LeapTakersPodcast_#22 - Job van der Voort

Remo Kyburz: [00:00:00] Coming up on this episode of Leap Takers: 

Job van der Voort: [00:00:02] You know, if you think about it the other direction, if you think about like, what if you don't do things remotely? What if the world was the case that everybody would work in remote companies and the companies would be fully distributed and you would inverse it to like what used to be the standards you think you'd be insane to do that because why would you go to a specific place between specific times? to then look at your screen all day. And I'll be breathing down your colleague necks?. I wish you did that. Like the only advantage is that you can have lunch together beyond that you get everything else when we're working remotely. You, you would be forced to live in a particular place to work for a particular company that doesn't make any sense.
Remo Kyburz: [00:00:40] 

Hey everyone. Welcome to the year 2021. And another episode of the Leap Takers podcast where I'm interviewing upcoming European entrepreneurs, investors, and to makers from various fields to retrace the journey of how to start their own projects and to discover the insights, tips, tricks, and advice. They  gathered so that you too can take the leap. 
I am absolutely excited about today's episode. And I have to honestly say that it's probably one of the interviews I've done so far that I've enjoyed the most, and I'm the most proud of personally. So who is my guest today? I had the privilege to talk to Job van der Voort. Job is the CEO and one of the founders of remote.com. 
Remote makes it possible to employ anyone and anywhere in the world. Their mission is to simplify how companies employ the best talent globally to help remote organizations do their best work and to overall help transform the world's to place with more equal access to employment opportunities. 
And  where you can work more flexibly. And  from anywhere. So remote was probably also among the fastest growing startups globally in 2020. And this backed by some of the best venture capital investors in the world. Such as index ventures, Sequoia,  General catalyst, Two Sigma, and many more, very accomplished investors and angel investors. 
Before founding remote. Job. Worked as a neuroscientist. And he was one of the very first engineers that joined Gitlab. Gitlab is today. A really big name and one of the largest distributed companies in the world. And Job was the VP of product for several years before he decided to start remote.com. 
So you can probably see why I'm so excited about this episode. And we will discuss a variety of super interesting topics and advice for you, listeners that I'm sure you will enjoy. For example, we discuss how Job entered the world of tech and startups, the advantages of remote work, second order effects of this whole remote first trend. We're seeing best practices of working remotely, that origin story and how he founded remote.com. And his tips and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and much more. So overall I'm super excited for this year for 2021. And I have big plans to do the show more frequently and to also provide more content and resources online. 
So not to miss anything, please subscribe to the podcast or a newsletter on the leap takers.com website. And yeah, there's a lot of exciting guests coming, so I hope you keep listening to this show. One last thing before we get started, we recorded this episode at the end of November, 2020. So just FYI as a reference of time, because some of the content in this conversation might refer to the time we recorded this. 
So now you have heard enough from me, I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did with Job van der Voort, CEO and founder of remote.com.  
Hello, Job. Welcome to the Leap Takers podcast. It is really a pleasure to have you on the show today and to chat with you and to learn more about you and what you're building.
  
Job van der Voort: [00:03:47] Thanks. Very much. Happy to be here.

Remo Kyburz: [00:03:49] Yeah. Great. I am always very curious to start interviews and these conversations with finding out a bit more about your background and how you got into entrepreneurship and how you got into tech as a person. So let's get started with that.  Introduce yourself quickly and you know, kind of where you're coming from , and how you got into tech?

