Remotely Inclined

Stefan Palios
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  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Interviews with thought leaders and practitioners about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. remotelyinclined.substack.com

  1. 02/04/2021

    The Future of Business Travel: In Conversation with Skift Media CEO Rafat Ali

    Rafat Ali is a two-time media entrepreneur. He sold his first blog a few years ago and is now building Skift, a global media company focused on business travel, conferences, and the business of travel.  Of course, COVID was not fun.  The company nearly fell apart, but managed to eek by with a few saving graces. Namely: remote work.  Rafat made the decision to not renew the company’s lease when it came up in summer 2020, and with that decision the company - and its dozens of employees - went 100% remote. This move stands apart from what’s becoming the major wave of hybrid remote announcements, since as of right now the company is totally remote with plans to stay that way.  In this conversation with Rafat, we talked about 📈 How Skift weathered the COVID storm, coming back from the brink of collapse (and what they are up to now) 🔒 Remote work versus pandemic lockdown work (they are not the same thing) ✈️ The future of travel (and business travel in particular) Have a listen in Substack or in your favorite podcast app!  Thanks for reading!  ☕ If you enjoy what I do, buy me a virtual coffee from time-to-time to support my work. I know it seems small, but it truly helps. 👉 Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe now to receive the next one. You can also help grow the newsletter by asking a like-minded friend to sign up. 💌 Feedback to share or want to say hello? Hit reply on this email or leave me a comment on Substack.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    27 min

  2. 10/15/2020

    Are Offices Prisons of the Mind?

    Admittedly, you’d expect the founder of a company that helps remote teams with payroll and taxes to not like offices. But Sahin Boydas is a little different than most entrepreneurs. With nearly 10 startups under his belt (a handful of failures and a handful of successes and exits), Sahin has barely ever worked in an office - and never on a permanent basis. Whether in his native Turkey, to Boston, to Silicon Valley, every single one of his startups is remote. It’s perhaps no wonder he refers to offices as “prisons of the mind.”  In this interview, Sahin and I talked about the future of Silicon Valley, how Sahin thinks about angel investing remotely, and of course the future of remote work.  Check out key takeaways below or listen to the whole episode on your favorite podcast platform. Image courtesy Remote Team Silicon Valley’s greatest export Silicon Valley was - and arguably still is - the global epicentre of tech. Even in a remote world, Sahin doesn’t think that’s going anywhere. Instead, the shift will be from requiring physical presence in Silicon Valley to requiring a Silicon Valley mindset anywhere you are in the world. What constitutes a Silicon Valley mindset? For Sahin, it’s a willingness to try new things, take bold risks, and invest in ideas knowing that not everything will work out, but the production and founding process will teach individual founders a lot and help educate the whole ecosystem for the next crop of entrepreneurs.  Key quote:  “The idea of Silicon Valley is three ingredients. The first ingredient is we welcome everyone in the world. It’s the American dream on steroids. Second, you are free. You can be anything. I think anyone, any gender, any religion, you will be welcome here. Then we have Stanford, getting millions of ideas from professors. And we have the money from Sand Hill Road and Stanford. Then we have the lawyers that know how to do the exit playbooks.” “It’s not really about the tech, it’s about the outcome and building something fast… it’s about the culture.” Angel investing remotely After some business successes, Sahin began to invest in other startups (remotely, of course). Instead of following a geographic thesis or waiting for the startups to come to him, he decided to take his stock investing mentality and bring that to angel investing. Namely, Sahin invests in companies that he either is a huge fan of as a customer or, if the solution isn’t what he personally needs, that he’s a huge fan of in general. It may not be the most sophisticated, algorithmic investment strategy, but it’s a system that helps him direct his investment dollars into opportunities he’s genuinely happy to rave about. Key quote:  “I personally read around a thousand article titles a day to generate ideas. If someone is building my idea, that’s an investment I want to make.” “If I find any idea that I really, really, really like, I reach out to the founders.” (Disclosure: Always do your own diligence on investments and follow your own independent research. Everything we talked about in the episode were just examples, not advice.) The future of work Sahin founded RemoteTeam.com to help remote companies manage the nitty gritty details of payroll, taxes, and employee administration on remote teams - all the little things that get more complicated when you don’t have one central office location.  As such, it’s pretty easy to believe that Sahin thinks the future of work is remote:  Key quote:  “We somehow got used to this 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of family time. But I don’t think I’ve ever worked 8 hours linear in my life.” “I’m so excited that the world is catching up to [remote work] and changing.” The final word “The office was built by the industrial revolution… the office is our prison of the mind” Amazing, thank you for your insights! You can get in touch with Sahin on: * Twitter * Instagram * LinkedIn * RemoteTeam.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    24 min

