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Normalizing Hiring Outside Silicon Valley (Andreas Klinger of AngelList)

2022-04-2258 min readWritten by Arc Team
podcast ep5 angelist andreas klinger hire outside california
Written by Arc Team
Summary:

Should you hire engineers in Silicon Valley? AngelList’s Andreas Klinger explains why hiring outside the Valley is the new normal.

Remote work is almost like a spectrum. It’s not like you either work remote or you don’t work remotely. It’s more your company might be in one place, it might be in multiple places, or every employee might be in multiple places, almost like a spectrum from being like everybody at the same spot to, like, how distributed are you…

Andreas Klinger, Head of Remote at AngelList

Today on the show we have Andreas Klinger, the Head of Remote at AngelList, and one of the founding team members of Product Hunt. We talk about why hiring Silicon Valley engineers is now mostly a liability, how to systemize trust within remote teams, why onboarding is super crucial for remote teams, and so on.

In this interview, we also mentioned two great resources: Andreas’ blog post “Managing Remote Teams – a Crash Course”, and his talk at the Running Remote conference. If you’re not familiar with these, be sure to check them out!

If you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider leaving a review on iTunes!

The podcast is also available on your favorite players: iTunes, Google Podcast, Castro, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Player.fm, and Tune In.

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

  • 01:02 — What is “Head of Remote”?
  • 02:00 — Why remote work came naturally to Andreas
  • 04:37 — How investors’ perceptions about remote work have changed over the years
  • 06:24 — Why building an engineering team inside Silicon Valley is now questionable
  • 11:08 — Is there such a thing as a “network effect” in remote work?
  • 15:45 — Why Andreas wrote Managing Remote Teams – A Crash Course
  • 19:48 — Systemizing “trust” inside a remote team
  • 23:35 — Why onboarding is crucial for new hires
  • 28:37 — Why you need to “refactor” your organization every few months
  • 35:04 — The misperception of the “digital nomad” trend
  • 40:30 — Is “remote readiness” is a thing?
  • 43:40 — How to start transitioning into a remote team
  • 47:12 — Andreas’ general advice to those who want to start/scale remote companies, especially regarding hiring
  • 50:30 — Why pair programming is an underrated way to assess your remote candidates

Mentioned Resources:

Full transcript:

Jovian: Hello, world. Welcome to another episode of “Outside the Valley,” a podcast where we interview remote startup leaders, workers, remote work advocates, and companies who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. This is a podcast where remote teams can learn what works and what doesn’t so you can do it right. “Outside the Valley” is brought to you by Arc, the remote hiring platform that enables companies to easily hire remote software engineers and teams. I’m your host and producer, Jovian Gautama.

Today on “Outside the Valley,” we have Andreas Klinger, head of remote at AngelList and one of the founding team members of Product Hunt. We talk about different topics such as why building an engineering team in Silicon Valley is now mostly a liability, how to systematize trust within remote teams, why onboarding is super crucial for remote teams and so on.

In this interview, we mention two great resources. They are a blog post written by Andreas titled “Managing Remote Teams: a Crash Course,” and his talk on the Running Remote conference in Bali this year. If you’re not familiar with these two, be sure to check that out at our show notes where you can find the links. Here we go. Andreas, welcome to the show.

Andreas: Hey, thanks for having me.

Jovian: Thanks for having me. How’s it going, man?

Andreas: Very good. I just realized I’m calling in from West Coast America, and you’re like in Taipei, like we’re too doing this around the world which is awesome.

Jovian: Right. So for the listeners, it’s now 7 a.m. here in Taipei, Taiwan, and in Pacific Time, what time is it there?

Andreas: It’s 4 p.m. here.

Jovian: 4 p.m. Cool. Yeah. So the joy of remote work, am I right?

Andreas: Absolutely.

Jovian: Right. So for the listeners here, if you are not following Andreas Klinger on Twitter, you are missing out. Andreas tweets a lot about remote work and he was the founding team member and CT of Product Hunt and currently the head of remote at AngelList. So Andreas, just to start a bit, your title, like, head of remote is very special. Before we go there, tell us more about your experience on remote working.

Andreas: So I have been running remote teams like quite some time in my life. I don’t know how many years. The title, head of remote, is actually super confusing. Like, nobody really knows what it means including me. It’s, I think, I realized a better framing would have been head of remote products, because my job is basically within the talent department of AngelList to improve products for remote teams and remote work.

So for those who don’t know, AngelList right runs one of the largest job marketplaces for startups. And like, basically, if you wanna find a job in any startup out there, it’s a high chance that they’ve posted on AngelList. And we also have the largest job board for remote work by a large margin. And my job is to actually just improve the product to be more suitable and more useful for remote work.

Jovian: Product Hunt has been here for a while now. So when you joined Ryan Hoover to work on Product Hunt, can you share a bit more what was the landscape of remote working at that time? I guess that at that time, remote work wasn’t really a thing that makes sense.

Andreas: Yeah, it depends on point of view. Like I almost have it the other way around, like beginning of this year when I started doing this job for…like I started focusing on the head of remote role at AngelList, I had like this weird epiphany where I realized there are consultants for remote work. And until this moment, for me, remote work was just a thing that’s completely normal. Like it’s kind of… For me, like, I thought it was like consultant for remote work is kind of like being a consultant for standing desks. It’s kind of like I agree with you it’s a good thing, more people should do it, but I don’t really know what you’re consulting until I…

Like now I kind of get it. Now I get it. Like the more I see how much information gap there is actually, I get it.

But for me, it was almost like remote work isn’t anything crazy or special. It’s completely normal. Like, we have laptops. We have the internet. We are working online, right? It’s the most natural thing for us.

