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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

#181

Post by tixocloud »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #146
tixocloud wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this. Very timely as it’s currently going through my mind. Did you guys first start with the founders distributed as well? Going to be interviewing some guys who aren’t in the country I’m based in but from a skills and vision perspective, looks to be a good match.

My cofounder and I worked together from cafes on nights and weekends, but also did a whole lot of remote collaboration, in our first couple of years. We did a 3-month summer accelerator where we were f2f every day early on, as well. But when that was over, we switched back to mostly remote collaboration. For the bulk of our first 2 years of operation (which was really a bootstrapping period), we worked mostly over th…

Thanks. What’s shaping up to be is that my technical co-founder could be remote while I’ll be dealing with the F2F interactions. While I feel somewhat comfortable having a remote co-founder, I worry if it will come back to bite me.

Also, for your remote employees outside of the US, how do you structure your payroll, determine compensation and pay them? Seems like it would be quite an extensive HR payroll setup, which might not sit well with investors or potential acquirers?

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

#182

Post by tixocloud »

sytse wrote: post #171
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?

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 ups…

This will be a challenge for me as my investors already feel the company has the potential to be an acquisition target for one of the big guys and feels we should be building it that way. We’re also based in the U.K. and am not sure how many Saas platform tech companies become public.

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

#183

Post by tixocloud »

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…

At the moment, embedded myself into an incubator. Haven’t really found any angel investors who would be willing to give us some runway as I don’t think many here get what we do. But it is a good thought and something to consider if things don’t pan out.

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

#184

Post by tixocloud »

AYBABTME wrote: post #178
bsder wrote: post #172

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. 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.

Exactly why we want to do remote. I find our concept is hard to parse amongst the talent in our geographic area whereas I’ve found folks across the world who completely get it and would like to help.

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

#185

Post by tixocloud »

sytse wrote: post #180
sulam wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, it’s an interesting thought. Would your audience understand what it means? Are you trying to position GitLab into something more than what it is today.

It would also be equally interesting to test what the term would mean to different people.

For me, I still find it difficult to wrap my head around the original concept of what an OS is. And Development Operating System would mean an OS that is in development. At least based on first impressions.

I am likely to try something similar with saying “DevOps for ML” or “CI for ML”. Will see how that goes.

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

#186

Post by BadassFractal »

I really wish there were more case studies available out there to show whether the "always remote" startup approach can work.

Having to be in the same room for many years at the very beginning of building a high-growth venture-backed startup is considered a law of the universe at this point, and it would be interesting to know how much not following it actually hurts you.

Does this only work for people who really have their shit together and maybe have started / sold successful businesses before?

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

#187

Post by sulam »

sytse wrote: post #180
sulam wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, full disclosure, I helped create and ran the developer tools group at a large, well-known tech company. This is a space I'm intimately familiar with.

The idea seems pretty straightforward to me and not particularly insightful. Calling it an OS is different from calling it a platform, but effectively it's the same thing. Perhaps more interesting are the implications of that analogy -- do you ship APIs and have a lot of third party people building on top of you like in the Github model or do you go more in the direction of Atlassian? I know that's a bit of a false dichotomy, Atlassian has APIs and Github is clearly trying to extend their toolchain, but in general you have one with a rich ecosystem and the other where you mostly ship what they provide.

For myself, I see GitLab trying to be more of a Github alternative than an Atlassian alternative. I don't know if that's your strategic intent, but that's how it comes across to me. In either case, I think the industry in this space is pretty unexciting in terms of the kinds of innovation that are happening right now. Google still has a toolchain that is a decade ahead of most of us, and I don't see anyone really tackling that head on.

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

#188

Post by avip »

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…

Let me get it straight: You are increasing potential hires pool tenfolds, save a fortune by not playing the real-estate bubble game, effectively double your work day to almost 24 hours by spreading over timezones, and likely enjoy a 6-days work week - and VCs are worried about your ability to scale? This is just astonishing to hear.

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

#190

Post by ghostly_s »

denimnerd wrote: post #88
billyggruff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teleconferencing systems with a 'communal' screen and camera do not make much sense to me nowadays. Most employees have at least 2 devices with built-in cameras and a screen that can be utilized for videoconferencing. Give everybody a headset. Done.

we do that on many days, but the audio quality is so much better on the "mainframe" cisco setup.

Bizarre, do you have some really cheapo headsets or something? (Or let me guess...using your iPhone earpods?) In my role I've tested a lot of pricey speakerphone systems, and we find headset audio quality to be far superior in every circumstance.
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