Hacker News Reader

Comment by marmada | Hacker News Reader

How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful.

It reminds me of ML where the bottleneck is often the bandwith between the GPUs.

And as expected working side by side / living in the same house dramatically increased productivity. I couldn't imagine a remote employee being as motivated.

TL;DR -- startups need a certain workaholic mentality / intensity. In-person work can provide this.

In defense of remote: We didn't have a commute, which saved us at least 1.5 hours a day.

View on HN

I work at such a startup. We all live in different countries and different timezones. Everybody has a high level of autonomy and decision-making working on his own stuff. Most of product communication happens in comments on Jira and technical — in PR comments on Github, both of which are completely async. There's also Slack for some realtime interaction, but it's okay not to be online. At average, I'd say that I have one or two video calls a week, and I don't feel that I need more.

It's one of the most productive environments I had in my entire 15 year career.

I run a globally distributed startup - we still have very responsive communication but a) it’s not everyone on the team that’s a workaholic since not everyone prefers to be always “on” like that, and so that’s fine, they contribute in other ways; b) we have to be a bit more strategic about timing since you can’t powwow with someone unless that person’s awake, and c) we spend more effort explicitly aligning since misalignment can waste a ton of time, so in a way it’s upgraded the quality of our communication. I personally think it’s been fine, and as a result we have a much bigger hiring pool and are getting as much done as any startup in SV I’ve worked at.

Hate to sound dismissive but I've worked with people who can't communicate very well unless it's in person. Writing/reading causes a lot of misunderstandings for them due to comprehension or patience, and video calls don't seem to work very well for them as they are typical scheduled and have less body language.

This is fine, but I do disagree with those people saying "remote doesn't work" for startups, etc. It's just them.

> How do remote startups function? Back in my startup days, my cofounder & I lived in the same house when we were founding. We slept in the same room in order to synchronize sleep schedules as well. Bandwith was (as expected) super high. Immediate communication over issues while still allowing for uninterrupted work time. Being able to point at your screen and say "take a look" is super powerful.

I'm starting a startup now. There is no way that I am ever going to be pointing at a screen and telling my cofounder "take a look". My cofounder will not be a tech guy, he'll be a sales, marketing and customer-contact guy.

A business is "product + distribution".

There is very little point in having two cofounders who are both focusing only one of the above two variables. I think it is a recipe for failure, and so I will not be doing that.

I'd rephrase it to:

"Certain types of companies need a certain workaholic mentality"

The way you describe led to monoculture and I hope this isn't the only way to do things.

Wasn't there a saying that your software will resemble your company structure? I don't know if a software resembling two people sleeping in an office is a good structure to base your software on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com