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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

#191

Post by TAForObvReasons »

avip wrote: post #188
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…

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.

> save a fortune by not playing the real-estate bubble game

I always thought that the real estate game was intentionally part of the deal. The idea would be for a group of VCs to pick a target location (say, San Francisco), buy up the local infrastructure (housing, office space, coffee shops, etc), and turn around and rent / sell to the startups that you just funded. This would pad the ROI, so even a company that crashes and burns after 5 years would still be profitable on the basis of the rents paid.

This cycle wouldn't come into play with a remote team. And in that lens, the onerous zoning laws of the bay area make perfect sense

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

#192

Post by dkersten »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53
madcaptenor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also with our tool, it took an average of 30 seconds to get a meeting started." You must have better phone-meeting tools than my company does.

Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product). When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or s…

> You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?"

I wouldn’t like it if people distracted me like that. Part of what I like about working remotely is that it forces asynchronous communication on people. Send me a message on slack and I can ignore it if I’m deep in thought. If you need to talk to me over voice chat, send me a message on slack asking me to join you in voice chat.

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

#193

Post by shanghaiaway »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #112
chiefalchemist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our onboarding materials explicitly say, "NYC is not HQ". And it's not HQ. It is just an office we leased because we ended up with 10+ staff in NYC and they preferred an office to a co-working space, for security/privacy. (If you've ever lived in NYC, you know it can be challenging to have a home office at any reasonable cost, due to typical square footage of living spaces. That's part of the reason I left NYC.) We a…

Would be interested in seeing a write up on your services stack.

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

#194

Post by spraak »

okmokmz wrote: post #84
praneshp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your advice (no need to look down, etc). OP however came off as condescending (at least to me) when he said stuff like "breathe fresh air", "stuck in subway for 2 hours", etc in responses, making everything a zero sum game. The way I see it, he moved to wherever because his girlfriend forced him to, and then lucked into find a good job that they enjoy.

>OP however came off as condescending (at least to me) when he said stuff like "breathe fresh air", "stuck in subway for 2 hours", etc in responses, making everything a zero sum game. I don't think he was being condescending. I'm at a point where I would absolutely value fresh air, not having to commute more than 15-30 minutes a day, being able to live in a rural area where I can have privacy and space, and other ben…

Well, this thread is about working remotely. Why not go remote and live where you want? I get to enjoy rural living, thriving farmers markets, clean ocean and air, relaxed social environment - all from my home in Hawai'i.

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

#195

Post by destitude »

hnaccy wrote: post #75
strittmatter wrote: post #6

I am all for the remote trend. I think InVision is doing a really good thing here and it looks like a lot of other companies are following suit. I hope it influences people to migrate from major tech hubs and help boost the economy in rural areas. I am from the rust belt area and it's been pretty unaffected by all of the tech growth. Most of the locals are still hoping for natural gas or coal to start booming again.…

The rust belt would just get undercut by programmers living in vastly cheaper locations around globe.

There is some salary adjustment made for geographic location.

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

#196

Post by buboard »

carlosdp wrote: post #133
buboard wrote: post #48

I wonder if there are startups working on this space, helping setup remote companies. People seem to use a basket of various tools, none of which was explicitly made for remote work. My ideal setup would be a virtual space, like a game, where employees can virtually interact. Most communication is written, complemented by voice chat when needed. It gives an understanding that "there are other people out there" and no…

Someone above mentioned this: https://www.sococo.com/ which is video conferencing that gives a map of where everyone "is" in a virtual office and makes getting on chats lower-touch. Seems to solve part of that puzzle.

right , this is a good start. Not sure why this kind of gamification is not used more often. It creates a certain sense of being together more than simple email/slack, plus it can be more fun than just looking at pixellated webcams during meetings.

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

#197

Post by Aeolun »

ryandrake wrote: post #68
denimnerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that situation now. Well kind of. I am in the only team member not colocated with the rest of the team. At the start it was really hard. They would all be in a room together and I could barely even hear them over the phone, much less speak up and say something over their rapid fire conversations. It's gotten better since I've brought these concerns up I'm only on week 4. We've setup twice a week cisco telepres…

At a lot of companies, teleconferencing systems are astonishingly bad. Like, “why did they even consider buying this” bad. Often the first 10 minutes of a meeting will be spent figuring out how to use the conf system or rebooting it because it’s not working. Then figuring out which cable to plug into in order to project remotely. Then asking if everyone is here. Then telling Karen to mute her microphone because she’s…

Only karen is incapable of either hearing or understanding the word ‘MUTE’ so everyone rolls their eyes while they try to yell over the hurricane and clack, clack, clack of her keyboard.

Then she’s finally muted, and someone else unmutes and takes over the disturbance.

It’s unimaginable to me...

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

#198

Post by denimnerd »

ghostly_s wrote: post #190
denimnerd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no, the issue is that part of the team ends up in one conference room with 1 shitty conference phone. people don't speak up loud enough, don't speak into the mic, etc.. look up cisco ix5000 which is what I'm talking about. it's a whole 'nother beast.

yeah when everyone is on a headset it's fine as long as people mute themselves but when it's a few people on a headset and most in a conference room it's terrible.

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

#199

Post by thaumasiotes »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #191
avip wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> save a fortune by not playing the real-estate bubble game I always thought that the real estate game was intentionally part of the deal. The idea would be for a group of VCs to pick a target location (say, San Francisco), buy up the local infrastructure (housing, office space, coffee shops, etc), and turn around and rent / sell to the startups that you just funded. This would pad the ROI, so even a company that cra…

> buy up the local infrastructure (housing, office space, coffee shops, etc), and turn around and rent / sell to the startups that you just funded. This would pad the ROI, so even a company that crashes and burns after 5 years would still be profitable on the basis of the rents paid.

You can never turn a profit on rent paid out of money you gave to someone, just like it's impossible to turn a profit on purchases your employees make from you with the wages you pay them. You're always better off just keeping the money.

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

#200

Post by sciurus »

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…

At Mozilla we do have offices. I don't know what the exact office vs home based worker breakdown is, but I think the majority work from home. It's certainly true on my team, which is spread across three countries and nine cities.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/

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