working from Airbnbs.

Interestingly enough, long-term, work-away-style travel is the fastest growing part of Airbnbs business. The world is our oyster people—get out and enjoy it!

And our friends: beehiiv, Attio, PostHog, Athyna

While the companies above are remote first, they are also the incumbents. But the hottest up and coming startups I see in my day to day are also remote first. Companies that I have spent time with lately thanks to this newsletter like beehiiv, Attio, PostHog, and my own company Athyna are all fully remote.

My firm belief is that the more our pre-COVID past becomes a distant memory, the more the world will trend towards remote. The people want it. And as today’s operators become tomorrow’s founders, remote work will begin to rule the day.

Extra reading

• How to build a remote team, GitLab

• Airbnb’s design to live and work anywhere - March, 2022

• Man of tomorrow: Atlassian’s Work Futurist Dominic Price, Outlier by Dovetail - December, 2022

And that’s it! If you enjoy this and want to learn more hiring globally with Athyna, you can see what we do here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

It’s a few weeks old now, but this conversation with John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs was quite phenomenal. If you want to feel a little smarter today, do yourself a favour and watch this.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

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 Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

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

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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