Remote Work

In this episode, we interviewed Todd Nienkerk. He is a digital strategist and open-source advocate. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of @FourKitchens. Four Kitchens develops apps and websites for organizations with a lot of content. Four Kitchens is a fully remote company with 38 team members distributed across the globe.

In this episode we talked to Todd about, transitioning from a co-located to hybrid, to fully remote. We also discussed about the benefits of remote work, relocating “remote work” resources, maintaining culture, communication, in-person retreat and collaboration, team building, lack of laws and resources for remote work.

Show highlights? The transition from collocated, to hybrid to fully remote, took about 3 years. Today (as of 2018), Four Kitchens is a fully successful remote office. What they learned on the process? That it is actually more expensive to run a fully distributed company, and how to relocate resources to remote work environment.

In this episode, we interviewed Mark Faggiano. He is the CEO of Taxjar, the automated sales, tax reporting and filing software-as-a-service. Taxjar automates the tax process and handles everything for you. Taxjar managed to create a system that does all that with a 100% remote company and remote workers. As of today, Taxjar has 32 employees and will probably have more over the next six months.

In this episode we talked to Mark about, what is TaxJar, the benefits of building a SaaS product remotely, hiring better applicants, how to boost your remote team’s productivity, and the challenges of running a remote SaaS business.

Show highlights? According to Mark, if you are planning to build a remote company, invest time and energy in your workers. Remote communication means you will probably have to over-communicate sometimes. And finally, make sure your remote workers know how to manage their time and don't force a schedule over them.

In this episode, we interviewed Ryan Carson. He is the co-founder and CEO of Treehouse, an online coding school that teaches how to make apps, software and how to build a website to over 80,000 students around the world.

When Ryan started Treehouse, he was living in the UK and started to hire employees from the US. They saw the value in remote work; they could hire the best wherever they were, and quickly integrated them into the team without relocating.

In this episode, we talked to Ryan about, lack of human interaction, in-person meet-ups, facetime, technology tools, building trust, and the different types of founders.

Show highlights? Ryan believes that trust is one of the most important elements for handling remote work. To help integrate “trust” into the team, Ryan uses a tree analogy… where the root is the integrity, the trunk is the intention, and the branches are the capabilities. The last part of the tree is the leaves which are the results.

Stay tuned for more!