Naval

JOJI

PARSA

Tom Howard

Harj

Ahash Ganeshamoorthy

T Timothy Tran

John

Brian Jacobs

Keith

Benoît Meunier

Gustavo Couto

Aditya

Alex V

Larry Velez

Petri Kajander

Rajat

 Taken more broadly, Diana, technology gives us choice.

 And anything that gives us more choice is a 

 technology that is fundamentally going to be adopted.

 And so remote work is technologically enabled.

 It gives humans more choice. We're not going back.

 Hey, it's Pierre from Cal.com. We've been running a remote company, Async First, for

 two years now. We're growing fast and people really appreciate the love for our product.

 From my experience, I think having a remote First company with a global workforce has

 a ton of benefits localizing your content 

 as well. So if you have a product on the web

 and you sell to all kinds of different people in different countries, it does really help

 to have people from Latin America, from Europe, from Asia, from Australia to chime in and

 bring in their local expertise, whether it's in translations or in payment processing.

 I think it's a real superpower to have a 

 global team, and especially because you can interact

 almost 24-7 with an engineer, whereas if you have a co-located team in San Francisco, you

 know, up to 8 to 10 hours a day, there's just 

 radio silence. So when there's a bug or whatever,

 an issue with the service or something, there's always an engineer around when you have a

 24-hour available team, whereas if a co-located team goes offline, it goes offline. I think

 that's a really, really big benefit for a small startup as well, because the founding

 team can decide when to work. I can work 

 the morning with the India-Asian team, but

 then in the evenings I can work with the 

 North American team if I'm, let's say, based in

 Europe, and I think that's a real, real superpower.

 customer service or DevOps, it really helps to have

 a round-the-world team, but that's less creative work, obviously.

 What does everyone think about startup hubs, sort of geographic startup hubs, in the world

 of remote work? Does that make sense still?

 Is that always going to make sense or is it 

 just a matter of time before geography makes

 no difference and you won't have these concentrations of startups?

 I'm very interested in that because it seems that if remote actually truly is the future,

 especially on the engineering side, then wouldn't the concept of a localized sort of ecosystem

 just die naturally just with the course of time?

 You'll have the legacy people, but ultimately in the long run it would just be meaningless

 and everything would be done remotely. So curious what the thoughts are on that.

 I think there are two great startup hubs, Silicate Valley and the Internet.

 And then there are some lesser startup hubs.

 But everything is enabled by the Internet.

 So if you make the Internet your home, then you can pick whatever geography you like.

 Something I've been wondering about is just the social pressure that helps

 keeps you motivated and in my own experience every time I've showed up in

 the office my teammates work keeps me accountable and motivated for example it

 when I see my teammates work so hard and

 something I've been wondering about Naval is do you have any offsides or any

 bonding activities to build camaraderie with your team because I think that's

 super important and also I think there's a difference between like early career

 and later career early career I think being in person can be hugely beneficial

 because of the mentoring opportunities that you need to take advantage of you

 Unfortunately, if you need social pressure to be 

 then I think you're going to be bound into local geography.

 That's fine, it's a trade-off that you make, but then remote work is not for you.

 But I think we're moving away from an age of 

 tracking inputs and much more into tracking outputs,

 and the flexibility that you gain in exchange is worth it.

 So I've been working remote for the past four years and I do think it's generally

 a net positive for the industry and for most people. But I also 100% agree with

 David that it's very hard to replicate the serendipity and the camaraderie that

 you get from working in person. What I notice a lot of time is remote teams

 tend to sort of converge on just being more transactional over a long period of

 time and your interaction with your co-worker will feel more and more like

 you know you're paying for their time instead of you and your co-workers are

 working together to fight a war. And I think for you know startups at certain

 to me a lot of the debate just depend on

 what stage of the company you're at, what kind of challenges you have, and is that

 just a trade-off you're worth making. Because you know I do think a lot of the

 remote works problem could be solved by active effort. You could spend

 the energy to make it less transactional to really kind of build that camaraderie

 easier to just get everybody you know in the same location and just to fight the

 battle together. Because I think generally when you start a startup

 you really want to try to worry about as little as possible right. You want to

 spend all your energy on getting to product market fit, finding the right

 customer, finding the right problem. You don't want to have to spend too much

 energy on building culture and building that team camaraderie or you

 know at least you want to spend you want to have that to be as

 organic as possible and not spend too much you know active energy on it.

 Hey Pierre, do you ever struggle with engineers 

 or workers that are just on a completely different

 time zone and you're just never working at the same time? Do all your conversations with

 these people just happen async or do you find a way to sometimes do sync conversations?

 I do find that sometimes when you're talking about people 

 who are around the clock, the iteration speed gets pretty slow.

 So you do have to separate them out a little bit by function.

 Because if you're waiting 12 hours for each 

 response, even in async communication, that's way too long.

