Our Journey to 100% Remote
When I first envisioned this company, I imagined a warm and vibrant office space. Bright. Upbeat. Healthy snacks in the kitchen. Yoga mats in the corner of conference rooms. Lots of natural light, with lush greenery everywhere.
At least, that was the dream. Before COVID. Before shifting to 100% remote work.
Nothing has turned out the way I imagined, and that’s okay. We’ve pivoted, we’ve adapted, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about the path we’ve taken.
We knew launching a 100% remote startup during a pandemic wouldn’t be easy, but the doors it unlocks — the ability to offer talented, diverse engineers from anywhere in the country an opportunity to join a promising startup with true unicorn potential — has been well worth the effort.
Here’s a glimpse at our journey thus far, and a peek at how we do remote work today.
The Backstory: Netflix to Noteable
It all began with a blog post describing some innovative work we were doing with Jupyter notebooks. The post was written to help with recruiting — we wanted to provide context to candidates on the type of work they’d be doing if they joined the team — but it had the unexpected bonus of establishing us as industry leaders within the Jupyter ecosystem. Much to our surprise, it also went viral, quickly rising to the #2 spot on Netflix’s acclaimed Tech Blog.
It was the catalyst from which everything started. We were soon inundated with requests to collaborate with other companies and universities — one Googler mentioned his team had met several times just to discuss our blog post. Wanting to capitalize on this interest, we agreed to meet with anyone actively contributing engineering resources to the Jupyter ecosystem. After all, this is who we’d be collaborating with on open source initiatives. If we could better understand what we each were working on, and if we could collectively commit to contributing our work back to open source, there was an opportunity to divide-and-conquer a lot of the work on our respective roadmaps.
We saw significant overlap in user pain points and feature requests, but substantial disparity in proposed solutions.
My Netflix team and I found ourselves on a whirlwind tour of leading data-driven enterprises — companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. We spent one or two full days at each company, sharing use cases, architecture, roadmaps, top feature requests, and more. Those meetings gave us a deep understanding of the notebook landscape. We saw significant overlap in user pain points and feature requests, but substantial disparity in proposed solutions. To avoid potential splintering of the Jupyter notebook spec as the result of this disparity, we invited those same folks to join us for a week-long summit at Netflix focused specifically on notebooks in the enterprise.
That entire experience was one of the most rewarding of my career. Spending concentrated time with each company — meeting them on their home turf, giving the same exact technical presentation over and over again, and putting on the enterprise summit — provided an unexpected and utterly fascinating glimpse into the corporate cultures of some of the world’s top companies. It also offered the opportunity to observe first-hand the impact of corporate culture on outcomes.
Everyone we met with was wonderful, but a handful of meetings stood out as being far more productive than anticipated. Surprisingly so.
Those meetings all shared the same characteristics:
- Everyone was casual and friendly.
- Information was shared transparently.
- The whiteboard was put to good use.
- The problem was always put before the ego.
The meetings that were exceptionally productive? The ones where everyone involved was empowered to take quick action and folks started jumping in and contributing immediately.
Those collaborations happened between some of the world’s most famous work cultures:
Amazon.
Bridgewater.
Microsoft.
Netflix.
Never before had I seen such unbureaucratic, cross-company collaboration move at such speed! I think Bridgewater actually issued their first pull-request the same day we met. It was exhilarating to experience, and I knew it was the kind of company culture I’d want if I ever started a company.
*Obligatory disclaimer: this is not meant to be a definitive assessment of company culture or collaboration between these companies. Many microcultures exist within large companies, especially in companies as large as these. These are but my observations from a handful of meetings, with select staff from these companies, to align on our respective contributions to open source.
Building the Future of Data Collaboration
Fast forward a couple years, and I’m now starting a company with several of the amazing people I met during that project: Matthew Seal (our CTO), Pierre Brunelle (our CPO), and Elijah Meeks (the world’s first Chief Visualization Officer). Having seen firsthand the effect of company culture on a team’s productivity, our first instinct was to emulate those cultures — especially the focus on high performance.
It turns out, companies known for high performance also require teams to be physically colocated.
There are many good reasons for this, chief among them the ease with which your team can collaborate and develop rapport, which we know leads to employee happiness (read: retention) and productivity (read: profitability). Before joining Netflix, I’d been at GoDaddy for a number of years, where I led remote teams of engineers distributed across Phoenix, Seattle, and Silicon Valley while working from the Iowa office. I can easily recall some of the issues that arose from being in a different physical location — and a different time zone, too.
Key among them: it’s easy to be forgotten, even when you’re the boss.
Not intentionally, of course. It happens accidentally. Absent-mindedly. When folks are walking back after the team standup. Or grabbing their morning coffee together. Or taking a long lunch on a beautiful day. And voila! Just like that, you have information silos.
For those of us who like to move fast, these information silos can feel like death by a thousand papercuts. We wanted to avoid the silo spiral at any cost, but we weren’t too worried. After all, it’s a lot easier to communicate when you’re only 6 feet apart.
The COVID Factor
The State of California issued its stay-at-home order the same day we were expecting term sheets from investors. The shutdown wasn’t a surprise — we’d been watching the data — and we knew it wasn’t going to be over anytime soon.
So, embracing the reality of the situation, we pivoted 180° and went fully remote.
Why not hybrid, you might be wondering?
