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InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

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Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#171

Post by sytse »

tixocloud wrote: post #162
sytse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab being all remote has been a problem during fundraises. We mentioned it since we're transparent and inevitably investors will want to visit your office. During our latest D round it was a smaller problem since later rounds are more based on financial metrics and comparables (GitHub, Atlassian, Jfrog). But I wouldn't say that it is no longer a problem with VCs, many still have scaling concerns. As one of the bes…

That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent. Does this change your strategy somewhat in that it limits your access to capital which forces you to look at profitability sooner?

I think you can raise a comparable amount of funds for a distributed team, it will just be with fewer investors and at a lower valuation.

The valuation will be lower since an acquisition is less likely. Most acquirers of companies under $100m want the acquired employees to join their office. Since this is unlikely with a distributed team there will be a discount on the acquisition price of up to 50%.

There was an upside to this. Since distributed companies make for a less valuable acquisition target our investors are aligned with our plan to become a public company https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence-

For public companies being remote is less of an issue since financial metrics are much more important and in the case of an acquisition they would likely stay as a separate entity.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#172

Post by bsder »

tixocloud wrote: post #162
sytse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab being all remote has been a problem during fundraises. We mentioned it since we're transparent and inevitably investors will want to visit your office. During our latest D round it was a smaller problem since later rounds are more based on financial metrics and comparables (GitHub, Atlassian, Jfrog). But I wouldn't say that it is no longer a problem with VCs, many still have scaling concerns. As one of the bes…

That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent. Does this change your strategy somewhat in that it limits your access to capital which forces you to look at profitability sooner?

> That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent.

Are you looking for VC funding or angel funding?

If you have the ability to use foreign teams, you are probably better off taking angel funding and bootstrapping.

Remember, VC's want "up or out". "Cheap remote workers" isn't really relevant to that to a first approximation.

In fact, some VC's will look at it as a detriment. They wanted you to spend that couple million and succeed or go up in smoke. With cheap remote workers, you look at that couple million as 3+ years of runway for really solid organic growth.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#173

Post by sulam »

sytse wrote: post #168
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how successful that investor is.

Very successful. He's had a number 2 spot on the Midas list of best investors in a year.

Yeah, having a way to rapidly say no to a lot of otherwise-interesting opportunities is probably valuable to him. And honestly -- getting a 'no' and a clear reason for it is awesome investor behavior compared to the norm. :)

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#174

Post by raverbashing »

sytse wrote: post #148
pixelmonkey wrote: post #79

Perhaps more interesting is that Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, just IPO'ed on NYSE, and they, too, have a fully distributed team of over 700 -- might even be trending toward 1000 by now. Zapier is another one at multi-hundred-person scale, and is a YC company. A couple other scaled-up ones on this model include Automattic (company behind Wordpress), DataStax (company behind Cassandra). There is also Wiki…

GitLab being all remote has been a problem during fundraises. We mentioned it since we're transparent and inevitably investors will want to visit your office. During our latest D round it was a smaller problem since later rounds are more based on financial metrics and comparables (GitHub, Atlassian, Jfrog). But I wouldn't say that it is no longer a problem with VCs, many still have scaling concerns. As one of the bes…

I guess/hope "remote only" objections will sound as ridiculous one day as Viaweb being questioned about their use of a "freeware OS"

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#175

Post by sulam »

thfuran wrote: post #122
andrewjrangel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was in software sales FYI

And, while I haven't worked in that department so I can't really say for certain that the team leads don't slight the people they're managing, it's a small enough company that the culture is pretty consistent.