So back then when I joined Ryan, I actually expected, and he as well, to some extent, that Product Hunt will be a side project in a way, like it would be a successful side project that’s [inaudible 00:04:50] right?

And it almost became a company by accident by the fact that it just started working really well. And at this point, we’ve already set up, fully distributed. So there wasn’t really a point to change that. So, back then I had already a lot of people I admired when it came to remote work like the folks Buffer. I’m a long-time friend and fan of them, and a few others.

So remote work for me back then wasn’t really a new thing. I have been doing it in my company before and so on and so on. And I have to honestly say I wasn’t even aware that it’s such a big deal in a way. And, for example, we got our first larger investments.

One of the investors actually said something along the lines of “Hey, now you’ve raised a few million dollars. Now you can finally get an office and become a real…get everybody over and become a real company.” And I was like, “Wait, what?” “Yeah, I think we are already a real company.”

I’m not sure how startups work, but I think we’re operating a real company, right? But the same investor now tweets on…like promotes remote work a lot on Twitter. So it’s kind of funny how times change here.

Jovian: Right, right. Exactly. So yeah, I think a lot of this remote work, friends so to speak, is to just get traction in the next couple of years in, like you mentioned right? Before VCs ask you like, when will you be a real company and get an office that we work or something like that, but how about now? How do you see the investment landscape, this part of investment landscape now, that distributed teams are getting more and more popular because I’ve read a lot of stories about startups, distributed startups, having…it’s easier for them to raise funds nowadays compared to even like two or three years ago. So what’s your thought on this?

Andreas: So this is almost like multidimensional. But I think I agree with you, kind of like remote work hit like a critical point in a way.

It just became like this thing, all of a sudden. It’s not like that it’s new. It just, like, reached its critical amount in a way, right, the critical amount of attention, where it becomes like an actual topic to a lot of people who didn’t realize and didn’t look before.

When it comes to investment, specifically, you almost have to segment between different regions. So when we speak of investments, most of the mindset actually comes from the valley.

For example, accelerators like Seedcamp have been doing investments in company that had, I would say, not co-located setups really, really early. So they had like investments where the founders were in America, but like a part of the team was in Eastern Europe or somewhere else like…

Jovian: I see.

Andreas: …a bunch of their, like, larger successes were like this kind of setup.

I also strongly believe that remote work is almost like a spectrum. It’s not like you either work remote or you don’t work remotely. It’s more your company might be in one place, it might be in multiple places, or every employee might be in multiple places, almost like a spectrum from being like everybody at the same spot to like, how distributed are you, right?

And on that spectrum, like, especially Silicon Valley, the common wisdom was its power law. So you either win or you don’t. And if you win, no costs matter. And if you lose, nothing matters, right?

So this was like the argumentation for Y2K to pay a lot of money for talent in the Valley and all this kind of stuff and why it’s okay to get everybody over. Even in the Valley, a lot of the VCs, like in a few years ago, already started to invest in companies where only the founders, or only the founders and the sales team come to America, but the actual engineering team stays somewhere else now because they already had an established team in India, Eastern Europe, or Latin America, right?

So this already was like kind of becoming more and more normal. The thing now is what’s shifted and I think this is also like where a little bit the hype of remote work in the valley came from.

It got to the point where it’s almost questionable to start your engineering team in the Valley.

This is now me personally speaking and not making a judgment about like other investors or VCs. If a founder comes to me and says that she wants to start in San Francisco and hire all their engineering in San Francisco, my initial question will be “Why? Like, how can you almost like justify this in front of your…?” this is a liability. This is no longer an advantage but it used to be an advantage to being the pool of the best people.

Now it’s a liability because you will hire people who are less experienced for a lot of money, which is by itself fine, power law and all, but you will have people who have like a very low retention. You will hire people who will leave after one and a half years, and you constantly would have this constant hire. It’s very expensive hiring going on. So the question here is almost like can you justify this and no longer like, is this the best approach? But, like, to me even like, can you even justify this in front of investors or peers?

So this is, I think, also like, the mentality, like together with the whole housing crisis in San Francisco and all this kind of stuff, right, where a lot of other investors got the POV, “Hey, actually, it doesn’t really make sense to fight in the same little few square miles for engineers. And unless this one startup happens to be this one really, really cool thing, hyped thing that every engineer wants to work on right now, it’s really, really unlikely that you can actually attract the talent. And it’s worse, it’s really, really unlikely that you can keep them because sooner or later, Google or anybody else, like one a half years later, will come and just like drop stock and everything on them and basically effectively double their salary.

So if you have an area where the average retention rate is like one-to-one a half years, and most of the people you actually hire end up being as average as globally, it’s very, very questionable if you should do that. So, right now there’s this shift in investors’ mindset. And I think more and more people tend to agree with this POV. Unless you’re like this one hyper-bold flyer who can just like…like basically unless you just say like, “No, this is the way how I do it and like everybody else, screw you,” and you manage to actually be this one company every engineer wants to go to, you might not actually…like you shouldn’t do it, period. You shouldn’t actually consider it. You might hire a few people in San Francisco, you might hire but you should actually just hire good people where you can.

Jovian: Right. This is interesting because it reminds me of the thing that you mentioned in the Running Remote conference back then because like remote work is a natural evolution of digital work. Now if we look a step further than that, this is also enabled because all of these global talents actually have the resources to learn programming from the best courses out there. It’s made them like on an equal footing with these Silicon Valley, kind of like to my next question.

