Did you switch to remote or start out that way?
AirTreks
AirTreks is a 30-year-old company that at one time received Silicon Valley funding and had a big office in downtown San Francisco. We worked from an expensive office for 25 years. Our sales team always had some remote workers.
We got to see how remote working technology has improved from the “front lines”—I’m remembering days circa 2005 configuring servers and setting up VPNs to link our remote team into our phone and customer management systems. Now, it’s easier than it ever has been to work from anywhere.
We made the switch to 100 percent remote work with a formal transition plan for closing our office.
American Express
At American Express, we’ve been serving customers for more than 165 years. As the environment and our own business have evolved, we’ve been receptive to new ways we could deliver our customers the superior service they’ve come to expect from American Express. While American Express has had a number of virtual roles for some time, our focused effort to expand the remote telephone servicing team began about a half decade ago.
Answer Connect
We like to say we started in a garage and have now happily returned to one, thanks to remote working. Twenty years ago, our co-founders built a long distance telephone carrier up from scratch. As new technologies made long distance a thing of the past, we transitioned into a live answering service, still based in our CEO’s garage. We grew from there into a traditional call center, with hundreds of employees in one large building. This model limited us in terms of space, talent pool, and imagination.
As a company, we believe in small experiments. So our first foray into remote working didn’t take us far—just across the street to the vacant space above a dry cleaner. We set up some computers there and began testing to ensure we could deliver the same standard of service from a “remote” location. When we got it working, we sent our customer experience associates home to take our clients’ calls over the Internet, and we’ve never looked back. That change reduced our square footage radically, while keeping employment even.
Last year, we downsized our office space again, trading in a space we loved but that was really bigger than we needed from 7,527 to an office across the hall that is just 725 square feet. The roll-up door makes us feel right at home, and we have just enough space for some of our leadership and other local employees to work one day a week in the office—if they want to. The rest of our hundreds of employees work out of their homes in five states, with a sixth on the way.
AnswerFirst
When our client base continued to grow the need [to switch remote] became necessary. We had limited capacity in our building, limited parking, and an immediate need for more employees. We started with just employees that had a long commute and preferred to work remote.
Appirio
Appirio started out as a remote company. We had a headquarters in San Francisco where local team members could work from the office, but those located in other locations were able to work remotely. Furthermore, those local to the San Francisco office would also have the flexibility to work from home for part of their week.
Beutler Ink
We did start out as a distributed team, but several of our team members joined from companies with offices. Switching them over to remote working was pretty straightforward: setting them up with the software they needed and making sure they had appropriate technology in their homes (good Internet connection is a must!).
Big Universe, Inc.
We started out working from home in our initial years, then got an office for just over a year but weren’t really using it much. In 2011, we made a decision to go 100% virtual. However, just before committing to it, I consulted with some folks at Automattic and other startups, read up on companies such as MySQL and others, on how they were operating remotely. After this, I knew we could scale the company as a 100% virtual company and have never looked back since.
Buffer
We did start out remote, although it originally happened accidentally. In December 2011 our founders raised an angel funding round of $400,000. At the same time though, their visas to be in the U.S. expired and so they left for Hong Kong. In the midst of their travels, they were excited to grow the Buffer team and hired people that felt like a good culture fit, without minding what part of the world they were in. The team started growing in Nashville, London, and other places, while the founders continued to travel. At one point there was the chance for the whole team to work from San Francisco, but our CEO Joel decided to keep the company 100% remote in order to encourage teammates to live and work from wherever they felt the happiest and most productive.
Codebusters, Inc.
No, we started with an office in downtown Santa Cruz. We decided to go remote because there was a decision to move the office, and because we saw that our industry was heading in this direction and we wanted to be more than ready for it.
Flex Professionals
We are remote natives. We started our business with very limited investment dollars, zero job seekers, and zero business clients. Remote was the way to go.
Fog Creek Software
No, we made the switch after 13 years. We made the transition initially to allow long time creekers to move away from New York, it was kind of our test to see if remote work worked for us. Then we began to hire remotely.
Goodway Group
Not at all. Goodway became a 98 percent virtual company in 2006, once we transitioned from being a traditional print marketing company to an entirely digital firm.
Greenback Expat Tax Services
From the very beginning, Greenback has been a 100% virtual company. We are all a highly energetic, positive, resourceful team working virtually across the globe. For our accountants, they have ultimate flexibility to decide where to work from and when to work. If they want to spend a tax season in their home office and in the slower season work a lighter load from Mexico or Bali or the coast of Spain, then great! Many on our accountant team does just that.
Hanno
We did–we’ve been 100% remote right from the start (although we considered being non-remote at one point in our history). I’m eternally thankful that we didn’t make that mistake–if we had, I’ve no doubt that myself and my whole team would have far less job satisfaction and the company would be much weaker.
Help Scout
Many of the earliest hires were together in Boston, but we quickly started growing our team outside of the home base. So, kinda-sorta.
Hippo Education
Started out remote mostly. At the beginning it was myself, my co-founder and one employee (Hi Tom!). We were bootstrapping to the highest degree. We had no office. And, nobody wanted to put any constraints on how anyone else worked. We were all already working triple time.
Inspired HR
We did not start as remote, rather we began in a very traditional office setting. We had an office in downtown Calgary in which we worked from daily. We did the switch based on our research and our client’s needs.
iTutorGroup
We started as a brick-and-mortar school, but our vision and mission led to the transformation of our entire business toward remote learning and remote work.