  3. 10/08/2020

    From Roadie To Googler To Future of Work Consultant: One Remote Entrepreneur’s Journey

    Lauren Razavi is now a sought after consultant and researcher on the future of work (and remote work in particular), but she didn’t start her career that way. Instead, she ran away from home at a young age and became a music tour manager, helping indie bands get their break. Then she transitioned into full-time freelancing, digital nomadism, and eventually to big tech™ at Google before striking back out on her own. In our conversation, she shared her insights on the future of the office, mobility, and humanity in remote work.  Building humanity into remote work “A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost.” The future of the office “One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose.” “But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on.” “Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here.” Not just remote, but mobile “When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer?” “We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists.” The final word “Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work.” Want premium content? Become a subscriber Remotely Inclined Chats with Lauren Razavi Transcript edited for brevity and clarity. Stefan: Welcome, Lauren. Let’s start with your story and journey into remote work Lauren: My story actually started about a decade ago. When I was a teenager, I basically ran away from home and joined a music tour. From that experience, I ended up becoming a freelancer and remote worker - and I haven’t changed course since.  I wanted to be a musician, but I was absolutely terrible at the guitar, singing, and the piano. So that wasn’t going to work. So I started to promote some friends. One of the bands I was working with started to get some traction, and that was mainly through my work as a music manager. Back then I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but just kind of going for it and leveraging the internet to spread the word about music and to make connections.  From there I went to university and studied politics. The main thing that studying politics teaches you is that you don’t want to get into politics! While I was studying, I fell into being a freelance journalist. I started pitching editors at magazines and newspapers in the UK and worked really, really hard for six months not getting anywhere.  Then I started to get somewhere with freelancing and it all flowed ever since. It’s taken me from freelance journalism and foreign reporting to Google in a couple different roles. Then I transitioned more into writing, speaking, and consulting rather than just the kind of straight freelance journalism, which is where I am at today.  You had a unique remote work journey. Is remote work actually for everyone? Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work.  One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose.  But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on.  So does that mean people who hate remote work have a point? When people say they hate remote work, sometimes there’s a real confusion in terms of what they are talking about. Particularly this year, when people say they hate remote work, what they might mean is more that they hate doing remote work unexpectedly during a pandemic, without the right equipment and surrounded by partners, children, and other housemates. None of that is conducive to remote work just like any other kind of work or entrepreneurial activity.  You have to be able to choose your way of doing things. Right now, a lot of people don’t really have that as an option. They’re not able to say they are the kind of person who needs a coworking space or the kind of person who needs a quiet room. We’ve all been thrust into this situation.  And remote work in many ways is such a vague term. Maybe 70% to 80% of most people’s work is actually deep focused work where they need to think about things and produce stuff that doesn’t require other people. Certainly in the knowledge economy, the vast majority of work lends itself to this kind of deep focused work. When I talk about remote, I’m talking bout that aspect. But also making an allowance for the fact that some stuff does have to happen and is more efficient in person.  What physical infrastructure does remote work need? There’s a hardware aspect and a software aspect to that question.  There are quite clear hardware aspects of a decent remote work set up: ergonomic set up, electronics, etc.  Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here. So they’ve seen interest in their products and users skyrocket.  A lot of small office interactions are being eaten by the world of software. But that’s really exciting because it’s freeing us up to have more meaningful human-to-human interactions. Do human relationships suffer when you don’t have the mundane little interactions to prompt conversation? When I think about the mundane things, in an office that might be asking if someone wants a cup of tea. Or helping them out with something. The same kind of thing happens in digital spaces. A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost. What else is involved in the future of work besides remote? I’m actually writing a book on this at the moment - it’s about the global mobility aspect. For the past six years I’ve lived and worked as a digital nomad, essentially travelling all around the world whilst building my career.  When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer?  We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists.  Amazing, thank you for your insights! You can get in touch with Lauren on her newsletter and on Twitter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    22 min

