Today is an important day for Firstbase and all of us personally.

We are announcing a $2M Series Seed led by David Goldberg at Alpaca and a $13M Series A led by David Ulevitch at A16Z.

Joining A16Z and Alpaca, are Mike Cardamone and James Murphy (Acceleprise), Karen Page (GP at BCapital Group), Beth Turner (General Partner at SV Angel), Johnny Boufarhat (CEO at Hopin), Mac Reddin (CEO at Commsor), Austin Rief (CEO at Morning Brew), Rob Biederman (Chairman at Catalant), Ryan Simonetti (CEO at Convene), Alana Anderson (GP at BaseCase Capital), Andreas Klinger (GP at Remote First Capital), Adrian…

Companies who adopted technology 20 years ago replaced every company that didn’t.

Companies who adopt remote working will replace every company who doesn’t in 20 years.

The reason is incredibly simple: talent and efficiency.

Talent

Unless you are Google, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft remote teams will be far more talented than any office-based team you can build. Talent wars will be won by companies that have great remote work capability, who will wield it to dominate the next decade:

📍Fixed Location

A physical office means you can hire the best person you can afford in a 30-mile radius, disqualifying you from 99.9% …

The future of where people work will be in giving them choice & flexibility.

90% never want to work in an office full-time again
80% want to work from home 3+ days every week
46% want to work from home most or all the time

What’s obvious, is that remote will play a massive part in work going forward.

HSBC announced a remote strategy led by a 40% reduction in office space. They will allow almost all their workers to work remotely, likely from home, for a significant period of the week. Many large companies will follow suit.

That is…

The rise of public announcements has been rapid. Almost daily we see a large tech company or global organization share that going forward that will be a “remote” company. The reality is that their actions will speak far louder than words ever could.

Some companies are paying lip service to something new in hopes of being rewarded for the clout that inevitably comes with it. Others are following through on what they’ve announced.

This brings us to the most important point around this transition to remote.

Whatever the leadership of a company does sets the culture of the company.

Leaders all in office? You’re an office first-culture
Leaders all remote? You’re a remote-first culture

Over the last 3 years, we’ve spoken to 100+ of the leading remote-first companies on the planet

These are the 20 lessons they taught us about how to build a great remote team

1. ✍️ Documentation: documentation is the unspoken superpower of remote teams

The most successful remote companies write down and record knowledge rather than lose it if people leave

Knowledge grows and is improved over time as everyone contributes to a repository of intelligence

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2. 🚨 Asynchronous: remote work is a bridge to async work

The best remote companies aim to avoid replication of the disruptions of…

From the moment I picked up Jason Fried’s book ReWork I was hooked. Much like reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, I felt like I was peering into the future and immediately understood the possibilities of the revolution we are about to experience. I saw not just the potential for my own startup to embrace it as a means to hire world-class people we would otherwise have had no chance of attracting, but more generally as a chance for the future of work to be infinitely better than the soul-destroying, happiness-draining, time-consuming monster that office work has become.

Working in an…

I didn’t like my life.

I felt like something was wrong with me. For about 18 months I battled with that feeling, trying to escape it or find an explanation for why I felt that way.

This was what I had been led to believe a good life should be. School, university, good job, house, family. I’d ticked most of those boxes yet everything felt hollow.

What joy I felt came in fleeting moments I never had time to experience.

I left for work before my daughter woke up, increasingly arriving home after she went to bed, exhausted from a…

The media would have you believe it’s almost 50/50 whether people want to return to the office or continuing to work remotely after Covid-19.

The reality is far clearer

• 90% of people never want to work in an office again full-time
• 50% of people never want to work in an office ever again

The dissonance around this is huge

People who love offices love offices and think everyone else feels the same way as them. The problem is that clearly they don’t.

The office is broken and always has been.

It’s great if you belong to a very specific demographic. …