Remotely Inclined

Rafat Ali is a two-time media entrepreneur. He sold his first blog a few years ago and is now building Skift, a global media company focused on business travel, conferences, and the business of travel. 

Of course, COVID was not fun. 

The company nearly fell apart, but managed to eek by with a few saving graces. Namely: remote work. 

Rafat made the decision to not renew the company’s lease when it came up in summer 2020, and with that decision the company - and its dozens of employees - went 100% remote. This move stands apart from what’s becoming the major wave of hybrid remote announcements, since as of right now the company is totally remote with plans to stay that way. 

In this conversation with Rafat, we talked about

📈 How Skift weathered the COVID storm, coming back from the brink of collapse (and what they are up to now)

🔒 Remote work versus pandemic lockdown work (they are not the same thing)

✈️ The future of travel (and business travel in particular)

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Admittedly, you’d expect the founder of a company that helps remote teams with payroll and taxes to not like offices. But Sahin Boydas is a little different than most entrepreneurs.

With nearly 10 startups under his belt (a handful of failures and a handful of successes and exits), Sahin has barely ever worked in an office - and never on a permanent basis. Whether in his native Turkey, to Boston, to Silicon Valley, every single one of his startups is remote. It’s perhaps no wonder he refers to offices as “prisons of the mind.” 

In this interview, Sahin and I talked about the future of Silicon Valley, how Sahin thinks about angel investing remotely, and of course the future of remote work. 

Check out key takeaways below or listen to the whole episode on your favorite podcast platform.

Image courtesy Remote Team

Silicon Valley’s greatest export

Silicon Valley was - and arguably still is - the global epicentre of tech. Even in a remote world, Sahin doesn’t think that’s going anywhere. Instead, the shift will be from requiring physical presence in Silicon Valley to requiring a Silicon Valley mindset anywhere you are in the world. What constitutes a Silicon Valley mindset? For Sahin, it’s a willingness to try new things, take bold risks, and invest in ideas knowing that not everything will work out, but the production and founding process will teach individual founders a lot and help educate the whole ecosystem for the next crop of entrepreneurs. 

Key quote: 

“The idea of Silicon Valley is three ingredients. The first ingredient is we welcome everyone in the world. It’s the American dream on steroids. Second, you are free. You can be anything. I think anyone, any gender, any religion, you will be welcome here. Then we have Stanford, getting millions of ideas from professors. And we have the money from Sand Hill Road and Stanford. Then we have the lawyers that know how to do the exit playbooks.”

“It’s not really about the tech, it’s about the outcome and building something fast… it’s about the culture.”

Angel investing remotely

After some business successes, Sahin began to invest in other startups (remotely, of course). Instead of following a geographic thesis or waiting for the startups to come to him, he decided to take his stock investing mentality and bring that to angel investing. Namely, Sahin invests in companies that he either is a huge fan of as a customer or, if the solution isn’t what he personally needs, that he’s a huge fan of in general. It may not be the most sophisticated, algorithmic investment strategy, but it’s a system that helps him direct his investment dollars into opportunities he’s genuinely happy to rave about.

Key quote: 

“I personally read around a thousand article titles a day to generate ideas. If someone is building my idea, that’s an investment I want to make.”

“If I find any idea that I really, really, really like, I reach out to the founders.”

(Disclosure: Always do your own diligence on investments and follow your own independent research. Everything we talked about in the episode were just examples, not advice.)

The future of work

Sahin founded RemoteTeam.com to help remote companies manage the nitty gritty details of payroll, taxes, and employee administration on remote teams - all the little things that get more complicated when you don’t have one central office location. 

As such, it’s pretty easy to believe that Sahin thinks the future of work is remote: 

Key quote: 

“We somehow got used to this 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of family time. But I don’t think I’ve ever worked 8 hours linear in my life.”

“I’m so excited that the world is catching up to [remote work] and changing.”

The final word

“The office was built by the industrial revolution… the office is our prison of the mind”

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Sahin on:

* Twitter

* Instagram

* LinkedIn

* RemoteTeam.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Lauren Razavi is now a sought after consultant and researcher on the future of work (and remote work in particular), but she didn’t start her career that way. Instead, she ran away from home at a young age and became a music tour manager, helping indie bands get their break. Then she transitioned into full-time freelancing, digital nomadism, and eventually to big tech™ at Google before striking back out on her own.

In our conversation, she shared her insights on the future of the office, mobility, and humanity in remote work. 

Building humanity into remote work

“A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost.”

The future of the office

“One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose.”

“But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on.”

“Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here.”

Not just remote, but mobile

“When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer?”

“We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists.”

The final word

“Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work.”

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Remotely Inclined Chats with Lauren Razavi

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Lauren. Let’s start with your story and journey into remote work

Lauren: My story actually started about a decade ago. When I was a teenager, I basically ran away from home and joined a music tour. From that experience, I ended up becoming a freelancer and remote worker - and I haven’t changed course since. 

I wanted to be a musician, but I was absolutely terrible at the guitar, singing, and the piano. So that wasn’t going to work. So I started to promote some friends. One of the bands I was working with started to get some traction, and that was mainly through my work as a music manager. Back then I didn’t really understand what I was doing, but just kind of going for it and leveraging the internet to spread the word about music and to make connections. 

From there I went to university and studied politics. The main thing that studying politics teaches you is that you don’t want to get into politics! While I was studying, I fell into being a freelance journalist. I started pitching editors at magazines and newspapers in the UK and worked really, really hard for six months not getting anywhere. 

Then I started to get somewhere with freelancing and it all flowed ever since. It’s taken me from freelance journalism and foreign reporting to Google in a couple different roles. Then I transitioned more into writing, speaking, and consulting rather than just the kind of straight freelance journalism, which is where I am at today. 

You had a unique remote work journey. Is remote work actually for everyone?

Remote work itself is for everybody, but I would say that remote work definitely isn’t for all types of work. 

One of the trends I think we’re going to see moving forward is a shift of the office from a place that people go for 9-5 every day into spaces for collaboration and getting together on a less regular basis with a clear motivation and purpose. 

But even the most dedicated remote workers are still going to encounter a lot of situations in their work where being remote from others is not necessarily conducive to achieving that particular task they might be focused on. 

So does that mean people who hate remote work have a point?

When people say they hate remote work, sometimes there’s a real confusion in terms of what they are talking about. Particularly this year, when people say they hate remote work, what they might mean is more that they hate doing remote work unexpectedly during a pandemic, without the right equipment and surrounded by partners, children, and other housemates. None of that is conducive to remote work just like any other kind of work or entrepreneurial activity. 

You have to be able to choose your way of doing things. Right now, a lot of people don’t really have that as an option. They’re not able to say they are the kind of person who needs a coworking space or the kind of person who needs a quiet room. We’ve all been thrust into this situation. 

