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Comment by jeremiahlee | Hacker News Reader

$100M ARR and fully remote!

This is definitely worth highlighting. Why so many businesses are still deluding themselves into thinking that work is better done when cramming people into an office is beyond me. Remote work is still the minority. My hypothesis is that it's actually just covert ego/power/distrust at play because founders and executives like to be able to say they have an office, and they like to see their employees "working." This mostly only applies to "new" businesses though (i.e. founded in the last 5-10 years); older businesses have an excuse because they're just doing what they already know.

In any case, huge respect to InVision for being one of the leaders in advocating remote work.

I, for one, work non-remote because of the social factor. Being among people physically is awesome (for me). And there’s surely a lot of founders who prefer building up a company with an on-site social environment. A co-working space does not count, because of the lack of continuity with your surrounding peers (ie. no common projects that lead to ‘being together’), hence its much harder to establish long-term relationships.

Is there a company, equivalent (or larger) in size to InVision, that is an example of a remote work org.? $100M ARR isn't anything to scoff at, but I'm not sure InVision's success (so far) puts the nail in the coffin to the idea of a non-remote work org.

I'm young and still find it invaluable to be able to walk over to Jane in engineering or Bob in marketing to hash things out in-person.

Elastic (ESTC) is another example off the top of my head, and they're public.

GitLab is also a fully remote company.

That's right. You can read more about it at https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/. There you'll find how remote work is changing the workforce, how it changes the organization, advantages for employees and organizations and what did we learn about remote working.

Is inVision Opensource? How do they prevent source code leak if everyone works remotely?

Remote or not, you typically have to trust employees to not leak your source. Most SaaS companies don't have an issue with employees trying to sell trade secrets to competitors, so they don't need strict controls.

Code exfiltration for trusted employees is as easy as an SCP, an email, whatever. Very few companies have extreme controls around these sorts of thing.

That said, typically remote-only companies will send you a laptop specifically for work that they have control over.

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