I think, like you mentioned, a lot of startups, they want to have either their business development teams in San Francisco or their founding team in San Francisco. I think Andrew Chen calls this the Mullet Model. Now that we have, the remote work is more trending upwards. And Silicon Valley is famous for this network effect right? It’s almost like… This sounds very corny, but it’s almost like the Hollywood of tech hub, because it’s more like really like who you know there, right?

Andreas: Yes, I agree.

Jovian: And then do you see this network effect either, I’m not sure if diminishing is the right word, or do you see, like, is their so-called “remote network,” so to speak, because I see there’s a lot of remote communities out there. Remotive has one, AngelList has one, we in Arc also has one. So do you see this like just getting stronger and diminishing the Silicon Valley network effect?

Andreas: Yes, and no. It depends for what, right?

Jovian: Mm-hmm.

Andreas: So first of all, I don’t believe that there is, for example, like when it comes to investment, I don’t believe that there is a Silicon Valley scene, a New York scene, a European scene, blah, blah, blah.

I believe there’s one global startup scene, and you have different, I would say, hubs with different up-link. So Silicon Valley has by far the strongest up-link, but a lot of the people that you would associate with Silicon Valley actually don’t live here anymore. They moved somewhere else and they’re just like brand-wise still very close to here.

And in a reality, it becomes much more like do you have a good uplink to this scene? And if you have a good uplink, you might live somewhere else. In reality, being in the Valley, gives you a lot of, I would say, falls, verification almost, like being… Like I know this is really extremely. For me back then it was harder to get, what I would say, famous or like well-known people from here, from the Valley, on a phone call or like a Skype call back then. Like, it was that long ago. Yes, that long ago, Skype

It was like harder for me to get them on a Skype call than to actually, when I was here, to just meet them for coffee, which was completely absurd, because a Skype call is 15 minutes, right? Getting to meet somebody for coffee is at least half an hour if not one full hour. But it was actually easier to do that in person for some reason because there’s this…back then, maybe still, I don’t know, this kind of like buyers that is like a self-selection process just by the fact that you’re here, right?

So there’s still the fact that it’s easier to access the network if you have regional proximity. That being said, it’s nowadays not only regional proximity. You can have other levels of proximity. You can have like proximity through knowledge or topics. So for example, if you are a very, very good content writer about a very specific topic, you know, that also like investors are interested in, they are more than happy to connect with you. So like that’s a proximity you can build up.

So I think it’s possible to raise from outside. And I think like a lot of companies do that very successfully. I still believe it’s easy to do it here. That doesn’t mean that the whole company needs to be here, right? It might be enough if a few of the founders are here, which leads to the next obvious question, should every company raise money? And especially should every company raise money from Silicon Valley venture capital? I personally believe no. The question is do you even want that nowadays?

Jovian: Yeah, I totally agree with the proximity thing. And it kind of depends on what you are there for. For example, I found a lot of…not a lot of, but some of my podcast guests are through Twitter, actually. I just find you with Twitter and you wanna be on our podcast. And yeah. And also, like, there’s a lot of, like, remote work “enthusiast.” It sounds really weird?

Andreas: I know what you mean. Yeah.

Jovian: Yeah, and that you can oh, there’s this aspect of remote work, or distributed teams, or team management, that you never considered before and you can immediately jump into a conversation with them. And it’s not weird at all. So yeah, I think also that’s a good case for like remote networking…

Andreas: Yes, I believe that Twitter is the protest version from like what they just described for proximity through knowledge, right, or interest, proximity through interest. And I think Twitter is like a very productized version of that. You don’t need to read long blog posts or books or anything and you can instantly connect with people and ask questions or jump into discussions.

So yeah, I fully agree. I would also highly recommend anybody who tries to build up reputation and in a lot of cases, networking is much more about your own reputation than your access, you know, because like the access comes through reputation. Twitter and content and blogging and all this kind of stuff is a very, very easy hack to actually get reputation.

Jovian: Cool. And speaking about content, so it’s kind of leaked to my next question, so I think a while ago, is it last year, you wrote something about managing remote teams on your blog?

Andreas: Mm-hmm.

Jovian: And this is also the… Like, the core point of the presentation when you were in the Running Remote conference in Bali, during this year, right? And I really like… For listeners, I’ll put the link on the show notes. I really like this type because it’s concise and tackles a lot of questions that we never…and like if you’re new to remote work and never considered it before, or like for example, what is a hybrid team, what is a distributed startups? Can you give us a bit more background about that blog post itself, what triggers you to write it and then the most important thing that you think the listeners should take away from that?

Andreas: Yeah, yeah, fair enough. The main reason why I write that blog post… I am a horrible writer. Like, I need forever to write a post. I have so many spelling mistakes. It’s like borderline questionable, like to the point that you even…to the point that I should get maybe a refund from my high school, you know, like that bad. And I also have this tendency of trying to add everything I… I kind of like to explain A, I actually need to explain B, and to explain D, I need to tell you about F, and G, and H, right?

Jovian: Yeah.

Andreas: So it becomes longer and longer, and longer. You know this is like the reason why this one is basically an eBook. But the main reason why I actually write them even if I’m not really good in it is I start to repeating myself in one-on-one discussions. So I had, like back then, friends of mine reaching out to me asking for recommendations for remote teams. And I almost at one point I had like a notes file where I was like talking to a friend of mine and, like, on the right side of the screen I had like my notes, and like literally reading from the notes, and I was like, “This is not efficient. There has to be a better way. Maybe we have the technology to build a better way, you know?”

Jovian: Who knows?

Andreas: So I decided to put like everything in the blog post. I don’t know, like, I think the biggest take away from it, actually, I don’t know, it’s like structure you’re thinking about remote work. So I strongly believe it’s you have to see it almost like as a spectrum. It’s not like you work remote or not remote. It’s like how distributed your team is, as we said before, right? And like hybrid setups are a real thing and might be needed. So but like what do you need to consider, right?

