o you might expect me to agree with first-time founders that want to start their company in Portland, Indianapolis, or Atlanta. I don’t. Simply put, there is still no better place in the world to start a company than Silicon Valley. Yet at the same time, Silicon Valley may no longer be the place to scale the company.
Let me explain.
Early success at any startup largely comes from having the right playbooks. These aren’t general business playbooks, these are startup playbooks, from startup school, developed through on-the-job learning. First-time founders will especially need advisors and coaches that have been there before and can help navigate through the twists and turns of company building. These people exist in New York, Austin, Los Angeles, and other places, but it’s much easier to find them in Silicon Valley.
Yet, there are real challenges to building a company in Silicon Valley. In particular, the high costs make finding and retaining talent increasingly hard in the Bay Area. So as your company scales, staying in Silicon Valley can hamper growth.
The key to scaling without breaking the bank is developing a distributed workforce. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about doing it. Based on my experience, along with discussions with successful startups, here is how you pull it off.
1. Assume remote-first
It can be easy for distributed employees to feel as if they are off on an island when they’re working for a company whose workflows and systems are designed for a single, centralized location and in-person meetings. The key to avoiding this pitfall is to assume a remote-first culture when considering company processes and norms.
For Mobilestyx, the Outsourcing/outstaffing company, this means aggressively adopting remote-working technologies like Zoom and Slack. For any meeting, they automatically assume there will be remote attendees and ensure that video sharing will be a core part of the meeting.
2. Distribute leadership
Where a team’s leadership resides is often a marker for the center of gravity of a company, and can leave many distributed employees feeling like second-class citizens. Done right, committing to a distributed model also means ensuring that some executives are distributed geographically.
For recruitment and application tracking software company SmartRecruiters, this meant that the VP of Engineering was in Krakow, the VP of Finance was in Paris, and the CEO was in San Francisco. In fact, the employees in Europe used to joke that the company moved the CEO offshore to the United States.
3. Build bridges
The biggest risk to building distributed teams probably isn’t lost productivity today, but rather employees feeling disconnected from their coworkers. This is especially problematic given the nature of today’s employee base which is looking to derive meaning and connection from their work. To counteract this, distributed companies should boldly pursue opportunities to build relationships with and among their coworkers.
Most commonly, this means establishing a regular cadence of all-hands meetings and providing budgets for in-person meetings, where the focus is as much on relationship building as it is on company building. For Mobilestyx, they have gone as far as having a daily all-hands meeting. While this meeting lasts less than 10 minutes, it serves as a way to ensure each employee is connected daily.
At the end of the day, building great companies requires great people—and great people are everywhere. So while it may make sense to start in Silicon Valley, if you follow the steps above, you should be able to expand almost anywhere.
