Exceptional Communication Guidelines: How InReach Ventures Transformed Into A Remote-First VC
In these troubled times, InReach Ventures is still working on investments and product development: developing software to discover and engage with European early-stage entrepreneurs. In this post, I share the communication guidelines we implemented to help transform InReach into a remote software-powered VC firm and what we have learned so far from this experience.
A couple of months ago, I moved to Norway and transitioned to be InReach Ventures’ first fully-remote employee.
My girlfriend and I had decided to move to Norway, where she is from, attracted by the quality of life over there. Norway’s startup ecosystem is nascent and with my passion for community building I would contribute to its growth.
The challenge had been to figure out what job I would do.
After months of discussions and reflections on my career, I realized there was a real opportunity for me to keep growing as Product Manager at InReach. I decided to transition to be the InReach first fully-remote employee — working from Norway.
Transforming InReach Ventures into a remote-first workplace
Over the last 18 months, we have seen at InReach the rise of remote work, both through the entrepreneurs we talk to and the general tech ecosystem. The company believed in me and with Roberto, Ben, John, and the entire team, we believed in transforming the company to enable distributed employees and in our value of being native to the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
However, companies don’t just go remote-first overnight (or so we thought), so I started a project to come up with a set of communication guidelines to transform InReach into a remote-first workplace.
Little did we know that from March 2020, the lockdowns of the UK and Europe would push every single employee to work remotely for the foreseeable future and accelerate our remote-work plans.
In this post, I share the communication guidelines we implemented over the last few weeks to enable remote work at InReach and what we have learned so far from this experience.
Our Exceptional Communication guidelines are publicly available here and cover:
- An introduction to why exceptional communication is key to our success as the next-generation VC firm
- A description of different types of communication (asynchronous vs synchronous)
- A set of golden rules we abide by as a team
- An agreement on general availability in the context of a distributed team
- And finally, tips on how to use the right tools (emails and Slack)
What we have learned from remote work so far
As a 10-person company used to verbal communication in our London open-office, some parts have worked well for us, others are still work-in-progress.
We are taking advantage of asynchronous and synchronous communication channels: email lists, Zoom, Slack and DIG, our own software to discover, evaluate and support investments.
In the tech team, most of our discussions now happen over email and push us to be more thoughtful when we collaborate on an issue.
More than ever, the investment team relies on DIG, our own proprietary software, to communicate on every deal and use email to send us product feedback.
In addition, they rely on email for deep discussions on investments and introduced end-of-day calls allowing them to review where they stand with each deal and move faster.
However, we have lost in cross-team communication and bonding throughout the day.
As an engineer interested in entrepreneurship, working at InReach gives me the opportunity to hear and learn from the investment team after an interesting call with entrepreneurs. The opposite is true too: investors have always been exposed to our technical discussions. We have yet to figure out how to replicate this osmosis between engineering and investment online.
As for bonding and social interactions, Slack does not yet come close to impromptu hallway and kitchen chats — which we compensate for with fun scheduled “team play” video calls.
We would love to hear from you
Those guidelines are a living document so please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to help us improve.
They were inspired by the work of established remote companies such as Gitlab, Basecamp, and Doist. Like everything we do, they will evolve based on everyone’s sensibility, practice, and learning.
Finally, the guidelines enable us to keep living our mission in those difficult times: to provide the best European technology entrepreneurs with the same opportunities, regardless of where they’re based, by leveraging software, data, and machine learning.
👋 If you are a European entrepreneur in the area of SaaS, Marketplaces, or Consumer Internet, we would love to hear from you.