  4. 10/01/2020

    The Real Costs of Running a Remote Business

    One truth about remote work that’s become a cliché is that it saves you money. Many remote entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with say that their choice to be remote was, at least in part, due to the costs of an office. The challenge I have with this statement isn’t about its truth. Instead, it ignores the other, very real expenses that pop up when you run a remote business. I want to shine a light on those for two reasons:  * A lot of bashing around remote work stems from the idea that companies are reaping massive savings while forcing employees to pay for office expenses (in the words of Laurel Farrer - “will no one ever be satisfied?”).  * Entrepreneurs thinking of going remote - you need to go in eyes wide open. You’ve probably experienced some of these costs as you navigated COVID, but there are others that will come up if you want to build a thriving remote culture.  I’ve broken down this article into three categories: freelancers / solopreneurs, services teams, and product teams. Each category is cumulative, meaning a services team will also have the expenses that a freelancer or solopreneur has. Further, a product team will likely have the expenses of a services team and a freelancer, since a lot of product companies offer services, whether as a revenue line or under the banner of customer success.  So shall we talk about money?  Image via Burst Remote expenses: Solopreneur and freelancer All businesses have some fundamental things they need to pay for. In the freelancer and solopreneur world, thankfully those expenses can be relatively low. However, they can still amount to thousands of dollars per year for:  * Payment processing for digital payments * Web hosting for personal sites and ecommerce platforms * Custom email and digital asset managers * Social media management tools * Contract management and e-signature tools * Any custom technology necessary to do their job (design platforms, etc.) These infrastructural costs hurt freelancers and solopreneurs the most, in my opinion, because they are not built for the freelance world. Big tech platforms like Zoom didn’t build for freelancers when they launched a ‘freelancer’ level. Instead, the company simply took enterprise value triggers and offered fewer of them for a lower price. While this covers some needs, it does not reach all - leading to platform creep for freelancers.  Services companies Services companies will have the same infrastructural costs of a freelancer, scaled up by the size of their team. However, they will also have:  * Virtual office tools like Workplace by FB or Memberstack / Memberspace / etc.  * Project management tools like Asana, Trello, or Airtable  * Travel and retreat expenses (don’t assume remote teams shouldn’t spend time together) * Home office stipends or coworking memberships for employees * Virtual events * Gift cards and other goodies in lieu of office perks like snacks and coffee * Payroll and team admin software that manages the complexity of having employees in different countries These kinds of expenses are often higher for remote service companies than they would be for an office-centric company. Take retreats, for example. You can’t hire a coach bus to drive outside the city with the team - everyone has to fly in, some folks from very far away. It creates opportunity for fun exotic locales, but also adds to the cost base.  Product companies Selling a product is the most scalable type of company, but it also carries with it a higher fixed cost base. Not only will product companies have all the costs associated with human capital, they will also have:  * Ticket management and support hub software * Fulfillment and shipping costs * Returns and inventory management costs * Cyber security costs associated with remote product development * And more based on what kind of product they are selling Many of these costs can be outsourced or handled as a percentage of revenues, but that leaves a smaller pot to pay employees and hold profit for investment later. When these companies are remote, there is some efficiency to be gained - an ecomm brand can have centralized inventory instead of distributing it to storefronts first - but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy from there.  There are of course other costs associated with running a business, but I tried to highlight the ones that remote companies have (or have more of) compared to office-centric companies. And if you’re noticing some overlap, that’s a good thing - it means that many office-centric companies are more set up to work remotely than they may have thought.  One more thing…  I started Remotely Inclined to investigate running a business remotely, and now invest multiple hours per week researching different topics, interviewing experts, and putting together this content. If you’d like to support that work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get access to everything I produce and you can have me solve your remote work problems for you - just send me a question. I’ll do the research and publish the answer. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    11 min