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: And then all of the first-degree and second degrees of implications of remote work. So, like, reduce to the primitives, what does remote work mean?

It means that people might not be able to instantly constantly go back and forth, you know. They’ll have like different hand-over processes. Like you need to be more aware of like, how can you enable people actually to work autonomously, right? How can you enable people to be productive on their own? If they constantly have to wait for other people, they get really, really frustrated really, really quickly.

And there’s a few nuances around all of this. There’s also like a few nuances around communication. But all of this comes out of primitives, in my opinion, with reduced effects. It’s more important to me that people understand like, what is the fundamental differences, you know, and what falls out of that, and like, how to think about that, than to just… Like, it’s more important to me to make people understand how I think about this, than what I think about this, if this makes sense, right?

So this is where the whole blog post came from, similar with the Running Remote conference, where I did the keynote. It was more like here’s a few principles that I strongly believe in and like, what are the conclusions? Like what can you basically draw out of that?

Jovian: Yeah. One of the most interesting thing or one the most interesting nuggets on the blog post and the presentation is that how you describe trust, right, trust in remote teams and the concept of trust battery. So in my opinion, I think a lot of company sees trust as this very abstract thing. It’s like the “culture thing.” So we have a culture that trust each other to do work and that just ends at that. But you talk more about systematizing the thing. Can you share a bit more about that?

Andreas: Yeah, fair enough. So the reason like…so most of the stuff I try to describe around that is actually just basic good management. A lot of people have very different understanding of what that means, right? And you could proxy the word trust here with a word like authority, for example. But again, it’s a biased word. A lot of people have additional opinions, like, what authority means. Like a lot of people assume authority means authority above other people, and so on and so on.

The reason why I like the concept of systematizing trust or thinking about trust is we assume that trust is a natural thing that you either trust somebody or you don’t. Like, it’s very binary in our thinking, right? But in reality, it’s not. Like, you trust somebody about different things very differently. This trust might change over time and you might trust different people fundamentally different, right?

So the problem you have as a manager is if somebody joins your team, they have not established themselves on this like weird multidimensional map of, like, this web of trust between people that haven’t established themselves. So what you usually kind of do is you try to connect them with people that can talk with people and just hope that they like…like, you know, like, and if after a few months kind of or found their place and people started trusting and to do more and more. The thing is with remote teams is you need to be very aware how you, like, what kind of things you wanna…for example if somebody joins, what do you want her to be able to do from day one? What do you actually expect her to be able to do from day one on? You know, what are your expectations? What is your comfort zones?

Basically, how do you structure and systematize your own trust? Like how do you give trust? How do you verify trust? How do you wanna receive trust and all this kind of stuff? It’s basically this whole web between people is what the fundamental building blocks around any team work is.

The weird thing about this is that we think of it as a purely naturally evolving thing, which a remote team kind of, I mean, it’s always true. But like for me, trust starts earlier. For me, trust starts with the fact that I trust you to push code to GitHub. That’s already like a trust, you know. I trust you to deploy servers. Like in a lot of companies, I would not allow you to deploy to the servers.

A lot of other companies, there’s a whole process around that, you know. In our company, for example, I would just allow you to do that because I have A, B, and C, in place, right? And so on and so on. Like basically, systematizing processes, systematizing authority, systematizing your whole management principles is where it is kind of roots in, you know?

I personally like the framing around trust because in the end, everything here is trust. Every process we have in place, roots in the fundamental trust between people, any enabling we have between people, fundamentally roots in trust between people, any authority autonomous work. Any happiness in teams, fundamentally, roots in trust, any positive culture as well, right?

Jovian: Right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And also speaking about building trust from day one, and also this is something you also mentioned on your writings in things that are mentioned by the previous guest on this podcast is that the importance of onboarding. Every successful remote company that I know, they really have a robust onboarding process in place, like, almost over the top to be honest. Like, for example, Zapier, I think they have the so-called onboarding B&B or something. Toggl also have that. I’m just curious, in your opinion, like, how do you describe how onboarding shapes the roles of a new hire?

Andreas: Yes.

Jovian: And then I wonder if you can share a bit more about the onboarding process that you had when you were in Product Hunt or now in AngelList?

Andreas: Yes, more than happy to. So where does this all come from right?

Like in remote teams, you need to be more actively thinking about processes. You need to be, like we called before trust, but like you need to think about like all your processes, who does what? Who can make which decisions? What decisions do you expect people to do? And so on and so on.

Like you, by default, are more aware about this stuff because for you, it’s more expensive to just monkey-patch or like hotfix, you know, any process problem you have with just a random meeting. Like normal companies like co-located companies, if they have a problem, they do like a quick meeting and fix the problem, most likely not effective. And most likely, it’s actually not like removing the systematic problem in their process. It’s just like a hotfix monkey patch to keep stuff going. And all of a sudden, you have like meetings all day, right?

Jovian: Mm-hmm.

Andreas: In a remote team, you can’t do this because meetings are just very, very expensive. It’s exhausting, expensive and so on and so on. So what you have is you have like all these processes, so when you actually onboard somebody to make them effective, you wanna like teach them about your processes, how things are done and all this kind of stuff, you know?

And more importantly, you wanna give them the tools that they can do it on their own pace and their own time as autonomously as possible because again, it’s very expensive for you to have somebody sitting with this person four hours, five hours a day. Because this person like if, like, honestly, if you sit in a hangout that’s longer than one hour, you’re borderline going insane anyway, right? Now imagine if you would have like full onboarding boot camps just in hang out, you would go crazy.

