cto, remoteI have been researching and I thought I would try to spark a conversation here about this topic: Startup with Remote CTO.
Here is the story:
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There is a B2B company which has been providing services for a year and has been, in the last few months, focusing on adding technology to their offering. The plan is to put more and more energy and efforts into the tech, turning the company into a tech company first.
The company has a steady amount of revenues from the services and is soon going to start a beta program with some customers for the tech part (a SAAS platform).
The CEO has worked alone in the first year, while the CTO took care of all the tech and turned the idea into reality, becoming co-founder at the 1st-year “birthday” of the company.
Now, the CTO believes they can work remotely (from another continent). The CTO also thinks that by being in another region of the world the company would increase their presence by having face-to-face meetings with prospect clients in that region.
The CEO, on the other hand, doesn’t believe it is possible to have a remote CTO and is thinking of either convincing the CTO to remain or to change their role to a C-less one (e.g. backend developer, software architect, etc.)
The CTO doesn’t want that and by not being able to be remote (as it was previously discussed during the initial agreement) that would be a deal breaker.
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Is it possible? Would you have examples where one or more of the founding members went full-remote and it either worked or crashed?
They’re both kind of right. For context, we’re 100% remote at Scrapinghub, and have over 100 employees. The management team is spread as far east as India and as far west as the US east coast. I’d say this much:
It’s perfectly possible to have a remote CTO. In no way does it get in the way of productivity if you use the right tools and hire the right people (hint: autonomous). And it indeed allows to spread the number of time zones where you’re able to do meetings with clients at sensible work hours.
But, there also is something to be said about how being remote can get in the way of working as a team at sensible work hours. If the company’s managers don’t have 3-4 hours worth of slots per day where they can potentially meet one another in a Hangout, they’ll end up needing to constantly work async - and that can make a serious dent in their respective productivity and in their teams’ productivity. Likewise for the manager relationships with employees: a manager’s team should have 3-4 hours worth of potential meeting slots each day. The less compatible time slots the entire team has, the more precious those time slots become. You need at least 3-4 hours worth of time per day where the entire team is online so they can interact with one another and streamline activities.
Put another way, try to avoid extreme time zone differences between people who need to regularly interact with one another. My own limit is a 6-7h time zone difference. I’m lucky to be based in Europe in this respect: my two teams are spread between India and the US east coast. I’d be very hard pressed to recruit anyone further east or west, because I’d be short on meeting slots to call up a quick 15min Hangout with all parties concerned should I need to quickly sort out whatever that day’s fire might be. And I’d fully expect the managers who report to me to have everyone in their team be in time zones that are compatible with theirs as well (but not necessarily mine).
Aside: I’ve seen the damage that being too far away can do first hand. Picture dysfunctional decision making where two managers in barely compatible time zones aren’t on the same page and give contradictory directions to an employee. It’s even worse when that employee can’t meet both managers together unless someone volunteers to book a meeting between 12am and 6am to gather all three stakeholders to put everyone on the same wavelength. Projects can drag on forever when that happens - or worse. From Europe, I’d think twice before accepting work from a client or an employer based in California or Australia - I’d relocate to somewhere closer if it’s a long-term opportunity.
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