  5. 09/24/2020

    You're Probably Doing Remote Work Wrong

    Laurel Farrer has been leading remote organizations for 14 years, well before it was a hot topic. Now, she helps other companies figure out their remote work arrangements with her company Distribute Consulting and she built a thriving community of remote workers in the Remote Work Association.  While Laurel knows there’s a lot of flexibility in remote work, one thing that grinds her gears is when people have complained about wanting remote work for years only to deride organizations now for “downloading” office expenses onto employees. To quote: “Will no one ever be satisfied?” In this interview, Laurel shared the four categories of remote work infrastructure, how to take care of your mental health during both the pandemic and with regular remote work, and more.  Remote infrastructure is four things → Too many companies ignore infrastructure, believing that once you don’t need an office space anymore, you’re good. Not only is this not the case for hybrid remote companies, but it’s also not true of all-remote companies. Physical infrastructure: All workers, remote or not, need a place to work - desks, chairs, wifi, etc. For a business, this could mean an office, coworking memberships, or home office stipends.  Digital tools: Whatever tools you need to get your work done. This was commonplace in an office environment, but additional tools for communication and collaboration are critical. Processes and rituals: You may not see everyone every day, so no chatting by the coffee machine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t build regular practices to make work life easier and more pleasant.  Information management: If you don’t manage information properly, you get the worst of both worlds.  Mental health: Remote work challenge accelerated by the pandemic → Like an office environment, a remote work environment has mental health risks associated with it. That’s to be expected.  → The difference between offices and remote work is that feelings of isolation, disconnection, and micromanagement can be very physical, whereas they might be more difficult to pin down in an office full of people.  → Unfortunately, the pandemic served to accelerate and exacerbate all these issues, meaning it’s critical that people check in with themselves.  → Self check in questions should be about discovering patterns which you can then do something about. This is entirely about what works for you - not about any sort of best practice.  The final word “There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you.” Remotely Inclined Chats with Laurel Farrer Transcript edited for brevity and clarity. Stefan: Welcome, Laurel! What’s your remote work journey and why did you found Distribute Consulting? Laurel: I’ve been working remotely for 14 years. The entire time I was operating distributed companies. And 14 years ago, remote work wasn’t cool. It wasn’t natural. I got a lot of questions. Through those years, I was a consultant informally on the side, answering those questions. About four years ago I was experiencing a horrible company culture, and I said I was going to dedicate my life to preventing this for other people. I unexpectedly quit my job because it got to a level where I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought about what would be next, and I knew I wanted to strengthen the conversation about virtual organizational development and create the resources I wanted and needed as a distributed company executive. What does it mean to be an “office manager” in a virtual world? The role of an office manager is to keep operations humming - to create an environment in which productivity and business operations continue and people have a place to come together that fuels their productivity and collaboration. That’s exactly what you do as an office manager in a remote company, but in a virtual space.  We still need to have a place to work together. We still have tools to manage. We still have environments to create activities or to plan and coordinate. How does the office manager role change in a hybrid-first remote world? The goal with remote work is not to necessarily make everybody go distributed overnight. We can’t do that. It would completely crush our economy. What we need to think of instead is location irrelevancy in our work so business operations can continue regardless of where we are. So that means we can be just as productive outside of the office as we can be inside of the office. That’s where this new office management role becomes environment creation - we’re going to create an environment where people can collaborate digitally in order to work together as a team in order to produce and review output. It’s creating infrastructure of employee engagement, culture, rituals, and accessibility. It’s just making the office digital instead of physical.  Continuing on the idea of infrastructure - what physical infrastructure is necessary in a remote work world? This is a conversation too many people neglect. We’re still physical people - we might work in digital spaces, but we’re physical. We need to pay attention to our coworking spaces or home offices or mobile and HQ offices. They have to support our health and safety so we can continue to be productive, safe, and strong mentally, emotionally, and physically.  The conversation about infrastructure is not just tools. Too many people stop there once they figure out if they should have Microsoft Teams or Slack. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how you’re interacting with each other.  Infrastructure is four things:  * Physical infrastructure like offices and desks.  * Digital tools like Zoom or Slack. * Processes and rituals to help people get their work done.  * Information management to ensure everything is accessible for people to do their jobs.  I spoke with Avery Francis on the podcast about mental health for remote workers. How many current mental health issues are embedded in remote work versus caused by COVID?  There are health risks - mental health, emotional health - that come along with working remotely. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates them. We’re at risk of feelings of invisibility or micromanagement or imposter syndrome. Or feeling very controlled by our leadership team. Or burnout. Or informational isolation. Or feeling disconnected from our job.  When we’re in this exaggerated situation, all those problems become even more extreme. So people have to be hyper-aware and hyper-preventative of that isolation, burnout, and micromanagement, which means they need to be extremely proactive in self-awareness and thinking about “ok, do I have a problem? How am I doing today?” Some ideas: * Cutting off work at scheduled times.  * Start work at scheduled times.  * Reach out to a coworker.  * Go for a run during lunch.  The point of remote work is that it’s all about employee empowerment. It’s autonomy management, which means we’re in control. We don’t have to be supervised, which is a double-edged sword. On one side you get all this freedom, but on the other it’s up to you - if you’re feeling these problems of burnout or isolation, you’ve got to be willing to solve it.  What steps can people take if they do a self-check in and things aren’t going well? You’re learning about yourself. So for some people, that’s journaling. For some people it’s talking it out with a friend. Or talking to a therapist. Or taking a schedule of their day and collecting data about how you feel at different points of the day.  However you get there, just get a point of clarity and be able to notice patterns. Is remote work just an excuse for companies to make employees pay for things like rent and desks? I always laugh at this conversation. For the past 10 years, employees have been begging their employees to please see the light about how much money you can save. And that productivity is going to increase and output will increase and retention is going to increase. And the employers wouldn’t even think of it. And now all of a sudden we have this global boom and everyone’s saying employers are just trying to take advantage. Will no one ever be satisfied?  There are pros and cons to both. Companies will save tons of expenses, but now some other expenses they’d never even thought about in their budget, like increased travel or home office stipends or coworking memberships… now they have to compensate for those.  There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you.  Amazing, thank you for your insights! You can get in touch with Laurel Farrer on LinkedIn. You can also check out Distribute Consulting and the Remote Work Association. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    20 min

