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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

#201

Post by TAForObvReasons »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #199
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's someone else's money.

- VC raises money to invest

- VC or the individual partners buy the infrastructure (or already owns it through different channels)

- VC instructs companies it funds to use infrastructure it owns

$$

Now, of course there's interest in successes in the fund, but even when a bet doesn't pan out the VC firm can profit

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

#202

Post by sytse »

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.

You know how we think about all remote, we think it is a no-brainer. I want to leave some notes on your points:

1. "Increasing potential hires pool tenfold" => In the view of many VCs the most talented and experienced people will live in the bay area.

2. "effectively double your work day to almost 24 hours by spreading over timezones" => although it is great that our support and site reliability engineers don't have a night shift it is very hard to work across timezones, it makes most part of our company less effective and harder to coordinate, we have to push ourselves to work asynchronous (issues instead of chat)

3. "enjoy a 6-days work week" => we think the benefits of not having a commute belong to the team member, not the company

4. "VCs are worried about your ability to scale" => they are very worried about having the executive team on the same page, not very worried about individual contributors

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

#203

Post by sytse »

tixocloud wrote: post #182
sytse wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You will have to get to a liquidity event, 99% of the time this is an acquisition or going public.

It is not very motivating for you and the team to build for an acquisition. If you want to go that route be careful how much you raise, every pounds has to paid back 3 to 10 times.

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

#204

Post by sytse »

sulam wrote: post #187
sytse wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

In my view everyone has open APIs and the difference is:

1. GitHub focusses on a marketplace ecosystem (although I hear they will be adding CI soon)

2. Atlassian has a suite of applications that work well together and you can buy as a bundle

3. GitLab is a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle, one codebase with everything from planning to monitoring, one UI, reliable upgrades, everyone on the same page

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by OptionX »

Nice to see such a transition. Give more opportunities for developers by removing the geographical constraint. And on a more personal note, the part I hate the most from my job is the commute and it feels so much better when I get the opportunity to work from home.

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

#207

Post by PhasmaFelis »

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.

A lot of people don't work well remotely. Me, for example. I found that out the hard way.

> likely enjoy a 6-days work week

Wait, what? Are remote workers expected to work Saturdays or something?

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

#208

Post by DoreenMichele »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #207
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.

A lot of people don't work well remotely. Me, for example. I found that out the hard way. > likely enjoy a 6-days work week Wait, what? Are remote workers expected to work Saturdays or something?

effectively double your work day to almost 24 hours by spreading over timezones, and likely enjoy a 6-days work week

My assumption is they mean that M-F covers 6 days if you have people in enough time zones, while still paying them for five days.

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

#209

Post by simplify »

dkersten wrote: post #192
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

From the next paragraph:

> I knew who was active... and who wanted privacy (had their office door closed)

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

#210

Post by dang »

eganist wrote: post #9
klohto wrote: post #4

While this is no doubt great I don't really believe a statement "But most importantly, Frein said, it helps InVision build a better product". Under what metric? I don't believe that people who are forced to cooperate with video and screen sharing options can deliver a better product than these, who can walk up to a colleague and ask them in person or use a whiteboard to explain their problem. In the end, remote worke…

[meta] Hey, all of HN? I'll risk a bit of karma on this question: Why are any of you downvoting klohto's comment? klohto's requesting specific information and providing one's own impression of (or perhaps anecdotal experience in) a remote environment. I can't think of a single good reason to downvote, and it's really irritating seeing good discourse being suppressed in this manner. [/meta] As for the question about r…

Going on about downvotes is against the site guidelines, so please don't. Just give a corrective upvote and move on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&sort=byDat...

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