And remote work in many ways is such a vague term. Maybe 70% to 80% of most people’s work is actually deep focused work where they need to think about things and produce stuff that doesn’t require other people. Certainly in the knowledge economy, the vast majority of work lends itself to this kind of deep focused work. When I talk about remote, I’m talking bout that aspect. But also making an allowance for the fact that some stuff does have to happen and is more efficient in person. 

What physical infrastructure does remote work need?

There’s a hardware aspect and a software aspect to that question. 

There are quite clear hardware aspects of a decent remote work set up: ergonomic set up, electronics, etc. 

Software is having an absolute renaissance now from the downturn in a way nobody really expected. You have these software companies that are absolutely flourishing because they’ve been on a path and were viewing a future of work they thought was very distant. And before 2020 it was very distant. And now suddenly it’s here. So they’ve seen interest in their products and users skyrocket. 

A lot of small office interactions are being eaten by the world of software. But that’s really exciting because it’s freeing us up to have more meaningful human-to-human interactions.

Do human relationships suffer when you don’t have the mundane little interactions to prompt conversation?

When I think about the mundane things, in an office that might be asking if someone wants a cup of tea. Or helping them out with something. The same kind of thing happens in digital spaces.

A lot of people think technology somehow changes how humans behave, but I really don’t think it does. We behave in the same way using different kinds of communications tools. For instance, I’ve run a Slack channel for freelancers who collaborate on different projects, and it’s a small but close knit community. Most of us are in touch most days just to have some digital recreation. But you consciously have to make sure that you’re not spending your whole day gossiping on Slack, for instance. There’s a balance to strike, but I don’t think anything’s lost.

What else is involved in the future of work besides remote?

I’m actually writing a book on this at the moment - it’s about the global mobility aspect. For the past six years I’ve lived and worked as a digital nomad, essentially travelling all around the world whilst building my career. 

When we say remote work right now, we mean work from home. But I think by the end of this decade we will see a fundamental and enormous shift to work from anywhere. In the next stage of things, people are going to wake up to what’s possible. We’re going to see a much more fluid approach to location from workers. For instance, if your role is remote, what’s to stop you from taking your family to a villa in Italy for three months every summer? 

We’re seeing this as sort of a pandemic recovery process for many countries like Barbados, Bermuda, and Georgia. These countries and governments actually want to attract remote workers as replacements for tourists. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Lauren on her newsletter and on Twitter.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

One truth about remote work that’s become a cliché is that it saves you money. Many remote entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with say that their choice to be remote was, at least in part, due to the costs of an office.

The challenge I have with this statement isn’t about its truth. Instead, it ignores the other, very real expenses that pop up when you run a remote business. I want to shine a light on those for two reasons: 

* A lot of bashing around remote work stems from the idea that companies are reaping massive savings while forcing employees to pay for office expenses (in the words of Laurel Farrer - “will no one ever be satisfied?”). 

* Entrepreneurs thinking of going remote - you need to go in eyes wide open. You’ve probably experienced some of these costs as you navigated COVID, but there are others that will come up if you want to build a thriving remote culture. 

I’ve broken down this article into three categories: freelancers / solopreneurs, services teams, and product teams. Each category is cumulative, meaning a services team will also have the expenses that a freelancer or solopreneur has. Further, a product team will likely have the expenses of a services team and a freelancer, since a lot of product companies offer services, whether as a revenue line or under the banner of customer success. 

So shall we talk about money? 

Image via Burst

Remote expenses: Solopreneur and freelancer

All businesses have some fundamental things they need to pay for. In the freelancer and solopreneur world, thankfully those expenses can be relatively low. However, they can still amount to thousands of dollars per year for: 

* Payment processing for digital payments

* Web hosting for personal sites and ecommerce platforms

* Custom email and digital asset managers

* Social media management tools

* Contract management and e-signature tools

* Any custom technology necessary to do their job (design platforms, etc.)

These infrastructural costs hurt freelancers and solopreneurs the most, in my opinion, because they are not built for the freelance world. Big tech platforms like Zoom didn’t build for freelancers when they launched a ‘freelancer’ level. Instead, the company simply took enterprise value triggers and offered fewer of them for a lower price. While this covers some needs, it does not reach all - leading to platform creep for freelancers. 

Services companies

Services companies will have the same infrastructural costs of a freelancer, scaled up by the size of their team. However, they will also have: 

* Virtual office tools like Workplace by FB or Memberstack / Memberspace / etc. 

* Project management tools like Asana, Trello, or Airtable 

* Travel and retreat expenses (don’t assume remote teams shouldn’t spend time together)

* Home office stipends or coworking memberships for employees

* Virtual events

* Gift cards and other goodies in lieu of office perks like snacks and coffee

* Payroll and team admin software that manages the complexity of having employees in different countries

These kinds of expenses are often higher for remote service companies than they would be for an office-centric company. Take retreats, for example. You can’t hire a coach bus to drive outside the city with the team - everyone has to fly in, some folks from very far away. It creates opportunity for fun exotic locales, but also adds to the cost base. 

Product companies

Selling a product is the most scalable type of company, but it also carries with it a higher fixed cost base. Not only will product companies have all the costs associated with human capital, they will also have: 

* Ticket management and support hub software

* Fulfillment and shipping costs

* Returns and inventory management costs

* Cyber security costs associated with remote product development

* And more based on what kind of product they are selling

Many of these costs can be outsourced or handled as a percentage of revenues, but that leaves a smaller pot to pay employees and hold profit for investment later. When these companies are remote, there is some efficiency to be gained - an ecomm brand can have centralized inventory instead of distributing it to storefronts first - but that doesn’t mean it’s all easy from there. 

There are of course other costs associated with running a business, but I tried to highlight the ones that remote companies have (or have more of) compared to office-centric companies. And if you’re noticing some overlap, that’s a good thing - it means that many office-centric companies are more set up to work remotely than they may have thought. 

One more thing… 

I started Remotely Inclined to investigate running a business remotely, and now invest multiple hours per week researching different topics, interviewing experts, and putting together this content.

If you’d like to support that work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get access to everything I produce and you can have me solve your remote work problems for you - just send me a question. I’ll do the research and publish the answer.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Laurel Farrer has been leading remote organizations for 14 years, well before it was a hot topic. Now, she helps other companies figure out their remote work arrangements with her company Distribute Consulting and she built a thriving community of remote workers in the Remote Work Association. 

While Laurel knows there’s a lot of flexibility in remote work, one thing that grinds her gears is when people have complained about wanting remote work for years only to deride organizations now for “downloading” office expenses onto employees. To quote: “Will no one ever be satisfied?”