  6. 09/17/2020

    This Remote CEO Explains Why CEOs Should Never Lead Company Social Activities

    Hi, Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on… Sharon Koifman has been running businesses remotely for 18 years, and now he helps companies around the globe hire full-time remote workers with his agency DistantJob. He’s also publishing a book, Surviving Remote Work, all about how to become the best possible remote employee (or manager). In our interview, Sharon shared a couple lessons he learned the hard way - namely, why CEOs should never try to be their company’s social centre.  The perils of CEO-driven company socializing → When Sharon first started DistantJob, he went remote as a matter of cost: no office expenses and geographic arbitrage on salaries. This was also the value he thought he was offering to clients - a cheap talent solution.  → He soon realized the paradox that if you see humans as simply outsourced cheap labor, they won’t perform as well for you. He switched his mentality - and DistantJob’s work - to focus on placing full-time remote employees.  → As a result, he immediately tried to become what he called the “social centre” of the company. He’d bring everyone together for Zoom happy hours and crack jokes. The feedback was dismal: no one was having fun.  Remaking socializing for remote work → After collecting feedback from employees, two themes emerged: they didn’t like that Sharon was driving all the company social activities and they didn’t like being forced into big digital groups. Both resulted in feelings of disengagement.  → As a result, the company revamped how it socialized:  * The company uses Donut, a Slack app to match people for 1-1 coffee chats.  * Further leveraging Slack, there are different channels for different kinds of socializing and fun, so people can pop into the “rooms” they are interested in - food, board games, etc.  * The company is “99.999%” remote, but will occasionally get together around conferences (back when that was possible) - this allowed the team to socialize at night but also learn and connect with the latest industry trends during the day.  The final word “When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals … you can really get to know them.” Image courtesy DistantJob Remotely Inclined Chats with Sharon Koifman Transcript edited for brevity and clarity. Stefan: Welcome, Sharon! Can you share how you got into remote work and what your company DistantJob is all about? Sharon: I’ve been running businesses from my computer for about 18 years. I started off running a web hosting company - and I’d even started a company before that where I was trying to create one of the first music distribution sites, though unlike Napster it would all be legal.  I didn’t really have money. So when I decided to find myself, I was sharing my hosting account with a few colleagues of mine and charging them. Next thing you know, we had about 3,000 clients and that music site never came to be.  So hosting became my first company. We had offices in India. Had our servers originally in Texas then moved to New Jersey. I was sitting by myself running this entire operation. I realized my dad inspired me a lot because he ran an engineering firm. He would do the design of the machine on AutoCAD, on his computer by himself. The machine shop would make the components, someone else would ship it to the client… again, it was all remote.  Then came DistantJob. The original concept came to me from the first business - when you have an office in India, you have to do some outsourcing. It’s unavoidable. But for me that was like a business sin. You’re getting paid for the way you’re doing things, your processes, and your methodology. But then you take everything you claim you have and you give it to a company which you have no control over. You don’t know their processes. You don’t know if the results will come in the way you want. It was pretty shocking for me. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t just hire somebody that will work on your processes and build your culture.  After I sold my hosting company, I realized the need for full-time, permanent, career-driven, focused individuals that are working internationally and remotely. You still have this massive advantage of going to the world and finding amazing talent, but back in those days for some reason people felt the only way to hire individuals was through outsourcing.  You’ve mentioned before that it’s not just about hiring someone, but actually helping them build digital relationships (colleagues and friends). How do you do that at DistantJob? I came into DistantJob with the original focus of making a cheap solution. Then I realized that wouldn’t work - the world was too big. My mentality initially was that remote workers were less efficient, but then I realized they could be more efficient if you manage them. Now, the way I approach it is to start with all the positive things about the office and see if I could replicate them. So instead of hanging out in person, turn on the video camera. Then you can start to know people on a personal level - getting to know their hobbies and such.  At DistantJob, we have a lot of Slack channels for different hobbies. We’re a big fan of food, nerdy stuff like video games and board games, and we have channels to joke around in.  You found virtual happy hours didn’t work - what happened? What do you do instead? I remember my director coming to me and saying “I hear that people are not happy or having much fun.” I realized also that I was busy talking and doing all the entertainment. I was literally trying to entertain my team, make jokes, hang out, and be the social centre.  You slowly see that even though managers got the hint and tried very hard, it didn’t move the conversation along much. I’ve since had a much better experience one on one - intimate conversations. We still have drinks with one another, but now it’s two or three people and it works so much better.  I think this is reflective of meeting culture completely. When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals, you can really get to know them.  We also use Donut on Slack, an app that randomly matches you with someone for one-on-one conversations for 15 minutes. That gets better results than a big happy hour experience.  We’re also completely remote. Once in a blue moon I’ll hang out with my managers, but that’s a big project and it means a big investment on flights in. We usually do it around conferences, so it’s an opportunity to see the market while taking the evenings to hang out. But 99.999% of what we do is remote.  In the remote world, there’s a huge conversation about pay vs. geography. What’s your opinion? This is a very conflicting discussion because I’m a little bit on both directions at this moment. I pay what I can afford to, but I am a big fan of the geographic arbitrage solution on an ethical side, surprisingly. Take for example India. They’re known for outsourcing (the grandparent of the remote job experience).  One of the biggest things that you’d outsource to India or the Philippines was a call centre. You’d go there because it was cheap. But the jobs you brought helped the economies evolve, and now a call centre is only 15% cheaper there than it is in the United States. As a result, some jobs are coming back to the United States. It’s crazy - give it 10 years to let those economies evolve and the jobs are coming back while you just created half a billion jobs somewhere else.  Now, I don’t know about producing shoes in child labor camps in some backwards-ass countries. I’m very much pro building successful, intelligence-based jobs. You’ve just written a book based on your 18 years of remote CEO experience! Tell me more about it.  The book is called Surviving Remote Work - it’s all about getting people comfortable with (and not fearful of) managing remote employees. It’s about figuring out the optimal ways of success for remote employees and remote managers. And I hope I wrote it in a fun, easy to read way.  Amazing, thank you for your insights! You can get in touch with Sharon via email or pre-order his book on Amazon. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    20 min

