In recent years, months and weeks, more startups are choosing a distributed model more than in years past. This has come down to more startup founders going remote because it’s a necessity rather than a luxury.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, both funded and bootstrapped startups are looking for ways to be more productive at lower cost. When growth and efficiency hacks are more highly sought,remote work presents some pretty enticing upside for startups. Here are a few reasons why founders are going with a distributed work model:
It makes business sense to go remote
First off, founders are kissing the office overhead goodbye because almost every job at a company can be done remotely. Ask any developer that commutes to work each day, and they’ll tell you that they probably wouldn’t work from an office if it was not required.
In general, companies are contributing to, selling, and servicing a product that’s not usually housed where it’s employees work anyway. The product is almost always cloud based, and the employees do most of their work on other 3rd party cloud based products. It isn’t hard to measure why an office might not be needed to work effectively.
Advances in enterprise software
Knowing that everyone theoretically could work from home at a startup has always been intriguing, but arguable not possible in the past. Communication technology from even a few years ago was not good enough to support a fully distributed team. New technology and better iterations of old technology have made workflow and communication faster. The days of communication inefficiencies on remote teams are gone. Remote workers in 2017 perform the same if not better than their onsite counterparts.
Access to a global talent pool
The third, and maybe most important reason that startups are going remote to access the global talent pool. For software companies, the norm has been to put down roots near a local pool of tech talent. Skill sets are highly sought within local talent pools, so there is no need to limit the company to one local talent pool.
Today, communication tools have gotten to a high enough level and the talent pool is so competitive in certain areas. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to start a company with one physical location.