$1B Business Where All 700 Employees Work Remotely (2019) (opens in new tab)

Seconded. I've had a fabulous experience at an all-remote company, and a pretty lousy experience where I was the only remote worker.

Thanks! What we do for remote brainstorming is using indentation in Google Docs. We find that most ideas can be represented by a tree structure. We use indentation to indicate what is connected. You can't easily do arrows between different ideas but I've seen it work on almost every case.

BTW We're trying to bring real-time collaboration to GitLab issues so you can do the same in GitLab. I spend some time on that this weekend https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301...

What's the problem with starting screen sharing? That's how we do it and it works quite well. (Same timezone though)

If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire".

I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.

- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.

- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.

- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).

Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.

Automattic?

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

Red Hat is about 50% remote, and was plenty profitable before being acquired by IBM last year.

Edit: And is still profitable now. It sounds like I was saying it was only profitable before being acquired :-)

Buffer and Basecamp come to mind, plus they are more efficient: they pay significantly more while managing to turn impressive revenue/profit vs the headcount.

Isn’t that the wrong metric to look at? You are looking for massive successes from the very small number of remote companies to compare with the massive successes out of all companies. A better (but still somewhat flawed approach) would be to take a random sample of non-remote companies equivalent in size to the number of remote-only companies and compare the distributions of their success.

I work for one Or at least one where remote-only is quite common. Side effect : I have no idea how many coworkers I have, just know the team I work with normally and a few outside. It's a tech company, but it's an manufacturing one.

I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?

And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....

Basecamp https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/search?q=remote&unscope...

Florida Virtual School employs thousands of teachers. And they've been operating for over twenty years. They're publicly funded, though.

Profitability means nothing at this stage (and is sometimes even undesirable). As long as it is following the same growth path as more established companies in its segment, it can be considered a success.

Toptal is profitable and 100% remote, not a single office anywhere. Not sure if largest, but quite big at ~500 employees.

Elastic is not remote-only and they are not VC funded anymore (they IPO'd)

Check out AffinityX. Likely not the largest, but profitable and growing.

Is Zapier profitable and in those categories?

Zapier.

WordPress perhaps?

>We've published extensively about this subject

For entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of All-Remote culture I think the hiring page is better [1]. And a list of countries that they dont hire due to legal reasons. [2]. And list of countries they have listed as cooperate entity for Payroll [3]

I think a lot of the issues and problems with All-Remote is not in the communication or working style ( which can be adopted ) but actually in the hiring and legals where smalls startups have absolutely no time, idea, nor the energy to do it themselves. I remember reading HashiCorp's founder saying the same thing where its was the hardest part of hiring across the world.

This may actually be startup idea to solve this.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/hiring/

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines

[3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...

Happy to answer questions about remote as well!

Loads of guides in the links Sid mentioned.

Plenty to watch in our Remote Work playlist at GitLab Unfiltered: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0Kq7QUX-Ux5f...

We're doing a webinar on Friday (2020-03-13) and would be happy to answer Qs there as well: https://gitlab.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hSUtLvcSTsqQ7ftNb...

C'mon that's just unfair. GitHub is Microsoft now, I for one I'm glad gitlab exists even if I don't personally use it much, but it's a nice replacement if centralized microsoft-owned github goes down like it has been in the last weeks/months...

Basecamp has a lot of competition and probably some frontend clones maybe, but I don't think it could be called unoriginall or a copycat of any of it's competitors (Todoist,Asana,Etc)

They also have great (free) books on working remote like REWORK. Maybe you like that example better?

Anyways nothing in life is black or white