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Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub | TechCrunch
April 9, 2019 | Workplace, Technology
There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier, all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees.
The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location. For a generation of founders, moving to Silicon Valley was de rigueur. Later, the emergence of accelerators and investors worldwide allowed a wider range of potential home bases. But now there’s a third wave: a culture of traveling with its own, growing support networks and best practices.
You don’t have to look far to find startup gurus and VCs who strongly advise against being remote, much less a nomad. The basic reasoning is simple: Not having a location doesn’t add anything, so why do it?
But that view is incorrect. For companies that have chosen to be distributed, remote has added value. Some claim they wouldn’t have grown as fast or as well if they weren’t remote. And there’s more to being a nomad than making sure your prime years go to better experiences than a daily commute between San Francisco and San Mateo.
Startups are fragile, so it’s best to avoid any work practice that could disrupt delicate growth cycles. For companies that have chosen to be distributed, remote has added value. Some claim they wouldn’t have grown as fast or as well if they weren’t remote.
The tools of remote work
Most large companies with a remote workforce were started in 2010 or after, during the same timeframe that a new generation of tools was becoming popular.
The use of these tools for occasional remote work at companies that aren’t distributed has caused some confusion. Just using the tools doesn’t imply being good at remote work.
As Jon Evans wrote in a recent Extra Crunch piece, “When you’re remote, scheduled synchronous communications like stand-ups or other video calls, are no substitute for the absence of unscheduled asynchronous ones.” That Slack channel has to be the primary water cooler in order for your remote workers to feel like first-class citizens. Being partially distributed, or having just a few remote workers, may be worse than committing fully to either an office-bound culture or a remote one.
What’s truly interesting at distributed companies is when remote work makes their management better than their office-bound peers. Humans thrive on the kind of subtle facial expressions and tonal shifts that don’t work well with remote tools, even if you’re video conferencing.
How can you know your employee is engaged in their work if you can’t see them at their desk or talk to them face to face? The answer: judge employees on results and merits.
Greg Mercer, the founder of the distributed startup Jungle Scout, says remote work provided an extra incentive to get management right. The company grew quickly and added tons of remote people.
Co-founder and CEO Wade Foster says that remote doesn’t allow for the typical Silicon Valley dysfunction of waiting until there’s an emergency to implement managerial reforms.
If you’re a bad manager, it really is harder to hide in a remote company, says Foster.
The point is that remote companies are finding that they must focus on the results of actual work, which has long been a weak point of office culture. If an employee spends hours trading obnoxious memes on 4chan, that’s not just irrelevant to their remote work, it’s unseen. A focus on results also doesn’t mean remote management has a shallow view of workers.
The writer states “In many years of working closely with several people, I’ve learned to intuit their feelings and attitude toward the work, and the best way to motivate each.” Furthermore he states “I’m only missing an unnecessary social dimension: an understanding of how they gossip, how they perform at office politics, or whether they’re working at any given moment.” However Most remote workers are still bound to one place.
Zapier began offering a “de-location”; package in 2016, which gave workers who were willing to move out of expensive places $10,000 to do so.
They can be viewed as an elite subgroup of remote workers: a study remotes found that only 24 percent of remotes reported being nomadic, and of those, about half still spent their time in only one or two countries. As a remote employee, and especially as a founder, that whimsical, flittering existence is a recipe for disaster.
Matt Mullenweg, whose startup Automattic is the second-largest remote company, advises approaching travel strategically. “With proper planning, travel can allow you to bootstrap community in different locations, connect with customers, meet non-traditional investors or advisors, and recruit talented colleagues outside of the normal fishing grounds of the internet giants. Something closer to ‘slowmad’ than ‘nomad’ is probably the right approach,” he told TechCrunch. “Starting a company is very intense, and you have to make it your very top priority. Your location is secondary to that — you need to be wherever is going to be best for connecting with your customers, your colleagues, and your investors.”
Just as happened in Silicon Valley, the network of remote work spaces, hostels, and popular destinations is creating a community of like-minded travelers. Some VCs already understand that remote work can have advantages.
When Zapier was founded in 2011, says Foster, explaining its remote methodologies was challenging. Fast forward to 2019, you talk to VCs across the Valley and they’re saying remote work is the future.
So certainly the attitude and opinions around remote work have done a pretty big 180; says Foster.
The article seems to think there are more and more funds that are more modern, like Tiny Seed for example; “You’d probably have to at least make sure you could explain that you understand some of the challenges of remote work and building remote teams”; he says.
A distributed future Remote and nomadism will likely grow in tandem.
The global talent pool is deep, but workers, managers and founders can have a host of reasons for not moving to one of the handful of highly active hubs. The technology for remote work, too, has continued improving. Zoom is even better, and is now a standard among remote workers.
Foster doesn’t see an upper limit to the model. “My hypothesis is that these kinds of companies will scale immensely… I don’t think it’s that much of a logical leap to say there will be massive companies with minimal offices,” he says.
The technology for remote work, too, has continued improving. Slack started without video conferencing but added it in 2016. Zoom is even better, and is now a standard among remote workers. And in the same period these tools grew among tech workers, internet connections improved massively in a range of developing countries, giving even more remote workers the chance to compete.
The next step for video, which will unfold over the coming decade, is wider availability of technology like high fidelity immersive telepresence, which will help employees engage face to face as needed. Text communication can improve, too, as remotes build up what Foster calls an “etiquette” of communicating in apps like Slack.
Nomadic founders will enjoy these same benefits, plus a few others. One advantage will be a unique networking scene that encompasses both travelers and the spaces they meet and work in. Another advantage is breaking out of Silicon Valley myopia. Startups could do worse than to have more founders that understand the needs, and possibilities, inherent to other cultures and places.
Source: Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub | TechCrunch
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