In this interview, Laurel shared the four categories of remote work infrastructure, how to take care of your mental health during both the pandemic and with regular remote work, and more. 

Remote infrastructure is four things

→ Too many companies ignore infrastructure, believing that once you don’t need an office space anymore, you’re good. Not only is this not the case for hybrid remote companies, but it’s also not true of all-remote companies.

Physical infrastructure: All workers, remote or not, need a place to work - desks, chairs, wifi, etc. For a business, this could mean an office, coworking memberships, or home office stipends. 

Digital tools: Whatever tools you need to get your work done. This was commonplace in an office environment, but additional tools for communication and collaboration are critical.

Processes and rituals: You may not see everyone every day, so no chatting by the coffee machine. But that doesn’t mean you can’t build regular practices to make work life easier and more pleasant. 

Information management: If you don’t manage information properly, you get the worst of both worlds. 

Mental health: Remote work challenge accelerated by the pandemic

→ Like an office environment, a remote work environment has mental health risks associated with it. That’s to be expected. 

→ The difference between offices and remote work is that feelings of isolation, disconnection, and micromanagement can be very physical, whereas they might be more difficult to pin down in an office full of people. 

→ Unfortunately, the pandemic served to accelerate and exacerbate all these issues, meaning it’s critical that people check in with themselves. 

→ Self check in questions should be about discovering patterns which you can then do something about. This is entirely about what works for you - not about any sort of best practice. 

The final word

“There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Laurel Farrer

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Laurel! What’s your remote work journey and why did you found Distribute Consulting?

Laurel: I’ve been working remotely for 14 years. The entire time I was operating distributed companies. And 14 years ago, remote work wasn’t cool. It wasn’t natural. I got a lot of questions. Through those years, I was a consultant informally on the side, answering those questions. About four years ago I was experiencing a horrible company culture, and I said I was going to dedicate my life to preventing this for other people. I unexpectedly quit my job because it got to a level where I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought about what would be next, and I knew I wanted to strengthen the conversation about virtual organizational development and create the resources I wanted and needed as a distributed company executive.

What does it mean to be an “office manager” in a virtual world?

The role of an office manager is to keep operations humming - to create an environment in which productivity and business operations continue and people have a place to come together that fuels their productivity and collaboration. That’s exactly what you do as an office manager in a remote company, but in a virtual space. 

We still need to have a place to work together. We still have tools to manage. We still have environments to create activities or to plan and coordinate.

How does the office manager role change in a hybrid-first remote world?

The goal with remote work is not to necessarily make everybody go distributed overnight. We can’t do that. It would completely crush our economy. What we need to think of instead is location irrelevancy in our work so business operations can continue regardless of where we are. So that means we can be just as productive outside of the office as we can be inside of the office. That’s where this new office management role becomes environment creation - we’re going to create an environment where people can collaborate digitally in order to work together as a team in order to produce and review output. It’s creating infrastructure of employee engagement, culture, rituals, and accessibility. It’s just making the office digital instead of physical. 

Continuing on the idea of infrastructure - what physical infrastructure is necessary in a remote work world?

This is a conversation too many people neglect. We’re still physical people - we might work in digital spaces, but we’re physical. We need to pay attention to our coworking spaces or home offices or mobile and HQ offices. They have to support our health and safety so we can continue to be productive, safe, and strong mentally, emotionally, and physically. 

The conversation about infrastructure is not just tools. Too many people stop there once they figure out if they should have Microsoft Teams or Slack. It’s bigger than that. It’s about how you’re interacting with each other. 

Infrastructure is four things: 

* Physical infrastructure like offices and desks. 

* Digital tools like Zoom or Slack.

* Processes and rituals to help people get their work done. 

* Information management to ensure everything is accessible for people to do their jobs. 

I spoke with Avery Francis on the podcast about mental health for remote workers. How many current mental health issues are embedded in remote work versus caused by COVID? 

There are health risks - mental health, emotional health - that come along with working remotely. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates them. We’re at risk of feelings of invisibility or micromanagement or imposter syndrome. Or feeling very controlled by our leadership team. Or burnout. Or informational isolation. Or feeling disconnected from our job. 

When we’re in this exaggerated situation, all those problems become even more extreme. So people have to be hyper-aware and hyper-preventative of that isolation, burnout, and micromanagement, which means they need to be extremely proactive in self-awareness and thinking about “ok, do I have a problem? How am I doing today?”

Some ideas:

* Cutting off work at scheduled times. 

* Start work at scheduled times. 

* Reach out to a coworker. 

* Go for a run during lunch. 

The point of remote work is that it’s all about employee empowerment. It’s autonomy management, which means we’re in control. We don’t have to be supervised, which is a double-edged sword. On one side you get all this freedom, but on the other it’s up to you - if you’re feeling these problems of burnout or isolation, you’ve got to be willing to solve it. 

What steps can people take if they do a self-check in and things aren’t going well?

You’re learning about yourself. So for some people, that’s journaling. For some people it’s talking it out with a friend. Or talking to a therapist. Or taking a schedule of their day and collecting data about how you feel at different points of the day. 

However you get there, just get a point of clarity and be able to notice patterns.

Is remote work just an excuse for companies to make employees pay for things like rent and desks?

I always laugh at this conversation. For the past 10 years, employees have been begging their employees to please see the light about how much money you can save. And that productivity is going to increase and output will increase and retention is going to increase. And the employers wouldn’t even think of it. And now all of a sudden we have this global boom and everyone’s saying employers are just trying to take advantage. Will no one ever be satisfied? 

There are pros and cons to both. Companies will save tons of expenses, but now some other expenses they’d never even thought about in their budget, like increased travel or home office stipends or coworking memberships… now they have to compensate for those. 

There is no right way to do remote work. It’s however you want to leverage this as a strategy in order to optimize operations or retain employees or access a greater talent pool. It’s up to you. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Laurel Farrer on LinkedIn. You can also check out Distribute Consulting and the Remote Work Association.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…

Sharon Koifman has been running businesses remotely for 18 years, and now he helps companies around the globe hire full-time remote workers with his agency DistantJob. He’s also publishing a book, Surviving Remote Work, all about how to become the best possible remote employee (or manager). In our interview, Sharon shared a couple lessons he learned the hard way - namely, why CEOs should never try to be their company’s social centre. 

The perils of CEO-driven company socializing

→ When Sharon first started DistantJob, he went remote as a matter of cost: no office expenses and geographic arbitrage on salaries. This was also the value he thought he was offering to clients - a cheap talent solution. 

→ He soon realized the paradox that if you see humans as simply outsourced cheap labor, they won’t perform as well for you. He switched his mentality - and DistantJob’s work - to focus on placing full-time remote employees. 

