8 ms·
Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company? Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastic
by ng7j5d9 7y ago
Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?
Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?
- throwaway5752 7y agoIf 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.
- birdyrooster 7y ago"Not trying to be snarky" is a sarcastic warning that snark is, indeed, incoming
- ng7j5d9 7y ago> If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire" Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid to go the remote path there.
- throwaway5752 7y agoI did take your comment in the intended spirit! My response were answers in that same spirit (points you might give that executive to say "we're a remote organization already").
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gordon_freeman 7y agoAutomattic? https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
- sirjonathan 7y agoAutomattician here. Over 1000 employees, fully distributed (with the exception of Tumblr, which has an office space).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- e1g 7y agoBuffer and Basecamp come to mind, plus they are more efficient: they pay significantly more while managing to turn impressive revenue/profit vs the headcount.
- Xcelerate 7y agoIsn’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.
- Nowyouknow 7y agoCheck out AffinityX. Likely not the largest, but profitable and growing.
- rwmj 7y agoRed 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 :-)
- PunchTornado 7y agothe op is asking for remote only companies. thousands of companies do partial remote work like red hat
- rwmj 7y agoRed Hat working is more remote than you'd think from the pure numbers, since even if you're working in an office your team won't all be in the same office. The team I'm in has people working in offices in CZ, around the US, the UK, Australia, and in China. So we work using remote tools anyway.
- PunchTornado 7y agoyes, but that's happening in every big company.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- auiya 7y agoIs the acquisition affecting the number of remote positions Red Hat have?
- rwmj 7y agoNot to my knowledge.
- teunispeters 7y agoI 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....
- johannes1234321 7y agoThis doesn't sound right. In a remote environment it's crucial to be able to find people. You need a good directory/orgchart. In an office you can walk over to section and ask. In a global chat room or such this is harder.
- teunispeters 7y agoThere are directories. I just haven't needed them - but then I'm mostly a dev on some lists of products. There is no global chat room though, but there are optional "ask for help here" lists where all the team leads are likely to be paying attention. Communication protocols are one of those good things to be sorting out too, from management perspective. I've had this job for a few years now, and am pretty happy.
- Irishsteve 7y agoZapier.
- pawelk 7y agoToptal is profitable and 100% remote, not a single office anywhere. Not sure if largest, but quite big at ~500 employees.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hello_moto 7y agoToptal is a software consultancy right?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kyawzazaw 7y agoIs Zapier profitable and in those categories?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DailyHN 7y agoFlorida Virtual School employs thousands of teachers. And they've been operating for over twenty years. They're publicly funded, though.
- lovebes 7y agoBasecamp https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/search?q=remote&unscoped_q=remote https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/search?q=remote&unscope...
- ganstyles 7y agoWordPress perhaps?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- paxys 7y agoProfitability 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.
- tree3 7y agoElastic is not remote-only and they are not VC funded anymore (they IPO'd)