Job van der Voort: [00:04:08] Yeah. So yeah, right now I'm the CEO and co-founder of Remote. Before this, I was the VP of product at Gitlab for five years. Before that, I did all sorts of things. My background starts in, I have a bachelor in neuropsychology, which led into a master in neuroscience, where I worked as a researcher for a number of years.
And I was about to start my PhD studying how the brain processes information, which is I was already doing that, but not in a PhD capacity. When I discovered Hackernews and I started to think, well, you know, a PhD program takes four years, at least usually longer, especially the place where I was working, which was very nice.
So, and then after four years, Four years getting paid, almost nothing to work really, really hard. And then as the four years, what I will end up with with this title, but are we essentially forced to start working somewhere else? If you want to have a good career in science, you have to move about and then, you know, I'll be doing a post-doc, which is, you know, still not a really great position.
And it was very short and. You know, let's say that I'm super successful and I, I have this amazing publication then I'll end up as a principal investigator somewhere. And what I will do all day is write grant proposals and there still be like some sort of, you know, board of directors of the Institute where I'll be working.
That is, that are essentially my bosses. And so I worked. You know, many years really, really hard. And I, my career is basically based on the fact of whether I get to publish in a high impact journal and, you know, and like my money is fully dependent on external sources and it feels very limiting.  Like  other than . Working really hard on the science itself. It's very hard to control your own faith. And so I figured that's not really what I want because this will lead to a life of frustration. I'm a very impatient person and to have to wait so much and like, and then be lucky. I am a lucky person in general, I guess if you look at my life, but yeah, I didn't really.
See that happening. So what I did is I left that place where I was doing science, which was in Lisbon and started starting my own company together with Marcello, my current co-founder from Remote as well. But I had no experience in tech. And so I ran out of money really quick within four months or so it was just enough essentially to pay, you know, my food and my rent that I had saved.
And so I was forced to find a job And that was already programming at the time. And I released a bunch of iOS apps. And so I found a job as a programmer, but in the Netherlands. So I had to move back there and I worked for nine months or so as a rails engineer, building a software for the Dutch government.
And then I left that to join Gitlab. And at the time I did a whole bunch of other things, but yeah, that's my story. A little bit. How to begin in a nutshell.

Remo Kyburz: [00:06:44] Yeah, I think that's a really , great intro. And also kind of where I wants to go because I find it very interesting that you have this neuro science backgrounds. And then as you mentioned, you joined Gitlab And I think when you started at the company, they were just around five people.
Could you tell me about how you found this company, how you came across this company and why you decided to Join this.

Job van der Voort: [00:07:05] Yeah, it's not as glamorous. I was working together with Sid the founder and CEO at the, at a company where I was an engineer. And so when he left as company to work on Gitlab, he says, Oh Job, you should join me. And it took me a few months and then I left the company to, to join, gitlab. So.

Remo Kyburz: [00:07:21] Oh,

Job van der Voort: [00:07:21] That was it nothing else there?
It was nice. It was just an open source project and we were using it inside of that company to, you know, for, for whatever you use Gitlab for. So and it was not very, very, very good. It's just like good luck, five point something, I think. Or four point something at the time 

Remo Kyburz: [00:07:37] For the listeners who don't know what Gitlab is, could you briefly explain what the company does?

Job van der Voort: [00:07:42] yeah, Gitlab started. As a source control management platform, which is where you have all your code. If you write code and you collaborate with other engineers nowadays, it's a very large suite of tools that allow you to not just host your code and collaborate on it, but also their States for all sorts of things.
It also has very good project management tools and a million other things it's really quite impressive nowadays.

Remo Kyburz: [00:08:05] Okay. So yeah, you were joining Get lab. And did you know at the time that, you know, it's a fully remote company?

Job van der Voort: [00:08:11] Yeah, yeah. The company, I mean, it was not really a company, right. So when I joined it's when really the company started, then, you know, we were in, I think, four different countries. We Dimitri you started open source project. He was living and he still is living in Ukraine. And so. We were, I see that an eye and Yacob were in the Netherlands and we had married in Serbia.
So there was not really like easy place where he could have an office to get into. And no, I prefered it. It's a good place where I worked at the time. So I was living for. For a few months when it just moved in, I was, I was living in the parents and then later I found a, an apartment close to my parents where my girlfriends now wife also moved in, but I have to travel an hour and a half by train every day to get to that place of work.
So switching from having to travel. An hour and a half, each way, every single day to just working from wherever I wanted, which was home that was a really big upgrade in my life. So, and I never really understood why you had to be in the office, but, you know, I was young. I didn't care very much, but yeah.