→ As a result, he immediately tried to become what he called the “social centre” of the company. He’d bring everyone together for Zoom happy hours and crack jokes. The feedback was dismal: no one was having fun. 

Remaking socializing for remote work

→ After collecting feedback from employees, two themes emerged: they didn’t like that Sharon was driving all the company social activities and they didn’t like being forced into big digital groups. Both resulted in feelings of disengagement. 

→ As a result, the company revamped how it socialized: 

* The company uses Donut, a Slack app to match people for 1-1 coffee chats. 

* Further leveraging Slack, there are different channels for different kinds of socializing and fun, so people can pop into the “rooms” they are interested in - food, board games, etc. 

* The company is “99.999%” remote, but will occasionally get together around conferences (back when that was possible) - this allowed the team to socialize at night but also learn and connect with the latest industry trends during the day. 

The final word

“When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals … you can really get to know them.”

Image courtesy DistantJob

Remotely Inclined Chats with Sharon Koifman

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Sharon! Can you share how you got into remote work and what your company DistantJob is all about?

Sharon: I’ve been running businesses from my computer for about 18 years. I started off running a web hosting company - and I’d even started a company before that where I was trying to create one of the first music distribution sites, though unlike Napster it would all be legal. 

I didn’t really have money. So when I decided to find myself, I was sharing my hosting account with a few colleagues of mine and charging them. Next thing you know, we had about 3,000 clients and that music site never came to be. 

So hosting became my first company. We had offices in India. Had our servers originally in Texas then moved to New Jersey. I was sitting by myself running this entire operation. I realized my dad inspired me a lot because he ran an engineering firm. He would do the design of the machine on AutoCAD, on his computer by himself. The machine shop would make the components, someone else would ship it to the client… again, it was all remote. 

Then came DistantJob. The original concept came to me from the first business - when you have an office in India, you have to do some outsourcing. It’s unavoidable. But for me that was like a business sin. You’re getting paid for the way you’re doing things, your processes, and your methodology. But then you take everything you claim you have and you give it to a company which you have no control over. You don’t know their processes. You don’t know if the results will come in the way you want. It was pretty shocking for me. I didn’t understand why you couldn’t just hire somebody that will work on your processes and build your culture. 

After I sold my hosting company, I realized the need for full-time, permanent, career-driven, focused individuals that are working internationally and remotely. You still have this massive advantage of going to the world and finding amazing talent, but back in those days for some reason people felt the only way to hire individuals was through outsourcing. 

You’ve mentioned before that it’s not just about hiring someone, but actually helping them build digital relationships (colleagues and friends). How do you do that at DistantJob?

I came into DistantJob with the original focus of making a cheap solution. Then I realized that wouldn’t work - the world was too big. My mentality initially was that remote workers were less efficient, but then I realized they could be more efficient if you manage them.

Now, the way I approach it is to start with all the positive things about the office and see if I could replicate them. So instead of hanging out in person, turn on the video camera. Then you can start to know people on a personal level - getting to know their hobbies and such. 

At DistantJob, we have a lot of Slack channels for different hobbies. We’re a big fan of food, nerdy stuff like video games and board games, and we have channels to joke around in. 

You found virtual happy hours didn’t work - what happened? What do you do instead?

I remember my director coming to me and saying “I hear that people are not happy or having much fun.” I realized also that I was busy talking and doing all the entertainment. I was literally trying to entertain my team, make jokes, hang out, and be the social centre. 

You slowly see that even though managers got the hint and tried very hard, it didn’t move the conversation along much. I’ve since had a much better experience one on one - intimate conversations. We still have drinks with one another, but now it’s two or three people and it works so much better. 

I think this is reflective of meeting culture completely. When you have too many people in a physical or zoom meeting, the majority of people don’t get invested in that meeting. But when you have one, two, or three individuals, you can really get to know them. 

We also use Donut on Slack, an app that randomly matches you with someone for one-on-one conversations for 15 minutes. That gets better results than a big happy hour experience. 

We’re also completely remote. Once in a blue moon I’ll hang out with my managers, but that’s a big project and it means a big investment on flights in. We usually do it around conferences, so it’s an opportunity to see the market while taking the evenings to hang out. But 99.999% of what we do is remote. 

In the remote world, there’s a huge conversation about pay vs. geography. What’s your opinion?

This is a very conflicting discussion because I’m a little bit on both directions at this moment. I pay what I can afford to, but I am a big fan of the geographic arbitrage solution on an ethical side, surprisingly. Take for example India. They’re known for outsourcing (the grandparent of the remote job experience). 

One of the biggest things that you’d outsource to India or the Philippines was a call centre. You’d go there because it was cheap. But the jobs you brought helped the economies evolve, and now a call centre is only 15% cheaper there than it is in the United States. As a result, some jobs are coming back to the United States. It’s crazy - give it 10 years to let those economies evolve and the jobs are coming back while you just created half a billion jobs somewhere else. 

Now, I don’t know about producing shoes in child labor camps in some backwards-ass countries. I’m very much pro building successful, intelligence-based jobs.

You’ve just written a book based on your 18 years of remote CEO experience! Tell me more about it. 

The book is called Surviving Remote Work - it’s all about getting people comfortable with (and not fearful of) managing remote employees. It’s about figuring out the optimal ways of success for remote employees and remote managers. And I hope I wrote it in a fun, easy to read way. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Sharon via email or pre-order his book on Amazon.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…

Techstars is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world, with hubs in over 30 cities, spanning over 10 countries around the world. But in 2017, the accelerator launched Techstars Anywhere, a program for people who can’t - or shouldn’t - relocate for an accelerator. With COVID, the whole startup ecosystem went remote, but Techstars Anywhere was able to continue operating and support all other Techstars accelerators with its experience and knowledge. 

In today’s chat, Ryan Kuder - the Managing Director of Techstars Anywhere - shared the biggest challenge he’s seen on remote teams, the secret to getting into Techstars, and why Techstars Anywhere is all-in on remote work.

The biggest challenge of remote teams

→ Whether hybrid or all-remote, Ryan observed teams struggling with intentional communication. It’s not just that you can’t read body language, but each act of communicating requires the intention to act. It’s a weird thing initially for people who are so used to sitting in an office and passively recognizing opportunities to communicate. 

→ The solution that Ryan shares with Techstars founders is two fold: 

*  Plan channels for emotions, problems, and specific issues to rise to the surface. Because you can’t see things in person, the different channels (i.e. “Client issues.” “Stuck on a problem.” etc.) make those challenges visible again.

* Set the tone as the founder, actively leveraging the channels as you want employees to leverage them. Encourage people to use the systems in place so that they become habit. 

Techstars Anywhere: the secret to getting in

→ Techstars is sector and stage agnostic, meaning a brand new startup might be in the program with a multi-million dollar scaling company. This is because Techstars chooses to focus on inflection points in companies. 