 So yeah, completely remote where the whole team is 

 working on the same thing all the time is a little tough.

 So you do want to try and aggregate a little bit by time zone.

 Yeah, this is a huge one, often understated in discussions about remote work.

 And it obviously depends very, very much on the company itself and the individuals.

 30 minutes to a mediocre five minutes to a

 terrible, terrible two hours, depending on how you commute and how far away your commute

 I had been running hard remote-first companies for past 20 years, back from the days when

 ICQ was our only tool. And I think duality between 

 on-site company and remote company is as following.

 On-site companies are far more forgiving. They're easier to start, 

 easier to scale early, far easier for founders to fix any mistakes,

 especially if it's first-time founders like Y Combinator, great founders who still don't

 really know what they are doing at their first startup.

 So everything in early startup cycle is simply easier for on-site startup.

 But that's come at a price that all the 

 things you're not optimizing for early, it kind of

 creeps in into culture and makeup of the company.

 And I think thanks to Elon, we now have a 

 numeric answer to that, is how much of that

 slack from being on-site can creep in in such company.

 In remote company, everything early on is harder, but over long term, you might simply

 build a stronger company, a far more robust and anti-fragile company.

 But it is not an exercise for first-time founders.

 So first-time founder trying to build his first startup and his first remote company

 at the same time, I think he's just doomed to fail.

 It's too complicated. Remote companies are absolutely unforgiving of any mistakes.

 If you don't understand how to test for 

 culture fit, if you don't understand how to test for

 skills, if you don't understand how to build metrics to track productivity, everything

 will start slipping and that company will become non-competitive very fast.

 But if it's experienced founders who know what they are doing, all the benefits of putting

 this process in place early and getting benefits from this process of quality in systems for

 remote collaboration, then I think over longer term, you simply would create a much stronger

 company. With remote first approach, Twitter would never ever would have grown to like 75% extra

 fluff people who can be easily laid off.

 In remote companies, such thing is just impossible.

 I think you're absolutely right, Max. It would be hard for me to 

 start and run AirChat remotely if I didn't already have a base 

 network of people and know exactly what I wanted and how to run it.

 That's a really great point, Pierre. As a startup grows past the phase

 where it's just the co-founders, you reach a point where the co-founders

 are working basically 24-7 whenever they're awake.

 And if there's an emergency, they stay awake to deal with the emergency.

 But then as you bring on some actual regular employees,

 you can't expect an employee to be working all the time.

 And so once you have enough of a headcount

 that can solve any given problem or any specific problem,

 then ideally for those issues, if a co-founder can't solve it,

 it would be nice if there's always an employee available

 who can solve it. The problem with being physically located in one place

 is that requires people to have on-call rotations

 where they're literally staying up all night

 or taking a night shift or whatever, which is awful.

 And while some people would probably be fine with that,

 I'm sure a lot more people would be fine

 with just being in a different time zone

 and working at their regular daytime schedule.

 So that's like a hidden benefit of not only being remote,

 but being remote and distributed across all time zones,

 as opposed to just being remote, say in West Coast US to East Coast US.

 shackled to my basement is not a 10x engineer?

 is coming up with Apple in remote work, where

 potentially with pass-through AR, presence can be solved to a large degree, where you

 can literally sit near people and can see them in your space?

 Do you think this will affect whatever point 

 David had about working together in the same place?

 Well, let's see what Apple comes out with first, but in-person is so high bandwidth

 that it's very hard to imagine replacing that with VR 

 AR just yet, but could happen. So open-minded about it.

 But even with AR, you don't necessarily have the serendipity factor.

 You're not stumbling into each other. It's probably still more likely to be scheduled.

 Although maybe companies can say, hey, doing 

 the hours of this and this for two hours a day,

 strap on your headset and wander around.

 Either way, technology is a one-way tool here.

 I think all technological advancements will make remote work higher productivity and higher quality,

 and none of them are going to make in-person more of a necessity.

 I agree with Max that for most people starting new companies,

 remote work is probably a better fit for experienced founders.

 Though I think it's less to do with the company building aspect of it,

 and more to do with you need a clear and correct product vision

 before you have product market fit for remote work to succeed.

 And I think that typically comes from experienced founders working in

 domains where they have deep knowledge or expertise already.

 Either from previous startup or because they've invested a lot in the space.

 For later stage post product market fit startups,

 I think the biggest risk of remote work is actually trust between the CEO and

 the exec team. So one of the common things later stage

 founders share with each other is that executive

 hiring rarely works out. The rule of thumb is if 30% or more of

 your executive hires succeed, you're doing really well. And

 the two failure modes of execs tend to be

 either they aren't actually very good at motivating

 a high-performing team, or they're power-hungry political

 types. And I think detecting both those failure modes

 is harder to do in a remote setup where you don't have a visceral sense of