Except sales cultures are typically _very_ different from the rest of a company.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#176

Post by ljm »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #105
pixelmonkey wrote: post #79

Perhaps more interesting is that Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, just IPO'ed on NYSE, and they, too, have a fully distributed team of over 700 -- might even be trending toward 1000 by now. Zapier is another one at multi-hundred-person scale, and is a YC company. A couple other scaled-up ones on this model include Automattic (company behind Wordpress), DataStax (company behind Cassandra). There is also Wiki…

re: " These days we also have an NYC office, but we refer to it as "the Internet cafe", about 20 of our 70 people "so happen" to work out of there regularly..." It would be interesting to know: - How many other distributed companies have a similar arrangement (i.e., a non-distributed "HQ")? - Does this make employees more productive and/or satisfied? - When on the journey does it make sense to transition from central…

One such place I worked for had the non-distributed HQ and it housed the execs and some of the local team (being non-specific here on purpose).

I switched from working remotely to working locally, which involved a change of country, and I realised that I couldn't justify my own position after that.

As far as it goes with productivity and satisfaction, I thought the decision to go half-in on remote was a mistake.

My take away was that a startup does not necessarily have the maturity to maintain the balance between local and remote while also focus on making things happen. It was totally a setup that was so advantageous to the staff that the business itself suffered, as I saw it.

In those terms, you get a reprioritisation or a negligence and productivity suffers because you've just resigned to the reality that it's really hard to manage it all. Yet still, you feel entrenched so the best you feel you can do is to just... do nothing.

I would say that a small startup depends on fluid interaction between founders and the various 'makers' on board who help fulfil the vision. If you're 50/50 on how you facilitate that then you get a lot of mediocre when you could have had one solid thing and your foundation is built upon a compromise.

If I found myself in a leadership position in such a scenario again I would hope that I could stomach the firing act and invest in the culture that suited us best. But I don't think that's so easy to do with a small team.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#177

Post by forkLding »

jasode wrote: post #31

I don't do UI design so I never heard of InVision before. I googled around and Crunchbase says they've gotten $235 million in funding[1]. A youtube channel shows some demos[2]. Is InVision considered the best of the design tools compared to competitors? [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/invisionapp#section-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndfHdRdEiGOyCOgxQ4W9YQ

They're pretty big and got into the design tools game early on

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#178

Post by AYBABTME »

bsder wrote: post #172
tixocloud wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent. Does this change your strategy somewhat in that it limits your access to capital which forces you to look at profitability sooner?

> That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent. Are you looking for VC funding or angel funding? If you have the ability to use foreign teams, you are probably better off taking angel funding and bootstrapping. Remember, VC's want "up or out". "Cheap remote workers" isn't really relevant to that to a first approximation. In…

"cheap remote workers" isn't quite the point, it's more access to talent that's not geographically next to you. I know it's not your main point but I just wanted to add this note. :) Most companies who do remote and are successful at it, don't pay a discount on employees. In fact in many cases the pay is very competitive with SF/NY standards.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#179

Post by sytse »

raverbashing wrote: post #174
sytse wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab being all remote has been a problem during fundraises. We mentioned it since we're transparent and inevitably investors will want to visit your office. During our latest D round it was a smaller problem since later rounds are more based on financial metrics and comparables (GitHub, Atlassian, Jfrog). But I wouldn't say that it is no longer a problem with VCs, many still have scaling concerns. As one of the bes…

I guess/hope "remote only" objections will sound as ridiculous one day as Viaweb being questioned about their use of a "freeware OS"

Indeed, I hope that one day you have to defend why you're spending money on an office, hiring only the 1% of people that live or can move to a certain place, and waste two hours of their day with a commute.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#180

Post by sytse »

sulam wrote: post #173
sytse wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very successful. He's had a number 2 spot on the Midas list of best investors in a year.

Yeah, having a way to rapidly say no to a lot of otherwise-interesting opportunities is probably valuable to him. And honestly -- getting a 'no' and a clear reason for it is awesome investor behavior compared to the norm. :)

Indeed I was grateful that he passed fast and with a clear explanation. We asked him again when we raised our D-round but that came together to fast to make it work.

In the one conversation I had with him he coined 'the emergent benefits' of a single application https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single-application... and he said we should call it a Development Operating System (OS). What do other people think of calling it that?

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