→ Ryan said the inflection points he looks for are: 

* Companies that are getting ready to launch once they’ve built a product.

* Companies getting ready to fundraise, whether a first round or a subsequent round. 

* Companies getting ready for scaling and fast growth. 

→ From there, Ryan said the companies that are successful at getting into Techstars all have both a vision for the future of the world and a clear understanding of how their company fits into that new world. Then comes the traditional team assessment, skills assessment, and other common elements of getting into a startup accelerator. 

From remote companies to empowering remote work

→ In the first cohorts of Techstars Anywhere, the accelerator wanted any kind of company. The issue wasn’t whether you were remote or not, simply that relocating for an accelerator didn’t make sense. For example: one of the first Techstars Anywhere companies was an organic mushroom farm in Brooklyn, NY.

→ Ryan and Techstars have a vision that remote work will become significantly more accelerated due to COVID (something we agree on!), and as a result tons of industries will change, both in terms of how we work but also how we live and travel. 

→ In response to COVID and the changing world of remote work, Ryan and the Techstars team are making a big bet with Techstars Anywhere, focusing the accelerator on the future of work and startups tackling the impacts of remote work.

The final word

Techstars applications are open. The accelerator is looking for companies at the point of evolution - product to revenue, revenue to growth, etc. 

Remotely Inclined Chats with Ryan Kuder

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Ryan! When we chatted, you said Techstars Anywhere isn’t a remote version of Techstars, but a whole new, remote accelerator experience. What do you mean by that?

Ryan: We’re all thinking about how to build remote experiences for our employees - especially over the last six months. The first step people take is usually to do what they’ve always done, but now on zoom. Everything kind of stays the same - but you wind up with some dissonance in that experience. 

So the way we’ve thought about Techstars Anywhere is we’ve got objectives for our founders. We want them to become great storytellers. We want them to build a fantastic network. We want them to be able to raise money. We want them to understand the levers and metrics that drive their business. And we want them to be able to understand the rhythms and cadences for their companies. 

We used our decade of experience that we had running Techstars accelerators as the starting off point then thought, given these objectives, what are the changes we need to make? It’s been an evolving process since our first remote accelerator back in 2017, which had a hypothesis of a hybrid model - it’s a little bit of time together in person, a little bit of time working remotely with the objective being to create an experience that was going to get that full value of a Techstars accelerator experience.

Which elements of the accelerator are all-remote versus which are in-person?

So much of what we do is building relationships. And there’s just something about breaking bread or having a drink - or even just sitting with somebody looking out over the ocean. In normal times (non-covid), it’s an experience that combines three in person gatherings with five week sections of remote work. 

When we’re in person, we’re focused on deep dives into particular topics and focused on relationship building. We’re focused on building out the network with our mentors. And then when we are in our remote periods, we’re focused on the meetings, execution, and building of the companies. In-person sessions are spread out evenly throughout the program so that we’re constantly getting back and forth. 

One of the great things about the Techstars network is that with all current Techstars accelerators running remotely, we’ve been able to try out of a lot of things and been able to focus on what it’s like to build experiences for founders that are delivered first and foremost, remotely. 

What’s been the biggest change or evolution in your process with Techstars Anywhere (barring COVID, which of course forced lots of change)?

There have been a lot, to be honest with you. Like a startup founder, one of the things we’re constantly figuring out is how do we continuously build better experiences for our constituents - founders, mentors, and investors.

The way we’ve gone about it is thinking about three experiences and figuring out the opportunities for us to create and opportunities for those to overlap. Each of the four programs we’ve put in different things, set up different kinds of meetings, structured interactions differently, and created more opportunities for connections. It’s  focused on creating community that involves not just the founders in the accelerator but also all the alumni and mentors and investors attached to the program. 

Can you share an example of how you structured your virtual experiences?

I believe that great remote work is not exclusively remote. When we think about how people develop relationships, there’s a ton of value that comes from hybrid things. 

At Techstars anywhere, we spend the first two weeks really understanding our business. Week one is a qualitative look at the business. Where are we as entrepreneurs? What are the businesses we want to build? Who are our customers? What are they buying from us and why? In week two we look at quantitative parts of the business: revenue, financial models, KPIs, and target setting. 

For the remainder of the program, companies work through meetings with mentors on their KPIs and understanding the challenges that companies are facing. Midway through the program, we get together and start to talk about storytelling, fundraising, and figuring out the best financing strategy for the business. 

We don’t have a traditional demo day - we do it online, and have been doing online demo days since 2017. We’ve been playing with the format to get the right audience to the right founders. We’re really focused on a few questions: What are we doing after this is over? How does everybody go home? What kind of continuity do we keep? When the program is over, the Techstars experience is really just beginning.

What have been the biggest stumbling blocks administering a remote accelerator?

One of the biggest challenges is having a comprehensive understanding of everything that’s going on. With the shift from co-located to remote work, we lose the ability to see people. You don’t know when to tap somebody on the shoulder and say ‘let’s grab a cup of coffee and talk through whatever’s going on’.

One of the most important things I can do is to approach every day with intentionality. We need to ensure we’re communicating the things we need to and that we are checking in with people on a regular cadence. If folks are struggling with a task or job or customer, create channels that allow that to surface so we can see what’s happening around us without necessarily being able to see it visually. That requires everybody to buy into the systems that are put in place in order to allow those things to surface. 

How do you make sure you’re in a good spot as a leader to be intentional with communications?

It’s important that your company develop the culture that’s right for it. There isn’t any kind of culture that fits everybody. When you think about your own remote policies and remote styles, the most important thing is that founders recognize for themselves where they want to be. Some founders will be overly transparent. Some will tend to be more reserved. 

The big part is how you set the tone of the types of things we share and talk about as a community. That becomes something reinforced by behaviors. 

The accelerator is now beginning to focus on startups that support the future of work. What prompted the shift?

Our first class was really focused on how we create a great experience for founders who can’t or shouldn’t relocate for an accelerator. But Techstars is a largely remote company ourselves and we started to see the changes that happen in work firsthand. 

With covid, we went from slow roll adoption to overnight nearly 100% adoption where it can happen. Our hypothesis is that this will come back down a little bit but is still a step function above where it used to be. We’ll see this adoption of more flexible work-from-anywhere policies, where it’s home, the office, or a coffee shop or coworking space. We believe that will have big, lasting, fundamental changes not only in how we work but in how we live. So we’re interested in founders that are looking at these types of impacts.

When a person’s office does not dictate where they live, all kinds of things change: neighbourhoods, transportation, entertainment, travel, etc. There are all these downstream effects.

What kinds of companies are you looking for with the new cohort of Techstars Anywhere?