So instead, what you do is you try to find a process that people can act autonomously in their onboarding, which can be handbooks, for example, that’s very famous for a lot of remote team. So you have a very good handbook they can read on their own pace.

It might also be onboarding around…like in engineering teams, it’s very, very common to have very, very good tooling in place in remote teams that guide first-timers to the right solution. So you have Lintest, telling you you’re doing something wrong. Static code analysis telling you if you do something insecure, you know. You have these patterns you can follow, you have this way to start ABC, you have this way to test everything, you have this way to deploy everything. Everything is kind of like put in a shape already so that this guides you to like a solution. And in reality, what most companies do not realize, especially startup is if you join a company, you decide in your first few weeks if you’re actually going to stay or not.

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: You know, what I mean?

Most people who will leave, will leave very, very quickly, like they will leave after one to three months. They would just say, “Okay, this doesn’t work. I tried it, it doesn’t work,” right? Beginning, they’re very hopeful and they just like, hope that something changes, maybe if you’re lucky. But it’s kind of this phase where you mess up, you know? It’s like this onboarding phase, is this first weeks.

It’s, in remote teams, where people maybe realize that remote work is not for them because they feel, for example, isolated and you didn’t have an eye for that, like you didn’t watch out for that. So you need to find a part in your onboarding but make sure that you realize and you handle the situation, right?

It might be that moment where people realize that they cannot really change anything in a company because everything is decided by somebody else. So how do you fix that? You know, like you basically…these first weeks are the most crucial phase for any employee. And any investment there is usually money well spent, and in my opinion, it’s also one of the reasons why remote teams have very good retention.

Jovian: Yeah, it’s interesting that we talk about it this way which reminds me. I think it’s an article by Jason Fried from Basecamp is that you have to see your company as a product, like work on that.

Andreas: Yes.

Jovian: And the thing we’re talking about, it’s just similar to what he was talking about SaaS onboarding for clients, right?

Andreas: Yes.

Jovian: If we don’t do onboarding right, it’ll churn in a couple of months or so. So, yeah, there’s…

Andreas: There’s more analogs in this metaphor, actually. I have a similar thing in here. For example

I strongly believe if a company or organization that is growing, you need to re-factor this organization every few months.

Jovian: I see.

Andreas: You need to re-factor like intentionally, not just like casually, “Now we have a problem, we fix,” but like, intentionally be like, “Okay, this works for us because we’re like five people, but this might not work with 20 people.” But that’s okay, you know. But, like, when we hit 10 people, when we hit 15, people, we need to intentionally re-factor. There’s a lot of stuff around like decision making, like how do you slice the work? How do you slice the teams? Who makes decision? What kind of decisions do you delegate?

Howard is supposed to make all these decisions. This is a continuous process. And if you are working in a growing startup, usually, in the beginning, you just think at some point you would have this figured out. In reality, as long as you grow, you constantly need to re-factor, so you constantly need to improve this. And the only way that you don’t have to improve this anymore is because you’ve found like a place where you stagnate, right, or because the company goes out of business.

This is the only like situations in my opinion where you don’t have to improve or iterate on this kind of organizational process. So I think the analog to a product is very, very good.

It comes down to also branding. Like how well is your brand received. Like, as a remote team, if you invest in public perception, like in brand, this is like the best hiring hack you can do easily, like the inbound you will get out of this is worth any investment.

And so on and so on. It’s not only that, it’s like the whole UX, like how easy it is for an employee to give feedback to the decision makers. Like it’s there, like, do you have like the suit company have like the equivalent of like an intercom Help Desk, you know?

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: Like, how would I as a nobody in this company actually give feedback to decision-makers in the world? It’s like, okay, you know, thinking of your companies and progressing is one of the most healthiest thing you can do.

Jovian: Yeah, that’s a fantastic analogy. For the next question, I want to touch a bit about there’s something that actually I remember a lot just from your talks and from your articles about the innovation versus iteration. I actually kind of agree with that and draw there some example. So, you mentioned that innovation is better when you’re in person and iteration is better when you are remote.

Andreas: Mm-hmm.

Jovian: So I chat with the CEO of Toggl, Krister Haav, a while ago. Do you know that Toggl has this cool game called the startup simulator?

Andreas: No.

Jovian: This is super funny. So it’s super funny. And then so basically, he mentioned that the team created it when they were on their retreat, right? And it’s super funny and with the like 8-bit-Atari style, graphic and whatnot. And one thing that he mentioned is that it’s probably not doable when they’re not in person because there are a lot of nuances. Especially like humor, right? Jokes, like especially when you’re zoom, when you’re like, uncomfortable, like 20, 30 people and someone laughs at my joke and people are like, “What did I miss? What I missed?” And the joke is not funny again. So that’s just one example of innovation that she’ll be in person, right?

Andreas: Yes.

Jovian: Do you see this changing in the future along with technologies like AR, VR and so on?

Andreas: I mean, first for like the listeners to explain like the main premise I have here is if you work remote, you can really, really focus on your own productivity. You can own your own performance and everything, right? So you iterate really well and really quick.

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: On the other hand, in a Hangout, a lot of the nuances in human communication get lost, a lot of the things you can do in person, like realizing what people actually mean and like all this little nuanced stuff kind of gets lost in Hangouts.

So I personally recommend remote teams also to meet in person for cultural reasons, like just to get to know each other, but also meet in person for, like, complicated kickoff, project kickoff, quarterly kickoff. So like all this kind of stuff usually pays off.

When I say innovation, I actually don’t mean doing like crazy, innovative stuff. I believe that every startup, every company needs to be innovative in a digital marketplace to actually succeed. You can’t just do what everybody else does the same way and expect to succeed tremendously. It won’t happen. So you need to be innovative.

