Many companies have people the work from home occasionally or employees that work fully remote. However, a growing number of startups are starting entirely remote and growing the company with the expectation they will stay a distributed organization.
Examples:
Links to this note
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Immediacy in Creative Tools More Important for Remote Teams
When working remotely, teams rely on low-bandwidth collaboration (e.g. video conferencing). It’s difficult to do certain kinds of creative work that involves fiddling and rapid iteration like product design. To make up for it, tools used need to be exceptionally fast at producing a change (e.g. pixels on a screen, reloading code) that a group can react to otherwise it amplifies the friction of low-bandwidth collaboration.
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Remote Native Companies Don’t Have Real Addresses
Most business registration requires a company to have a real physical mailing address. This is problematic for remote native companies as they don’t have one. Further, most mail forwarding companies use P.O. boxes which are note allowed. To work around this, remote-first startups use the address of the founders and employees in each state or convince someone to let them use their mailing address.
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It Takes Two Months to Hire in a New Country
When trying to hire someone in a new country, it can take on average two months to put in place all off the infrastructure for employment. This includes research (local laws, regulations, taxes) setting up local payroll (often through a consulting firm familiar with the location) and even setting up a subsidiary company which requires it’s own research into taxes and maintenance.
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Employers of Remote Workers Are Unsure They Are Remitting Taxes Correctly
Due to COVID-19, employees are spread throughout the country and moving around. This is a challenge for employers who are obligated to pay taxes in the jurisdictions their employees are working. Remote native companies and companies that support a growing remote workforce will continue to face this challenge.
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The following are remote native companies with all employees working remotely.
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Most messages sent on Slack do not happen in public or private channels, but in DMs. This indicates a preference for 1:1 comminication given the option.
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Two-Thirds of Remote Workers Want to Continue to Work Remotely
A Gallup poll with data from September indicate that two-thirds of remote workers want to keep working remotely. An article from 2016 estimated the number of knowledge workers in the US to be 30MM people and adding roughly 1MM per year. Since most remote jobs are knowledge work jobs, we can estimate 20MM people in the US want to work remotely permanently.