We have applications open for seven or eight Techstars Accelerators, including Techstars Anywhere, most of which will be running at least partially remotely. We’re not 100% sure what that will look like moving forward. 

For Techstars Anywhere, when we think about the founders that are a great fit, it’s people who have a vision about the way the world should look and what their company is in it. They’ve got an ability to share that story and get people on board. They’ve got all of the technical and functional skills necessary to get to whatever the next stage is. And we also look at the market people are working in, the progress they’ve made, and the idea they are working on.

It’s about companies entering inflection points. Around launch. Around a fundraising round. Around growth. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Ryan on Twitter and via Techstars’ website.

Image courtesy Techstars

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…

Today: I’m responding to two viral articles about remote work on today’s podcast. The long and short of it? I’m skeptical. 

Ok, so two articles went mega-viral this week in the remote work blogosphere: 

* Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy

* Working from ‘anywhere’ is possible—but not sustainable

From a media perspective, I have to hand it to them. Salacious headlines. Very “anti.” It’s got punch, facts, scary futures… it’s a delight. A great story. Which is exactly why I eye-rolled at the titles. However, I was also intrigued and curious. So I read both articles - here are my thoughts. 

Are we in for a crash - or a call to creativity?

The article on how a trillion-dollar economy is dying because it was very tied to the office ecosystem is real, and it’s scary. White collar workers and business travellers are the dominant spending category for a huge swath of the economy: 

* Hotels.

* Airlines / air travel.

* Food delivery.

* Restaurants and cafes.

* Office-adjacent businesses like dry cleaners, shoe shiners, and suit stores.

* Office furniture, technology, and supply stores.

But, as author Steve LeVine suggests, the bigger fear is not necessarily the primary loss (even though that alone is tens of thousands of jobs), it’s the next-step loss caused by city dwellers fleeing the city. If too many people leave the city, even further carnage could result in terms of commercial downtowns falling apart, losing jobs, and more. 

The logic is all there. And we’ve already seen a huge loss due to COVID, but I worry that the fears might be overstated. 

Here’s what I see instead: a call to creativity. 

Rents falling in major cities could result in a huge spike in small-time entrepreneurship: the cute cafes, shops, and restaurants that could never afford city rents. Further, people leaving could ultimately be nothing. What’s 50,000 people leaving in a city of millions? A painful blip, but little else. There’s real potential damage from the idea that more people might choose not to move to cities from small towns, and that could cause some city damage. However, doesn’t it kind of suck that our current model of city living is “it sucks, but you have to”? We can do better. 

Who isn’t able to afford the city right now that could soon? Photo via Unsplash.

Remote work is giving people the opportunity to live where they want - and it might even make cities more affordable. Just as thousands of people are taking their remote jobs and buying old houses, there are people who have always dreamed of living in the city (or just love cities) and now it’s affordable for them. I think the only people that will truly fail in this shift are the ones that built on the idea of guaranteed demand. If anything, we might see new developments building actual homes in cities (or “home in the sky” condos) at affordable rates, instead of shoeboxes we cram into because the only good jobs are here. 

Innovation has a remote work problem

In the article that remote work isn’t sustainable, Professor Hyejin Youn’s main point is that remote work cannot produce the same levels of innovation that central HQs in large cities can. 

So, right off the bat: this article is not about remote work, it’s about innovation and what kinds of environments foster it. The remote work connection is interesting and topical, but this article is not analyzing what remote work is or can do. Simply suggesting that remote work and innovation are not compatible. 

From there, the Professor Youn - a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, walks through his primary arguments: 

* Big cities are hubs of innovation because of their diversity. 

* Remote work is great for productivity, but not innovation. 

Ultimately, he drew the conclusion that if a company wants to be innovative, it needs to have an HQ in an innovation-breeding city, which he says starts around one million people. There’s a grave message to “think twice” before going to cities under one million, and suggests that municipal leaders need to create policies and infrastructure to attract “cognitive labor” (aka knowledge workers) - something we completely agree on.

Where I disagree with Professor Youn is the implication that you can only get diversity from large cities. Sure, cities might bring the diversity to you, but distributed and remote teams are possibly the best cross-section of global diversity available to the working world… if you build it that way. Yes, you can work remotely with all your bros from college, but you can also work remotely with brilliant minds living in different cities, countries, and circumstances. That’s a heck of a lot of diversity. 

We need to build innovation systems for remote work. Image via Unsplash.

The concept of remote being great for productivity but not innovation is one I have a hard time disagreeing with. However, what I’ve seen and learned from my interviews with remote entrepreneurs is that the new crop of innovators is not trying to take office-innovation virtual, they are looking at the strengths of remote work and building new models of innovation. For example, Shelly Spiegel focuses heavily on her remote culture. Melissa Kargiannakis leans into short meetings with ample additional communication opportunities. Floyd Marinescu focuses on reducing cognitive load to make innovation easier. This isn’t to say it’s a silver bullet - just that innovation is not a one-legged beast.

PS - liking these articles? Share them with a friend!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…

Today: I interviewed Job (pronounced “Yop”), the founder of Remote.com. He shared his views on how to build a strong remote company - and what remote work advocates mess up on.

There are laws, admin work, and a lot of planning that goes into making a job offer. Double (or triple) this amount of work if you want to hire an employee that isn’t in your home country. With the rise of remote work, this will be a key challenge for distributed companies in the future - and it’s a problem that Job van der Voort is solving with his company, Remote.com, a platform that handles all backend administration for hiring employees around the world. 

In our interview, Job shared his experiences on how to onboard new employees remotely, why a day of zoom calls is the wrong day to succeed in remote work, and what remote work advocates get wrong about the future of work.

Onboarding the right way

→ In Job’s experience with Remote and GitLab, good remote onboarding is a function of three things: 

* Communication.

* Documentation. 

* Welcoming. 

→ Communication should be frequent and try to answer every question before it’s asked. Companies should provide all standard messaging and go further to ensure that they are answering every anticipated remote-work related question. All of this should be documented and made readily available for new employees. 

→ When it comes to being welcoming, Job means helping new employees build their network within the organization. Professionally speaking, this takes the shape of encouraging coffee calls with either the whole organization (in small businesses) or the person’s new team (in big companies). Outside of the professional realm, this is also about creating social opportunities.

→ At Remote, for instance, they have a question of the day where everyone answers in a thread. These questions are meant to be philosophical or just fun (for instance “What’s the best food you’ve ever eaten?”), but never about work. 

A day of zoom calls is a day wasted

→ Job is a huge fan of asynchronous communication, and says it should be the default in every remote organization. If you’ve filled your days with zoom calls, “you’re doing it wrong,” since that will lead to the lowest levels of productivity. 

