Helping companies build effective distributed teams: my new journey with BeyondHQ

Silicon Valley, startups, distributed teams, job creation across America — can you spot the connection?

First, some predictions:

• The next generation of startups will be increasingly geographically distributed.
• They will scale by growing teams outside of hubs like the Bay Area.
• Fully remote work will rise in popularity, but a significant portion of interaction and collaboration in the near-future will continue in the form of distributed colocated teams.
• These teams will be just as significant, productive, and fully aligned with HQ.
• Startups will want to build these best-in-class distributed teams earlier and faster, to stay competitive, or risk failure.
• Decisions and insights at the intersection of workforce and workspace ops in each location will be critical to growth.
• This responsibility of growing a distributed enterprise will lie with a greatly expanded People Operations function, which will grow in prominence at the executive table.

Whether this comes as a surprise, or feels like present reality, read on.

Geo-expansion, aka building a team in a new location, as it stands today, is an operationally intense necessity. Which city/town should we consider next? What is it like to live and work there? Where are the good [engineers, scientists, salespeople]? Should we sign a new lease, sub-lease, or get a coworking membership? How can the new team get local office support?

Jason Lemkin is one of the most popular investor/entrepreneur voices in the startup world.

The list of decisions goes on.

Over the past few months, I spoke with about 20 startups, ranging from 50 employees in size, to a 1000. Yes, a 1000 person startup; I am sure you have guesses. These interviews surfaced a few key common challenges:

• Startups want to expand, but have no blueprint for expansion.
• The person tasked with expansion is overloaded and under-equipped.
• Each step requires a different vendor, and managing them all is cumbersome and fragmented.
• The C-suite has no centralized visibility into status, progress, or costs of the company’s remote offices.
• Remote teams feel culturally disconnected and risk failing.

I am excited to embark on a journey that aims to address these challenges and also delivers greater access to opportunity and faster pace of innovation, no matter where you live in the country. BeyondHQ is my ‘how’.

It all started with a brief conversation many months ago with Ross Fubini (this backstory has references to family members working with Einstein, upbringing in strict households, and helping local communities; details for another time!). We talked about scale-challenges startup face, and the growth in popularity of cities and towns outside the Bay Area. Having spent the past decade founding and growing startups and new office locations, I could see a big opportunity to help companies expand. After months of ideation, interviews with 20+ startups, and advice from entrepreneurs in and outside of Silicon Valley, I am launching the company and sharing what lies ahead.

BeyondHQ will deliver a turnkey expansion solution for startups (for now, and any growing knowledge-worker company over time). We will help build highly effective distributed (collocated) teams across the country, outside of expensive large/coastal markets. By understanding every startup’s core objectives for growth and culture, we will identify the right cities/towns for the next office(s), help manage new team setup in that location, and also provide ongoing local support as the teams grow over time. We will do this through collaboration with local governments and economic development agencies, local leaders, service partners, and increasingly strong and diverse talent pools in growth-focused cities and towns poised to make their mark.

From Des Moines to St. Louis, from Indianapolis to Santa Fe (where I spent time), cities and towns all over the country are championing local resources, talent, and community. I am also particularly interested in rural America’s potential for nurturing innovation. I am not alone in thinking about this. Nebraska is showing proof of activity here. Colorado started a rural investment fund a year ago. Research shows that communities with fewer than 20,000 residents have far larger percentage of entrepreneurs, and their businesses have higher five-year survival rates.

The R3 initiative is being led by Linc Kroeger at Pillar Technology Group, which has a strong presence in Iowa.

Revive. Rebuild. Restore. in Iowa is an excellent example of community-driven efforts to showcase rural locations as attractive centres for technology companies to build and scale teams. I am writing this post mid-air, on my way to Jefferson, Iowa, on an invitation from them to attend the launch of a new collaboration hub aptly called The Forge. As I prepare to change flights, I am thinking of the many growing startups I spoke with in the Bay Area, and am excited to learn how to help empower communities like Jefferson to meet these companies’ growth needs.

These are early days, with many future possibilities; check back for my chronicles highlighting progress made and lessons learned along the way. Soon, it will not just be me sharing updates — BeyondHQ’s team is already expanding, and I (we!) can’t wait to share more.

I am thankful to Ross for setting me off on this journey, and to Russ Fradin — who for the past decade has been a great guide, boss (well, boss’s boss really!), mentor, and connector. Much of the direction during early ideation I owe to both of them. (Oh, both their names abbreviate to RF, making many text message notifications confusing and entertaining.)

Every new entrepreneurial journey requires the right ‘fuel’ — strong support and guidance, initial capital, and an extensive network of helpful partners. I am lucky to say that I have Bloomberg Beta and Costanoa Ventures to turn to for this. Greg Sands, Roy Bahat, James Cham, and their teams have given me an incredible start, and I look forward to leaning on them and learning from them on the journey ahead.

Growing up, my parents (both doctors) traveled around the world for work, which meant growing up in seven countries and three continents for my sister and me. My family has been a growing distributed team, continuously adapting and thriving. I also bring lessons from this personal journey to building BeyondHQ’s contribution to entrepreneurial growth across the country.

I will finish this post the way I started it — referencing Silicon Valley, startups, distributed teams, job creation across America. It marks the beginning of what I expect to be an exciting and fulfilling journey to bring all of these together.

I hope you see the connection now :)