Jackson River
We started out as a virtual company with the intent to be virtual. We wanted to embrace modern technology that had never been created or offered before in our sector (specifically for nonprofit organizations and NGOs), but we also set out to experiment as a modern and innovative work environment.
Jungle Scout
Before Jungle Scout, I was able to replace my income with my ecommerce business, and my wife and I actually left the U.S. to travel the world. Then we started Jungle Scout and since we were already living the lifestyle, the business was developed to have a distributed team. It’s been the start of our culture from the beginning.
Kin HR
Our parent company We Are Mammoth started their operations in Chicago but with continuous growth, we decided to go remote and hire the best people around the nation.
Knobs.co
We started out working remotely.
komoot
We used to have an office when we were a very small team—we even cooked lunches together and were a very close knit team since the very beginning. People at komoot have always loved spending time outdoors and, in general, value flexibility in order to live the lifestyle they desire. We started to experiment with remote options and working from different places, and it worked just fine so we thought, why not go fully remote? And we never looked back.
OpenSnow
We started remote from day one.
Packlane
Once we had more than one person, we worked in a small office together for the first 2-3 months, and slowly transitioned to just working from home. At a certain point it just wasn’t necessary to be working in the same room, and everyone had a clear preference for their home office work environment over the shared office.
PeopleG2
PeopleG2 began as a typical “brick and mortar” company. We ensured all employees had a proper workstation in their home, provided a state of the art internet based system with which to perform the necessary tasks, and offered tips and continued follow up to ensure all employees were feeling successful in this new model.
RunRepeat
We started 100% remote from day one.
Sanborn
We’ve been around since 2004, so we didn’t start remote. And we’ve been a company that has relied heavily on collaboration from day one. A large portion of our work is bespoke, uncharted-waters type stuff, so communication and discussion are key. When the remote work tools evolved enough to make that level of discussion and collaboration possible, we made the switch.
Scrapinghub
We started remote and never looked back. It’s in our DNA. We could not run Scrapinghub otherwise.
SimpleTexting
We’ve used freelance remote workers almost from the beginning as hiring in NYC where we originally started was unaffordable for bootstrappers like us.
SitePen
SitePen’s deep involvement with the remotely-rooted open source community in addition to our CEO’s aversion to fluorescent lighting was what laid the foundation for SitePen’s preferred work environment. While having physical office space was attempted in the early days, the idea of going into the office never quite took off. It’s easy to see that SitePen’s organizational structure is wholly based on an open source software model – many individuals working remotely toward shared goals for the common good. Remote work is like breathing for us – it just is.
Skillcrush
Skillcrush has always had a fully remote team. When I founded Skillcrush, the idea of starting a remote company was really exciting because it allowed me to keep costs low while still being able to hire talented employees who were looking for flexible work!
Stack Overflow
The company started out entirely remote. Joel Spolsky was in NYC, Jeff Atwood was in California, and our first two developers Geoff Dalgas and Jarrod Dixon were in Oregon and North Carolina respectively.
Sticker Mule
We started out as a small team that was primarily focused on manufacturing. Our first hire in software development was in England and that went over incredibly well. A few months later, our customer service lead asked if he could relocate. Initially I was concerned but then we saw it as an opportunity to improve our processes so that we could support a remote customer service team.
We haven’t aggressively recruited until recently, but we’d often stumble across someone talented that we wanted on our team. These people were rarely local but it was usually obvious they’d make a great addition so we didn’t stress their location. After a while, it became commonplace for our team to be remote.
Summit CPA Group
We were a brick and mortar company for years. The switch was made starting at the top. Me and my partner Adam, started working remotely a couple of days a week so that we could determine what processes, software, etc needed to be put in place in order to make working remote a great experience for the team.
Taksa Technology Solutions
Started remote.
The Geller Law Group
I did not start out working remotely, I started out in a traditional law firm environment. After I had my son, I wanted to make a switch to a job that would permit me more work life balance. The remote work structure of the Geller Law Group permitted me that balance – the ability to be at home with my son during breakfast and dinner, catch up on work after normal work hours as needed, and not have to endure a painful commute wasting precious minutes in the car.
TNTP
I was one of TNTP’s first employees after its founding in 1997. We were virtual for some roles from the get-go, with CEO Michelle Rhee living in Ohio and other staff based in New York City, Maryland and Massachusetts. While I loved working from our central office in New York (both as an escape from my small city apartment and because it was fun to interact with all the staff who would come into town for meetings), I was also grateful for the flexibility that our virtual culture gave me when I decided I wanted to move closer to family. I now work from a home office in Cape Cod, where I can see the ocean every day and still make a difference for kids in cities across the country.
Toggl
We went remote about a year ago, and we put a lot of thinking into it. We laid out the pros and cons, talked to our team members and did some research. Once we started going remotely, we had a lot of questions about staying productive remotely, maintaining a company culture and managing a distributed team and we all learned together to make it work.
Trade Conductor
I have had offices for many years. But because I traveled more and more, it became clear that an office with no CEO is not good. So we went all remote. I see my team members 2-3 times a year. We use Skype, FaceTime, and mail. It is perfect and much more efficient.
Ultimate Software
We made the switch because one of my team members referred a friend to be hired on our team, and she happened to work in Orlando. We knew she was a rockstar, so it was worth it to make that change and hire a remote worker for our team.
Vork Inc
It started out as remote.
World Wide Web Hosting
Yes. We have been a fully remote company since our inception.