But this is not like the kind of innovation I mean. I mean more like radical step function innovation like you need like a huge pivot, you need to launch a new product, you need to like, figure out how you actually hit your growth numbers in a large step. You know, like all this kind of stuff. These kinds of discussions, like this crazy brainstorming, is usually easier in person to the point that I would even recommend having teams meet for lesser important reasons.

To your second question related to AR, VR, I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I’m personally not too bullish on VR. I’m kind of bullish on AR. And I personally believe they will emerge as a concept anyway. I believe AR is one of those things where it’s kind of like hard to mention right now, and that as soon as we actually use it, it will be hard to imagine how we ever watched these small screens all the time, you know.

VR is always mentioned as one of the things that people would use for meetings, and I’m always so confused because if I could redefine how meetings work, would I really try to recreate an office meeting room because like one of the hellish…like one of the worst environments to be in.

Jovian: All right.

Andreas: Like being several hours in a meeting room is actually not a joyful thing, you know?

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: Like, this is like a setup I would use to make the most productive in a meeting? I am not sure. So I wonder actually what is, like, VR first kind of approaches to brainstorming and all this kind of stuff, you know? And I honestly don’t have a good answer. So if anybody out there is working on something, please let me know. I’m more than happy to invest. Like this is the kind of stuff I’m looking for.

Jovian: Yeah, this sounds like a parody of like an office space in the future. Like you create the VR meeting and then in the meeting, you decide when to have another meeting.

Andreas: Yes. And then you have like these people in VR pulling out their phone and like “Oh, [inaudible 00:36:28] my phone yeah.

Jovian: Right, right. That’s horrible. I don’t want to live in that kind of future honestly. So let’s move on to the more, like, personal level of remote your [inaudible 00:36:39] more on the workers and talent itself. So I want to touch on the subject of a digital nomad, right? I think for companies that are hiring, a lot of companies are still afraid of “digital nomads,” because they have this perception of not being reliable, like “Oh, now you’re in Bali today and you’re in Bangkok tomorrow. We literally can reach out to you because you have no internet,” and so on. How do you think this affect the brand of remote work?

Andreas: Yeah. So there’s a few terms that right now are put together with remote work only for the reason that all of these people happen to work online.

Jovian: Yeah.

Andreas: One of them is outsourcing, very common, like outsourcing, offshoring. You know, like, “Hey, I don’t know if remote work is something for me because I couldn’t trust in some random agency in the middle of nowhere to do my work.” And I’m like, “This is not the kind of remote work I have in mind,” right? Another one is working from home. It’s true. A lot of remote workers work from home but like, not by default remote work means that you work from home. I cannot work from home. I work from like small offices all the time, right.

Another one is for example, as you mentioned, digital nomads like I have people telling me “Yeah, remote work sounds amazing. I would also love to work from a beach and like work from a pool. That sounds great.” And I like “No, that’s not the kind of remote workers I know,” like the kind of remote workers I know actually have an office desk that’s absolutely optimized for their own performance. They spend a lot of money on like actually fixing the room.

Jovian: Exactly, yeah.

Andreas: They might have a small office with like… I know people who have small offices with noise cancellation, walls and all this kind of stuff. They don’t go on a beach because that’s just not productive. They wanna be as productive as possible and optimize their own life for their own happiness, you know.

So I wonder if these terms not even as you said, like damage the brand of remote work to some extent and I think they do. So for example, at Product Hunt or like in most remote teams I know, are very critical of hiring digital nomads in a mission-critical role. So for example, if it’s a person writing content, sure, maybe works. If it’s a program that has to work with multiple other people, I’m not sure.

I personally if I do… Like I’m okay with people doing random, like, one-off, like, a few times when they want to, like going nomad. That’s fine. But it shouldn’t be the default setup. For example, I can only speak for me as my experience. When I do digital nomad and I travel, I need at least one week to actually be back productive. So if I switch locations every week or every two weeks I’m barely productive, you know.

It might be useful for other reasons. It might be useful to meet clients. It might be useful to get new experience. It might be useful just to, like, honestly, like just like, wind down a bit. Like, “I can’t do vacation right now, you know, but I need like a little bit of a break. So we have this compromise. That’s fine.” If somebody is a digital nomad and wants to be productive, I personally, at least I need to do this, I recommend staying somewhere at least a month, actually embedding yourself in the local scene, in the local environment, finding out how your productive over there and all this kind of stuff? It’s more like a digital slowmad.

And I would…this pattern I would recommend. The exception is obviously if it’s your own company. You are one-man person, you know, like or one-girl, company, sure, do whatever you want. If you have to work with other people, stay in one place. There’s a few of these concepts like working from home, off-shoring outsourcing, digital nomad, you know, like a bunch of these terms that just thrown in. Another one is like part-time freelancing for whatever reason. Like, a lot of people, when you talk about remote work, assume that you mean like part-time freelancers who will just do like a few things for you or for your project.

I don’t know why these terms are thrown in. I think it’s because to us as human species, working online is still a new thing. And we’re still like a little bit blurry around the lines and it needs a…like just cultural inertia, like it needs a little bit so that people understand the differences, you know? Maybe that’s the reason. I don’t know. But I believe it borderline damages the brand remote work.

Jovian: Yeah, and I think on the flip side, the digital nomad has got a bit too much of a bad rap because as you mentioned, actually, a lot of these digital nomads, I think Peter Levy has tweeted about this while ago. They’re basically so-called digital slowmads. They stay in a country that they’re not…

Andreas: I’m completely cool with that model…

Jovian: Yeah, exactly.

