I want to share a thread with what I have learned building and running distributed teams in the last year or so.
- It used to be a deal breaker. IIn that last 18 months it has become acceptable, sometimes, desirable.
- Driver: the high cost of living which has made it hard to work for equity in SV
- Preferred form of communication must be written
- Use voice comms when writing needs disambiguation OR when things that are “on fire”
- Video comms for nontactical 1:1 and all hands
- Discourage randomly shared ideas. Encourage people to think things through, and put it in writing
- Discourage interruptions
- Set up clear social rules for comms channels: What to use for urgent comms, what to use for non-urgent comms
- Make sure everyone knows what are the top 1-3 priorities so they work map backs to it
- In the ideal case, a key member of the founding team is Not willing to move to SV. If they wanted to, they could work at FB, GOOG, etc but they want to stay close to home. This is a key hire
Typical structures include:
- Full or part-time remote contractors (no equity)
- Agencies
- Fulltime remote employee or contractor (equity)
- Remote contractors with no equity, full or part-time are Not part of your team. As such, they should only work on peripheral tasks....
- Agencies are not part of your team. They can own full projects, but they need to be easily run independently of the core product
- Full-time people, under contract or employment, as long as they have equity, are the only ones on your team
- Decentralized accepts geo nodes (you have teams in different cities); distributed don't (you have people all over the world)
- In theory, you want to be distributed because the objective function is to find the best person, wherever they are
- Even if you are decentralized and not distributed, you still need to decide if you centralized the nodes in an office or not
- I think that the best set of for a distributed team is to Not have offices .....
- Offices reduce the cost of marginal comms which takes away from the distributed value and it jeopardizes
- If you are going to have an office, it should be something like this: