Bryan Helmig сo-founded Zapier in late 2011 with good friends Mike and Wade, which was admitted to YCS12 (Y Combinator) batch. Zapier is a web automation app to build Zaps which can automate the most tedious parts of your day to day job. You can connect two or more apps like Slack or Mailchimp or Hubspot or Google to automate repetitive tasks of data sharing between apps without coding or relying on developers to build the integration for you.

Zapier team has been remote and distributed since day 1. Company leads and employees have put together The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work where they describe their experience regarding the remote work. For example, how to run or hire a remote team, how to build a culture in a virtual team, how to work in different time zones, how to avoid burnout in a remote team, and much more. Additionally, Zapier folks describe the experience of other remote companies that inspire them and give a list of helpful remote team management tools.

Back in March 2017, Zapier announced a “de-location package” that consisted of $10,000 in moving reimbursement to employees who decide to move away from the Bay Area. The company said that after the announcement, they saw the job application number growing by 50%.

Bryan is a remote CTO working with a 100% remote development team since the very beginning of the company’s growth. In his interview with YouTeam Co-founder and CPO Yurij Riphyak, Bryan shares his thoughts on working with remote engineers and best practices of managing a development team distributed all over the world.

Yurij: At your recent talk at Y Combinator, two-thirds of the entire time was devoted to remote team management questions. People were asking less about what Zapier does but more about this kind of experience. Our feeling is that people who are working with remote teams formed a kind of small community, almost like a minority, and I feel like we at YouTeam are also a part of it. What I found that most of YC companies are quite sceptical about managing a remote dev team. Can you remember how did you and your co-founders arrive at this decision to start hiring remote workers in the first place?

Bryan: Well, we didn’t decide from the very beginning that we’re gonna be a remote company. It’s kind of ‘just happened’. We were working remotely and using Slack, GitHub so all the work was done online anyways. We’d got to start there. We had to grow our team and we needed to hire people we trust.

We were in California, Mike (Co-founder & CPO of Zapier) had moved back to Missouri. The people we trusted were folks we went to school with and worked with previously and they worked in the same area as us. We had them in Chicago, we had other people in Missouri, and we wanted to hire them since we knew they were good. We were familiar with an option of a remote team software development. We thought that was a reasonable and really effective way to get awesome people to comprise one team. It wasn’t like a grand plan, it was more emergent based on the pressures of what we wanted. It just happened.

Yurij: So it was like a low-hanging fruit for you, something that you could quickly approach and start using, right?

Bryan: Yes, I think so. That’s at least how I remember it. We certainly never sat down and said: “We’re building a remote company”. There was always just “We want to hire this awesome person and they don’t work here or live right by us”.

Yurij: Right, thanks. So why do you think most of the other startups are afraid of hiring remote engineers or CTO team? What do you know at Zapier that they probably don’t?

Bryan: I think there’s probably two pieces. One – most people are used to going to the office, that’s how they’ve done all the work before. That’s a pretty classic way to work. If you paint for a living, you can’t paint remotely; you have to be at the canvas, you have to be at a certain location. There’s no other option for this type of work. In tech, however, not all people realize that’s not necessary anymore.

The other thing is about people that have more experience working in mixed (co-located) teams rather than purely remote. I think that’s the worst scenario if you’re building a remote and in person/co-located team together. Then you have to optimize all your processes for both teams which requires a lot of careful consideration even in little decisions, like how you communicate with staff, how you hold meetings, and how you do calls. You have to ask yourself: “Is it acceptable that you have a quick meeting or an ad hoc meeting in an office but don’t like people calling in?” I would say: “No, that’s not acceptable”, because you have to let people come in. You can go even further and say “Well, we may be co-located, but everybody has to call in to the meeting”, and then “Hey, you’re going to that room, I’m going to this room, let’s split up our Slack chat.” And you really split up. It’s weird, but both are the kinds of steps you will need to take to make that team to work on the same level. I think that’s a point of friction if you co-locate which startups might be afraid of.

It’s a momentum of how people have always worked in tech trying to distribute their workforces. They probably just had tested it in really bad settings. However, we at Zapier are doing it kind of this purely remote way. Everybody’s on the same level. Everything’s optimized around it and that’s great.

Yurij: It’s interesting because what you said is quite counterintuitive like normally you think “Ok, I have a core team, which has to be quick in their uptake, and then I can extend it with a remote team.” But in fact, most of our clients, for example, that set up remote team startups through YouTeam, do it at the very beginning of their growth. First, there are just two or three founders who decide for a remote team software development. I mean, it’s not like they convert to it at certain stages. Well, did you have to develop any external practices and special tools to meet these challenges of managing a distributed CTO remote team?