Andreas: …that’s how I travel usually when I actually need to work.

Jovian: Yeah, so I think it’s like too quick of a judgment when someone says, “Oh, you’re on Instagram. You’re on the beach all the time. You’re not working. You’re a digital nomad. You’re unreliable,” when actually, these persons probably just move like every two months or so.

Andreas: Yeah, I usually…nowadays I differ between digital backpackers and digital slowmads.

Jovian: Mm-hmm. You gotta write about, like, an article about the whole terminology….

Andreas: Maybe I’ll do that. Yeah, it’s actually a good idea.

Jovian: Yeah. So still on the personal level of remote work, so a lot of companies when they’re hiring, I’ve seen a lot of people that they prefer to hire someone that had experience working remotely, like for an extended amount of time, right? “Oh, this person has worked remotely for a project for a couple of months, three or six months.” And some companies accept that, oh, some remote companies,” Okay, you don’t have remote work experience, but it’s okay. We can train you.” So my question will be, do you think the so-called remote readiness, is it a thing?

Andreas: I don’t know. I see it a little bit like Nick Francis of Help Scout. Like, what kind of questions would you ask somebody to join an office? You just expect that they’re able to join an office. You don’t really ask them like, “Hey, do you scream randomly while working? Do you like to be told exactly what to do? Do you…I don’t know, fart while programming?” I have no idea what you would ask somebody like that. But we kind of think we should ask questions to remote workers in a way, like are you actually capable of working remote?

In my experience, a lot of this stuff actually is just a proxy for bad management because if your processes are set up well, if you actually care for having a good culture, if you care for good onboarding, you can get people who are just skilled in what they do to be happy working remote. You can do that.

If you don’t have those things, obviously, you would prefer somebody who’s like just fixing whatever problem you have on their own, right?

I personally don’t care much if people already have like a strong background in remote work if I hire them. I really don’t mind. I also believe it’s really, really hard to judge from an outside if they…for example if you look at a co-located company. Like if they have worked at, I would say, mid-size to large company, it’s a good chance that this company was already a remote company in denial. That like this person worked with four or five people out of which nobody was actually in the same room, right?

Jovian: Right.

Andreas: It’s a realistic chance. It might also be that this person, beforehand, was kind of self-managing anyway. Like, I know a lot of co-located teams where all the engineers only communicate in Slack although they’re in the same room. And it’s completely normal. So where do you draw the line? I would just not draw the line. I would rather check if the people are like a cultural fit, skill fit, hire, period.

Jovian: Yeah, that’s a great way to look at it. So we kind of touched about this a little bit. It’s basically about hybrid companies, right? Actually, Arc is also a hybrid company. Some people are distributed, some people are co-located. And I know the sentiments out there is that hybrid companies are usually not ideal because there are chances that the remote team members will feel somewhat left out or something like that. In your opinion is there any way to make or to optimize hybrid…? Yeah.

Andreas: So as I said before, like

I think remote work is more like a spectrum nowadays. So a lot of companies will be hybrid. Even a lot of the companies that you associate with remote work are technically hybrid. They’re just like remote first. They have this attitude of making sure that remote and non-remote people or like remote workers or co-located workers are actually on the same level of information, same layer of communication, you know, and nobody has advantages about the other, and so on and so on.

There are a few techniques you can do. You can have meetings where everybody who actually will talk will call in. There’s nothing more isolating than to be this one person who watches a table talking about stuff and you barely understand them.

Jovian: Exactly, yeah.

Andreas: It’s extremely isolating. So what you do is you have everybody who’s going to talk call in. And it’s fine if the other people go into the meeting room, but these people call in, so, like, all of a sudden, everybody is on the same communication layer. The same is true with, like, you have a standard how you actually expect processes to start, you have like specs and handovers, you know, and it’s not like, “Hey, we’re starting a project. Yeah, we discussed everything in room blue. Yeah. Just know I will tell you later. No, no, there’s a spec, somebody wrote it, like, read that and it’s the same layer of communication again.

So that’s like how you make…and there’s a few hacks like that to make, in a team, the hybrid setup a little bit better. I think a healthy setup or a healthy approach for companies that consider going remote and are by nature will be hybrid is actually just think of it a little bit different. To think about the whole company might not be remote, but individual teams will be remote or at least remote first.

So you have, for example, your customer care team, where there’s like three people in the office, but 10 people remote. This team needs to, by nature because there’s a non-critical mass in the office, they need to work remote first, they need to communicate primarily remote and all this kind of stuff. Nobody in this team will feel isolated. They might not have the same career options. If the company is not well set up, that’s a fair argument to be made. But at least, it’s not that isolating and that limiting, you know.

A different one, a very common, people have their infrastructure team remote. They have like a DevOps teams remote. Sometimes people have…and so on and so on. And, like, this is actually a natural pattern that you can use. You can’t just say, for example, this team that handles customer onboarding should now be acting as if they’re remote first. So there is like a non-critical amount of people in the office and a critical amount of people remote.

If, for whatever reason, more people actually happen to be in the office, you know, is there a way that you can change it a bit? Is there, for example, can you like not have them sit next to each other, although this sounds non-productive, you know? But, like, let’s say you have four people in the office and four people remote, maybe these four people in the office shouldn’t sit next to each other. Maybe these four people should, some of them just encourage them to work from home from time to time, you know?

So how can you make the critical amount not to be in the office and then have, like, basically, these sub-teams, be remote-first, learn from these sub-teams what actually works for you, what does not work for you, what do you need to change in the company to be more remote-friendly? You know, and then bring these learnings into the whole company and then, like, start more and more of the company actually remote. If this is the path you wanna go, it’s also fine to stay at that level, obviously.