  7. 09/10/2020

    This Startup Accelerator is Taking a Huge Bet on Remote Work

    Hi, Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on… Techstars is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world, with hubs in over 30 cities, spanning over 10 countries around the world. But in 2017, the accelerator launched Techstars Anywhere, a program for people who can’t - or shouldn’t - relocate for an accelerator. With COVID, the whole startup ecosystem went remote, but Techstars Anywhere was able to continue operating and support all other Techstars accelerators with its experience and knowledge.  In today’s chat, Ryan Kuder - the Managing Director of Techstars Anywhere - shared the biggest challenge he’s seen on remote teams, the secret to getting into Techstars, and why Techstars Anywhere is all-in on remote work. The biggest challenge of remote teams → Whether hybrid or all-remote, Ryan observed teams struggling with intentional communication. It’s not just that you can’t read body language, but each act of communicating requires the intention to act. It’s a weird thing initially for people who are so used to sitting in an office and passively recognizing opportunities to communicate.  → The solution that Ryan shares with Techstars founders is two fold:  *  Plan channels for emotions, problems, and specific issues to rise to the surface. Because you can’t see things in person, the different channels (i.e. “Client issues.” “Stuck on a problem.” etc.) make those challenges visible again. * Set the tone as the founder, actively leveraging the channels as you want employees to leverage them. Encourage people to use the systems in place so that they become habit.  Techstars Anywhere: the secret to getting in → Techstars is sector and stage agnostic, meaning a brand new startup might be in the program with a multi-million dollar scaling company. This is because Techstars chooses to focus on inflection points in companies.  → Ryan said the inflection points he looks for are:  * Companies that are getting ready to launch once they’ve built a product. * Companies getting ready to fundraise, whether a first round or a subsequent round.  * Companies getting ready for scaling and fast growth.  → From there, Ryan said the companies that are successful at getting into Techstars all have both a vision for the future of the world and a clear understanding of how their company fits into that new world. Then comes the traditional team assessment, skills assessment, and other common elements of getting into a startup accelerator.  From remote companies to empowering remote work → In the first cohorts of Techstars Anywhere, the accelerator wanted any kind of company. The issue wasn’t whether you were remote or not, simply that relocating for an accelerator didn’t make sense. For example: one of the first Techstars Anywhere companies was an organic mushroom farm in Brooklyn, NY. → Ryan and Techstars have a vision that remote work will become significantly more accelerated due to COVID (something we agree on!), and as a result tons of industries will change, both in terms of how we work but also how we live and travel.  → In response to COVID and the changing world of remote work, Ryan and the Techstars team are making a big bet with Techstars Anywhere, focusing the accelerator on the future of work and startups tackling the impacts of remote work. The final word Techstars applications are open. The accelerator is looking for companies at the point of evolution - product to revenue, revenue to growth, etc.  Remotely Inclined Chats with Ryan Kuder Transcript edited for brevity and clarity. Stefan: Welcome, Ryan! When we chatted, you said Techstars Anywhere isn’t a remote version of Techstars, but a whole new, remote accelerator experience. What do you mean by that? Ryan: We’re all thinking about how to build remote experiences for our employees - especially over the last six months. The first step people take is usually to do what they’ve always done, but now on zoom. Everything kind of stays the same - but you wind up with some dissonance in that experience.  So the way we’ve thought about Techstars Anywhere is we’ve got objectives for our founders. We want them to become great storytellers. We want them to build a fantastic network. We want them to be able to raise money. We want them to understand the levers and metrics that drive their business. And we want them to be able to understand the rhythms and cadences for their companies.  