→ To get better at asynchronous communication, Job advocates a standard framework in the organization of what kinds of communication go on which platforms. (This is very similar to the “communications triage” framework advocated by Floyd Marinescu in our interview).

The power of human connection in remote work

→ While asynchronous communication should absolutely be the default in remote companies, there are clear exceptions to the rule for Job: 

* The moment when you have too many back-and-forths. 

* Anything social or with the purpose to help people bond.

* Creative sessions and brainstorming. 

* Just wanting to work together. 

→ The last bullet - just wanting to work together - is a critical one. This is the area Job says remote work advocates often get wrong. Promoting asynchronous communication and remote working arrangements should never imply that human connection isn’t important or desirable. 

The final word

“I think the biggest mistake in remote work advocates can make is to deny the value of being together in person.”

Remotely Inclined Chats with Job van der Voort

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Job! To start, can you explain your role as CEO of Remote.com?

Job: I founded the company along with my co-founder, who is the CTO. It’s my job to make sure that we execute and operate well. I started Remote.com after experiencing the struggles of international hiring when I left my previous employer. 

We founded Remote to solve what we believe is one of the biggest challenges when you want to build a distributed teams - when you hire someone in another country, you have to pay them, be compliant with local labor laws, and provide benefits. Remote has its own global infrastructure, meaning we have an entity in each country in which we operate. Through those entities, we can employ people for you. We act as the employer of record. 

In practice, let’s say you want to hire Jane from Portugal. You come to us - within a day we can onboard Jane. We give her employment agreements, any benefits you would want to offer, and we invoice you as the employer each month, but you just treat Jane like any other employee. For Jane, she gets a local payslip, benefits, and everything else she would expect from local employment. 

Do you only support full time employment or also contractors, consultants, and other forms of work?

Most of our clients have a number of contractors working for them. They start paying them through our platform, which we allow them to do for free. Once they feel it’s necessary to convert those contractors to employees, they can easily do that through our platform as well. 

What’s your advice or process for onboarding employees you’ve never met before? Any examples to share?

The important thing is that you communicate a lot, especially early on to create many moments of interaction and communication - and not just between managers and a new hire, but within the whole organization. 

You don’t get any accidental interactions when working remotely, so you have to force it. For onboarding, that’s where it starts - literally just have a call with each other. Make sure there are plenty of ways to talk with each other. 

Then make sure all information they might need is well documented and they could easily find it themselves.

But the most important part of this is that you should spend time thinking about how to make people feel welcome and comfortable in a new situation. When you do things in person, we have social standards. We have social scripts that we can follow to make sure someone is comfortable. When you’re remote, those aren’t established. You have to spend time thinking about making someone feel welcome. Once someone is onboarded, ask for feedback and let people tell you exactly how they feel.

For example, we encourage people to set up coffee calls with almost everyone else in the organization. Of course it depends on the size of the organization, but at least encourage people to have coffee calls with every single person on their team so they get a bit of a network established throughout the day.

Beyond that, the most important thing is to have many moments of interaction that are not about work. On our team, we play a lot of games together. We have a Minecraft server at the company. We play Pictionary together. We share news with the team. We have a question of the day, for instance “What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?”

What’s the best balance of asynchronous versus real-time communication?

This work should by default be asynchronous. It helps a lot to establish standards around what communication happens where. Slack doesn’t really encourage asynchronous communication, whereas other platforms (we use GitLab, for instance) helps a lot with asynchronous communication because it doesn’t feel like a chat. 

But there are very clear exceptions. 

* The moment when you have too many back-and-forths. 

* Anything social or with the purpose to help people bond.

* Creative sessions and brainstorming. 

* Just wanting to work together. 

I think the biggest mistake in remote work advocates can make is to deny the value of being together in person or doing synchronous work.

Changing gears, should remote teams care about data security more than in-office companies?

I used to work in an office building software for government, so it has to be highly secure. What we did there is if you walked away from your computer and left it unlocked, people would run a script on your computer to set your wallpaper to something ridiculous. It’s to make fun of you but also show you that you left your machine unattended and you run the risk of someone walking in and doing something with your data. 

When you run a distributed company, you can’t do this. So you have to create a strong culture around security awareness. There are some basic things you can do. It starts with educating people and giving people great hardware and software. 

I’m not a fan of bring your own device. I feel like that’s mostly a cost-cutting measure for organizations. Everyone at Remote gets a Macbook Pro, it’s very simple. The hard drive is encrypted by default and has good security practices. And then we know exactly what can be ran there and what people run over there. 

We also manage our passwords through password managers, which is one of those simple facts that makes your life a lot easier when it comes to security. 

Your culture of awareness needs to make people think about what it means to be secure and what you can do to prevent others from messing with your data. For Remote, we handle a lot of personal information. What we did is created extremely limited access to essentially everything. Even as CEO of the company, I cannot access our customers’ data in any way, and everybody in the organization is very clear on that. The way we built our software is that if you as an employer or employee were to revoke access or delete something, it would be unrecoverable for us. 

What’s your advice for folks who want to stay remote post-COVID?

The best thing you can do is treat your organization as one of your products. Review it and try to improve it - and never stop trying to improve it. You do so iteratively because there are no hard and fast rules and how to make remote organizations work. There are just a handful of examples. You really have to invent much of it yourself. 

There are many challenges of working together in an office, but we’ve been facing them for one hundred-plus years. Whereas the problems of working remotely we’ve been facing for maybe the last five years or do. 

Also: I would tell every leader that if almost every day is full of meetings or zoom calls, you’re doing it wrong. That is not necessary. The only way you can work effectively is by working asynchronously more and adopting modern tools. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get in touch with Job on Twitter or check out Remote’s website.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit remotelyinclined.substack.com

Hi,

Welcome to Remotely Inclined, a newsletter about running a business remotely. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Want to share your feedback? Respond to this email (or send me one). Or just read on…

Today: We’re talking about the next generation of remote entrepreneurs - and how BETA Camp is helping them launch their businesses.

Yifan Zhou and Ivy Xu met in middle school and became friends, but went their separate ways after college - Yifan to Bain & Company and Ivy to Silicon Valley. Years later, the two reconnected and realized all of the things they wished they’d learned in high school about entrepreneurship, strategy, and business. High school business classes in Ottawa just didn’t cut it. So the two founded BETA Camp, an immersive camp for high school students to teach them how to start a business - then help them actually do it. 

In this conversation, Yifan and Ivy shared the BETA Camp founding story, the curriculum students learn at the camp, and their thoughts on the future of remote entrepreneurship. 

Seeing an opportunity

→ Yifan and Ivy reconnected in late 2019, shortly after Yifan finished her MBA at Wharton and Ivy had left her Silicon Valley job to interview tech entrepreneurs around the world. The two reminisced about high school and all the learnings they wished they got as teenagers. 