Jovian: Yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic. So I think my last question for today is I think a lot of our audience are, you know, startup founders or even startup workers that are either transitioning from a co-located team and want to be a remote team or start hiring remotely or they just want to start a company and start hiring remote people from around the world, right? Any particular general advice or like this one top advice that you would give to them?

Andreas: Yes. How I would approach hiring?

Jovian: Yeah.

Andreas: You start with your network because these are people that you trust and like people that people you know trust, right? Start there. I think this is always the most healthiest thing especially early on as long as you can. Invest in your own brand so that people actually recognize you, want to work with you, and so on and so on. This can be in multiple ways. It’s also useful if you actually want to, at some point, raise money. It’s also useful in front of your customers, you know. So it’s, in general, worth doing.

Be a good place that people actually want to work at, as weird as this sounds. Like, be a company that’s aware about how they are as a company, you know? Like most likely, if you’re a first-time founder, you’re a shitty manager, you know. Be aware of that and try to compensate.

And I notice because I was a first-time founder and I was a shitty manager, you know. So try to compensate that, obviously.

When it comes to hiring, at some point, you will, like, reach the limits of those resources. At that point, I would highly recommend just inbound. That can be on your own site. It can be through platforms like AngelList like we have several hundred thousand people looking for remote work. So it might make sense to, like, have job listings there. It might be on a million other websites where you can do that.

So at some point, you wanna invest in inbound. You might also wanna invest in outbound, like, sourcing. For example, at AngelList, we have a good tool for that called Source or there’s tools on competitors like LinkedIn where you can basically start…like at Source, you can look at our tool, you can basically say, for example, something like “I wanna have somebody who used to work with Google, now lives in Europe, and is currently looking for remote work.” [Inaudible 00:50:57] with 60 people that start talking to these people.

Another good hack that I strongly believe in for senior hires, is actually reaching out to people for advice, and by that, seeing if there’s a path that they actually take over this role. So if you’re actually looking for somebody who’s…as a CEO… I mean, you shouldn’t maybe go to like, the top CEO in the world, but like some CEO in your network, or like extended network, get advice from them, like what you should look out for in a good CEO, like what you should find in a good person, what they should actually do, how you as a CEO should step back, and so on and so on, right?

Maybe there’s even a way that you can convince those people, and in my experience, this actually works quite well. This works for senior hires and engineering as well, finding out like what this role should actually be, who these people should be, and so on and so on. So, actually, leveraging the top end of your network is worth doing here as well.

Jovian: Cool.

Andreas: The other thing when it comes to hiring, assume that your actual assessment funnel is broken, so double down on your assessment thing as much as you can. A lot of companies have really, really bad assessment pipelines. The classic one in Silicon Valley is like the whiteboard tests and the coding challenges and all this kind of stuff. My personal recommendation here is pair programming.

Jovian: I see.

Andreas: That’s a very simple example that relates to your actual problems, like your actual work. Like, maybe if you have like a big site, make a very, very small variation of that site, or one big feature in that site, you know, and ask people together with you to change that. If for whatever reason, you know that you have a very complicated stack, maybe have this in one or two different stacks, you know, so that people who don’t happen to work in Lisp or whatever you’ve decided to use, you know, have a chance to actually use it.

But like pair programming is one of the most underutilized things for hiring, and in my opinion, especially remote, really useful. Because you will realize that people who are native speakers tend to be by far better in presenting themselves than people who are non-native speakers. And that’s a bias I have. When I speak to somebody who is a native speaker, I instantly have a very good impression. Like, they seem very eloquent, very smart, right? And like as a non-native speaker always have like this self-doubt about when I speak, right?

So, non-native speakers tend to shine a little bit less in talking, especially this… If you hire like also in Silicon Valley, you have this extreme. Like here, people are really, really good in presenting themselves, really, really good in talking and you instantly wanna hire this person. And then when they actually do pair-programming, you realize, “Hey, turns out they’re not that great.” So I highly recommend pair-programming here.

There’s a few other things. And hiring by itself and assessments and recruiting is almost its own science. And it’s always worth iterating on it. But if I would be forced, I would say network, brand, inbound, sourcing and outbound and pair-programming.

Jovian: Yeah, that was fantastic. So Andreas, thanks so much for your time today. This is a fantastic chat. I really learned a lot on this. So where can listeners find you online?

Andreas: If you wanna reach out to me, the easiest, honestly, is Twitter @andreasklinger, first name last name. Feel free to DM me. If you have any questions, send me. I also actively invest in startups related to remote work or tools for remote work or even remote teams if they’re good. So if you think this might be interesting, like please ping me on Twitter. Also, if you have any questions or just like advice in general or like if you can help with the network, let me know, always happy to help.

Jovian: Yes, awesome. So guys, don’t forget to follow Andreas on Twitter. Six of his 10 tweets per day is related to remote work. So if you’re really interested in this topic, don’t forget the follow him. So, Andreas…

Andreas: Do I really tweet that much? I probably should. Okay, fair enough.

Jovian: Okay. Yeah, you really tweet that much actually. My research for this podcast is just I was scrolling down your Twitter feed. And that’s it.

Andreas: Damn it. I think I have a problem.

Jovian: So yeah, Andreas, thanks so much for your time today.

Andreas: Likewise, thanks for having me. This was awesome.

Jovian: Thank you.

Andreas: Bye-bye.

Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of “Outside the Valley,” brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at Jovian@arc.dev. It’s J-O-V-I-A-N-@-A-R-C.D-E-V. Or you can find us on Twitter @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of “Outside the Valley,” and ciao.

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