We used our decade of experience that we had running Techstars accelerators as the starting off point then thought, given these objectives, what are the changes we need to make? It’s been an evolving process since our first remote accelerator back in 2017, which had a hypothesis of a hybrid model - it’s a little bit of time together in person, a little bit of time working remotely with the objective being to create an experience that was going to get that full value of a Techstars accelerator experience. Which elements of the accelerator are all-remote versus which are in-person? So much of what we do is building relationships. And there’s just something about breaking bread or having a drink - or even just sitting with somebody looking out over the ocean. In normal times (non-covid), it’s an experience that combines three in person gatherings with five week sections of remote work.  When we’re in person, we’re focused on deep dives into particular topics and focused on relationship building. We’re focused on building out the network with our mentors. And then when we are in our remote periods, we’re focused on the meetings, execution, and building of the companies. In-person sessions are spread out evenly throughout the program so that we’re constantly getting back and forth.  One of the great things about the Techstars network is that with all current Techstars accelerators running remotely, we’ve been able to try out of a lot of things and been able to focus on what it’s like to build experiences for founders that are delivered first and foremost, remotely.  What’s been the biggest change or evolution in your process with Techstars Anywhere (barring COVID, which of course forced lots of change)? There have been a lot, to be honest with you. Like a startup founder, one of the things we’re constantly figuring out is how do we continuously build better experiences for our constituents - founders, mentors, and investors. The way we’ve gone about it is thinking about three experiences and figuring out the opportunities for us to create and opportunities for those to overlap. Each of the four programs we’ve put in different things, set up different kinds of meetings, structured interactions differently, and created more opportunities for connections. It’s  focused on creating community that involves not just the founders in the accelerator but also all the alumni and mentors and investors attached to the program.  Can you share an example of how you structured your virtual experiences? I believe that great remote work is not exclusively remote. When we think about how people develop relationships, there’s a ton of value that comes from hybrid things.  At Techstars anywhere, we spend the first two weeks really understanding our business. Week one is a qualitative look at the business. Where are we as entrepreneurs? What are the businesses we want to build? Who are our customers? What are they buying from us and why? In week two we look at quantitative parts of the business: revenue, financial models, KPIs, and target setting.  For the remainder of the program, companies work through meetings with mentors on their KPIs and understanding the challenges that companies are facing. Midway through the program, we get together and start to talk about storytelling, fundraising, and figuring out the best financing strategy for the business.  We don’t have a traditional demo day - we do it online, and have been doing online demo days since 2017. We’ve been playing with the format to get the right audience to the right founders. We’re really focused on a few questions: What are we doing after this is over? How does everybody go home? What kind of continuity do we keep? When the program is over, the Techstars experience is really just beginning. What have been the biggest stumbling blocks administering a remote accelerator? One of the biggest challenges is having a comprehensive understanding of everything that’s going on. With the shift from co-located to remote work, we lose the ability to see people. You don’t know when to tap somebody on the shoulder and say ‘let’s grab a cup of coffee and talk through whatever’s going on’. One of the most important things I can do is to approach every day with intentionality. We need to ensure we’re communicating the things we need to and that we are checking in with people on a regular cadence. If folks are struggling with a task or job or customer, create channels that allow that to surface so we can see what’s happening around us without necessarily being able to see it visually. That requires everybody to buy into the systems that are put in place in order to allow those things to surface.  How do you make sure you’re in a good spot as a leader to be intentional with communications? It’s important that your company develop the culture that’s right for it. There isn’t any kind of culture that fits everybody. When you think about your own remote policies and remote styles, the most important thing is that founders recognize for themselves where they want to be. Some founders will be overly transparent. Some will tend to be more reserved.  The big part is how you set the tone of the types of things we share and talk about as a community. That becomes s

