Startup CEO, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16Managing Remote Offices and Employees

If I had to do one thing over again with Return Path, I'd have kept the entire company in a single office for as long as possible, or I would have created a “remote first” environment from day one.

Today, we have 12 offices in seven countries on four continents. We have been in business well over a decade and have a significant international sales force, so that's probably to be expected, but even since our early days our team has been split across multiple locations: we started in New York and San Francisco simultaneously to attract good talent; then an early merger led to offices in New York, San Francisco, and Boulder within two years of the company's founding.

There are situations where remote offices are actually the ideal situation, especially with international sales, and there are ways to mitigate the challenges of having a highly dispersed team. The first key is recognizing the value of physical proximity – as old‐fashioned as that sounds – and doing what you can to sacrifice as little of that value as possible as your team expands. But an equally important second key is that if you're going to have multiple locations and a lot of remote employees, you have to embrace it and build systems and processes around that principle. The more ubiquitous desktop video becomes, the easier this is.

Brick‐and‐Mortar Values in a Virtual World

As buzzwords go, telecommuting sounds pretty old‐fashioned. That's partly because the practice ...