I again thought back to my time at GoDaddy, where 80% of my 9-year career had been spent working closely with, or leading, remote teams. The handful of negative experiences I encountered almost always had to do with miscommunication or lack of communication, with the hardest challenges occurring when I took over responsibility for a fully colocated team while working from a remote location. Beyond that, my experiences were overwhelmingly positive, and I was surprised to find myself becoming close friends with colleagues I’d never met in person. When we finally did meet, it felt way more like reuniting with a long lost friend than meeting a coworker for the first time.
The smoothest and most successful projects all shared the same 2 characteristics. First and foremost, team members developed a strong bond and positive rapport with every member of the project, which were reinforced through quarterly in-person events and monthly team-building activities. This helped keep little misunderstandings from becoming big problems. Secondly, information was overwhelmingly communicated asynchronously — via both formal project documents and informal instant messages.
This was true even for colocated teams. I remember as a young database developer being flabbergasted the first time I saw my colleagues communicating over Microsoft’s instant messaging (IM) app, despite literally. sitting. right. next. to. each. other.
They wouldn’t even need to move, just turn their heads 90° degrees. It made no sense!
At least, not at first.
It wasn’t long before I too was singing the praises of async communications. For starters, it *dramatically* cut back on the notes I took in meetings, allowing me to focus less on taking notes and more on what was actually being said. It was also way less disruptive than interrupting my colleagues in the middle of their work, constantly looking over at his screen to see if maybe now was a good time. And it was often faster to send an IM because you could link to related materials or just copy and paste something from another window.
Best of all, I didn’t have to pause my music.
Life changing.
Is it easier to collaborate when you have a small team physically colocated? No question. But easier isn’t always better, and miscommunication happens in person too. The causes might be different, but the outcomes are the same.
Remote teams can thrive when the conditions are right. I know, because I’ve seen it firsthand. When everyone is remote (or at least, when there’s no physical center of gravity for a team) there’s no “forgetting” to notify everyone. It becomes part of the team culture. It’s just how we operate.
I believe if you design a company culture as remote from the start — if you truly put people first, are thoughtful and attentive about it, and invest the necessary money and energy — you can not only succeed as a remote team, but outperform your physically colocated peers too.
How We Work Remotely
When we decided to go 100% remote indefinitely, we were making the decision to boldly pave our own path forward. We were venturing away from the time-tested model we’d learned at Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. We knew we had to be thoughtful and intentional about designing a culture in which remote teams not only function, but thrive.
Source: Wing VC Remote Stack Summit 2021
We’ve researched the latest science and reflected on our own experiences. We’re exchanging notes with peer companies and leveraging the lessons of those iconic companies who came before us — remote trailblazers like Buffer and GitLab. Plus we’re coming up with our own ideas and actively soliciting feedback from our team.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far and how we’re tackling each of these challenges at Noteable:
Humans are hardwired for connection
It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer, marketer, or accountant: you need people. It’s science. Connection is a core part of the human condition and a key factor in employee satisfaction. We’ve long known the importance of camaraderie and positive rapport and its effect on outcomes. This is exponentially more true for remote teams.
Some things we’re doing to help:
- Every All Hands meeting begins with “One Fun Fact,” where we ask everyone a random question and take turns answering (here’s a list of icebreaker questions we use)
- Donut’s Zoom integration matches random people for virtual socializing over coffee
- Zoom’s breakout rooms allow us to bring people together in small groups for discussion and reflection as part of our company meetings
- Company game nights provide an opportunity to relax and unwind with colleagues
Asynchronous communication is essential
Asynchronous communication, or async, is any communication that doesn’t take place in real-time. In our fast-paced global world, synchronous communication is the source of countless bottlenecks. After all, there’s only so many meeting slots in a day, right?
Async communication comes up frequently as one of the most important cultural shifts for a fully-remote company. Buffer, who’s written a blog on it, has gone as far as 100% async. We’ve not gone that far yet… but we’re actively considering it.
Burnout is real — avoid it at all costs
It’s already hard to avoid burnout in a high-performing culture. Throw remote into the mix, and it becomes even harder. How do we avoid it?
- Unlimited Time Away — we offer unlimited sick and vacation time. More than that, we actively encourage our employees to take it!
- Company Shutdowns — the entire company takes off the week of Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Years
- Flexible Hours — life happens, so we provide the flexibility for employees to step away to take care of kids and appointments as necessary
- Time to Recharge — we discourage long nights and weekends and instead encourage employees take that time to recharge
Put effort into building team morale
People thrive when they are able to bring their whole selves to work. In a remote environment, it can be hard to find moments to share who you are, your accomplishments, and your unique self. Here are some ways we’ve inspired those moments:
- We actively encourage and make space for friendly team banter
- Friday demo days give employees an opportunity to show off their latest work
- Monthly virtual team bonding events to bring folks together for some team-building fun
- Everyone gets together in person for regular “team on-sites” (the new “off-site”!)
- We invested early in a head of PeopleOps to help us build a world-class remote culture
We’re still a young company, and our remote journey is far from over. We’ll continue to refine our best practices by collecting team feedback to ensure we’re building a positive remote experience for all. And we’ll continue to share our learnings with you via this blog.
Life’s too short to not love what you do. If this sounds like a remote culture you’d like to work in, we’re hiring! :)