    21 min

  8. 09/03/2020

    Hating On Remote Work Is So Hot Right Now

    Hi, Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on… Today: I’m responding to two viral articles about remote work on today’s podcast. The long and short of it? I’m skeptical.  Ok, so two articles went mega-viral this week in the remote work blogosphere:  * Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy * Working from ‘anywhere’ is possible—but not sustainable From a media perspective, I have to hand it to them. Salacious headlines. Very “anti.” It’s got punch, facts, scary futures… it’s a delight. A great story. Which is exactly why I eye-rolled at the titles. However, I was also intrigued and curious. So I read both articles - here are my thoughts.  Are we in for a crash - or a call to creativity? The article on how a trillion-dollar economy is dying because it was very tied to the office ecosystem is real, and it’s scary. White collar workers and business travellers are the dominant spending category for a huge swath of the economy:  * Hotels. * Airlines / air travel. * Food delivery. * Restaurants and cafes. * Office-adjacent businesses like dry cleaners, shoe shiners, and suit stores. * Office furniture, technology, and supply stores. But, as author Steve LeVine suggests, the bigger fear is not necessarily the primary loss (even though that alone is tens of thousands of jobs), it’s the next-step loss caused by city dwellers fleeing the city. If too many people leave the city, even further carnage could result in terms of commercial downtowns falling apart, losing jobs, and more.  The logic is all there. And we’ve already seen a huge loss due to COVID, but I worry that the fears might be overstated.  Here’s what I see instead: a call to creativity.  Rents falling in major cities could result in a huge spike in small-time entrepreneurship: the cute cafes, shops, and restaurants that could never afford city rents. Further, people leaving could ultimately be nothing. What’s 50,000 people leaving in a city of millions? A painful blip, but little else. There’s real potential damage from the idea that more people might choose not to move to cities from small towns, and that could cause some city damage. However, doesn’t it kind of suck that our current model of city living is “it sucks, but you have to”? We can do better.  Who isn’t able to afford the city right now that could soon? Photo via Unsplash. Remote work is giving people the opportunity to live where they want - and it might even make cities more affordable. Just as thousands of people are taking their remote jobs and buying old houses, there are people who have always dreamed of living in the city (or just love cities) and now it’s affordable for them. I think the only people that will truly fail in this shift are the ones that built on the idea of guaranteed demand. If anything, we might see new developments building actual homes in cities (or “home in the sky” condos) at affordable rates, instead of shoeboxes we cram into because the only good jobs are here.  Innovation has a remote work problem In the article that remote work isn’t sustainable, Professor Hyejin Youn’s main point is that remote work cannot produce the same levels of innovation that central HQs in large cities can.  So, right off the bat: this article is not about remote work, it’s about innovation and what kinds of environments foster it. The remote work connection is interesting and topical, but this article is not analyzing what remote work is or can do. Simply suggesting that remote work and innovation are not compatible.  From there, the Professor Youn - a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, walks through his primary arguments:  * Big cities are hubs of innovation because of their diversity.  * Remote work is great for productivity, but not innovation.  Ultimately, he drew the conclusion that if a company wants to be innovative, it needs to have an HQ in an innovation-breeding city, which he says starts around one million people. There’s a grave message to “think twice” before going to cities under one million, and suggests that municipal leaders need to create policies and infrastructure to attract “cognitive labor” (aka knowledge workers) - something we completely agree on. Where I disagree with Professor Youn is the implication that you can only get diversity from large cities. Sure, cities might bring the diversity to you, but distributed and remote teams are possibly the best cross-section of global diversity available to the working world… if you build it that way. Yes, you can work remotely with all your bros from college, but you can also work remotely with brilliant minds living in different cities, countries, and circumstances. That’s a heck of a lot of diversity.  We need to build innovation systems for remote work. Image via Unsplash. The concept of remote being great for productivity but not innovation is one I have a hard time disagreeing with. However, what I’ve seen and learned from my interviews with remote entrepreneurs is that the new crop of innovators is not trying to take office-innovation virtual, they are looking at the strengths of remote work and building new models of innovation. For example, Shelly Spiegel focuses heavily on her remote culture. Melissa Kargiannakis leans into short meetings with ample additional communication opportunities. Floyd Marinescu focuses on reducing cognitive load to make innovation easier. This isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet - just that innovation is not a one-legged beast. PS - liking these articles? Share them with a friend! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

    21 min
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About

Interviews with thought leaders and practitioners about remote work and remote entrepreneurship. remotelyinclined.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Stefan Palios
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2021
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Stefan Palios
  • Show Website
    Remotely Inclined