→ With that passion - and realizing that no such camps existed in Canada (and their American counterparts were cancelled due to COVID in early 2020) - the two saw an opportunity to launch BETA Camp as a virtual, six week summer camp. 

From nothing to business

→ Weeks 1 and 2 focus on business fundamentals: Strategy, the Four P’s of Marketing, Porter’s Five Forces, and other foundational knowledge. 

→ Week 3 is all about customer discovery and product market fit. 

→ Weeks 4 through 6 focus on taking customer lessons from Week 3 and creating a real, thriving remote startup. Each week features lectures, team discussion and activities, and talks from successful founders about the startup building journey. 

The new crop of remote (teen) entrepreneurs

Now in Week 5 of 6, the program is already churning out viable businesses led by teens: 

* A business teaching teachers how to use more state of the art technologies for more collaborative classrooms. 

* A fitness accountability and accessibility app in Slack. 

* A new Slack plugin. 

* A UV light box that will kill germs in your garage. 

Tools mentioned in this episode:

* Miro

* Mural

* Zapier

The final word

“The future looks remote to us.”

If you’re thinking of freelancing - or side-hustling, launching an ecommerce store, or something else entrepreneurial - check out #5to9Conf.

I’ll be speaking about building an inbound client funnel, and other speakers are covering everything from community building to building new products.

Remotely Inclined Chats with Yifan Zhou and Ivy Xu

Transcript edited for brevity and clarity.

Stefan: Welcome, Yifan and Ivy! Can you share what BETA Camp does?

Yifan: BETA Camp started out just this summer because of the pandemic - we knew there were going to be a lot of high school students at home without something impactful for the summer. So we started a six-week immersive virtual summer camp focused on enabling the next generation of leaders, whether they want to be entrepreneurs, tech innovators, or business leaders. 

The BETA Camp program has lectures from industry professionals on topics around building a business: intro to business, user design, scaling, to growth. They see the whole spectrum and then actually apply it to their own startups. Throughout the six weeks, they have the opportunity to work in teams and build a startup from the ground up. 

Was this going to be remote anyway, or was that in response to COVID?

Ivy: I’ve always been interested in helping high school students broaden their perspectives. Both of us grew up in Ottawa and we didn’t see many opportunities. After going to Queens University for a bachelor of commerce, I ended up moving to Silicon Valley and seeing the ambitious entrepreneurs, the startups, and the scale of things. It really broadened my perspectives on what I can do with my career - it’s something I wish I’d seen earlier. 

Yifan and I met in middle school, but then went our separate ways after university. But there was this unique time - back in 2018, I quit my job and travelled for a year, interviewing tech leaders all over the world. In 2019, Yifan had just finished her MBA at Wharton. So it was time when we both didn’t have that much on our plates and so we could start something. That’s when we thought of BETA Camp in the spring. 

Both of us being from Canada, we realized that there weren’t many competitive and immersive programs in the business, tech, and entrepreneurial space here. So there was a market gap. There are plenty in the US, but a lot of them were not running during the summer and now so many got cancelled due to COVID. So we saw this opportunity to provide this experience - and we think we can do it well with counselors that we can bring in. It really highlights the strength of a virtual program, since we can allow students to learn from the best of the best, no matter where the counselor is anywhere in the world. 

How did you develop the curriculum? What’s included?

Yifan: When we came up with the curriculum, it was asking what we would have wanted to know in high school. 

Week one is very introductory - intro to business and entrepreneurship. 

Week two is business fundamentals. Thinking about strategy, the Four P’s of marketing, and Porter’s Five Forces. That kind of traditional business stuff. 

Week three is product-market fit and customer research. Basically: finding a problem and finding out the pain points of your customers and designing something they actually want. 

Weeks four, five, and six is developing that product and growing it. Think about scaling, sales, marketing, etc. 

We have lectures and bring in amazing camp counselors from all over the world, and they are generally an hour and a half. There’s some theory, but then immediately live activities. It creates this MBA program atmosphere when you think about cases and having discussions. 

Then there’s Founder Fireside chats, where we bring in founders to talk about their journey and students can ask whatever questions they want. One amazing founder I want to highlight is a highschool student who built a business - and I think the students could really relate to how you establish the ability to start a business as a high school student. 

From there we have Future Fridays, which talks about what the future could look like. We’ll have someone with an MD, JD, MBA, or PhD talk about what that looks like from their perspective. Or a digital nomad talking about not having a permanent place to stay and how they deal with that. 

Should everyone start their businesses remotely?

Ivy: I believe the future is moving more and more towards being remote. As for BETA Camp, the future looks remote to us. We’re going to stay a remote program just because of the broader horizons and the skills that we want to teach at BETA Camp. 

In 10 years, by the time Campers join the workforce, they’ll most likely have the option of joining a remote team. Something I want to highlight is the skills we teach is how to communicate remotely - our teams are located all across North America. And then they come together and are using some of the best tools out there like Miro, Mural, or building integrations with Zapier. These are the tools used by remote teams. 

Do you work with universities? How can parents get involved?

We haven’t really done university partnerships. Unlike some other programs, we’re not a recruiting channel for these universities. But we’ve found amazing camp counselors from universities like Stanford, Wharton, MIT, etc. and also from some amazing companies. 

On the parent side, it’s fantastic to see some of them - some of our campers have parents who are very entrepreneurial. It’s great for an entrepreneurial parent to guide their child, but also BETA Camp is a great opportunity for those students to meet other students with a similar passion for producing what’s going to be valuable in the world. 

As we record this, you’re in week 5 of 6 - how are things going? What’s next?

Ivy: It’s really not even a six week program to build a startup, since the first two weeks are introduction and strategy. Looking back, all the skills and new tools they know is great. 

* We have a team starting a business teaching teachers how to use more state of the art technologies for more collaborative classrooms. 

* We have another team building fitness accountability and accessibility app in Slack. 

* Another is building a Slack plugin. 

* Then one team is building a UV light box that will kill germs in your garage. 

It’s all across the spectrum. With today’s systems - and we teach them about integrations with no-code - everyone could operate remotely. 

It’s one of the most rewarding things for me is seeing the real projects with validated markets - it’s unparalleled learning for these students to apply what they learn and feel how hard it really is to get customers and think about backend operations. 

Next is we’re launching a Fall 2020 program that’s going to be 12 weeks instead of just six, from September to December. It’s going to have the best parts of summer based on feedback from students, just pushed out over 12 weeks. 

Running parallel to school, we hope they’ll be able to achieve at least the same, if not more results by the end of 12 weeks. 

Amazing, thank you for your insights!

You can get learn more about BETA Camp on their website or Instagram.

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