Remo Kyburz: [00:09:15] okay. Yeah. I think a lot of, a lot of people feel similarly. And so it's very interesting that, you know, probably at the time it was not. That usual or very uncommon that it was a fully distributed team. I mean, I think still today, it's not that common, but I don't know how, when was that? Like 20
Job van der Voort: [00:09:34] 2013, 2014. Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays. I mean, we, we had remote, we have a heavy bias towards seeing this kind of company, so we see it a lot. And, you know, it will only grow that's that trend, but at the time, yes, it is very rare. And it was not just the distributed thing. It was just the fact that you would work remotely was very weird for people.
And we also would have the conversation, but how do you do things? Why? Like you sit at home all day, isn't that boring? Aren't you all alone? You know, it was a, it's funny looking back now. It was not that long ago. Six years. Big seven years. Yeah.

Remo Kyburz: [00:10:07] But the world can change a lot to think in six, seven years. Sometimes when you think back what didn't exist back then, and now feels like normal quite a lot of companies and tools. So, yeah.  If you could summarize your time at  Gitlab before we move on, like, what was your role there? What were you working on at your time at Gitlab?

Job van der Voort: [00:10:27] Yeah I led Product at Gitlab. So I joined initially I was thinking as a surface engineer, which should basically what was supports and everything else. And then I called myself product manager and then VP of product. And so I was, I worked on the direction of the company. The things that we would built was my responsibility.
So decide what it is that we're going to build. And more importantly, what it is that we're not going to build, because when you build it correctly, it gets lab. A million people ask you for a million different features. And you know, when you are building a very ambitious and complicated product, if you say yes to everything, even if you have the capacity to say yes to everything, you end up building a terrible, terrible system, which is very overly complex and bloated.
And so we try to avoid that which is, which is really, really difficult, especially when you have large enterprise customers. So yeah, everything related to product, essentially.

Remo Kyburz: [00:11:17] . Yeah, I could imagine. I think the you know, the subtraction of features are not saying yes to everything must be really, really hard and deciding what's the best feature , for the product overall. And I also saw that when you were at the company, it grew immensely from five to, I think, 450 employees.
How did you experience that? Like, did you expect that at all in the beginning when you joined or?.

Job van der Voort: [00:11:43] no, no. Early on we were talking, Oh, should we take venture capital or not? And then got into Y Combinator and things quickly flipped, but No.  How would I experience that? Yeah, it was, it was, I don't know. It's it's like, it just happens to you, right? Like it's, it goes really, really fast. It was fun to see.
Right. Because I remember thinking we had 11 employees, so we were like, Oh, we're a real company right now. You know, what is the limit of this? And then we had 40 and I was like, wow, it's getting really, really big. Yeah, but only once you get into the hundreds, it's, it's massive, then you have a massive organization and yeah, it's exciting.
You learn a lot, you're forced to learn a lot and to think a lot about, you know, how do things scale on how do they don't and what works some of them, especially if you build a, you know, a distributed company, there's not a lot of standards to follow or none in many cases. So we had to invent a lot of things ourselves.
And so that was yeah, it was exciting.

Remo Kyburz: [00:12:40] So you're basically, you. Invented, you know, kind of the guidelines for how to work remotely. And I guess, did you also build, internal tools how to communicate or  how you collaborate together or were there already tools around like, you know, today when you have all these collaboration tools?

Job van der Voort: [00:12:59] Yeah, there's those have been around for years. We, we, we were very principled about using Gitlab for a lot of things. So we use our own tool that we would build, which would drive some of them brighter station as well. But beyond that no, we didn't build any internal tools. Those already existed. I think zoom, when it's like started to get big and we migrated over to zoom.
We used everything else, everything under the sun before that That that, that made it quite significant difference because it's like the first one is really, really stable. But beyond that, now the tools are already available and they are still getting better. Absolutely. I think there's without question the case, but you know, the all already existed and they have existed for a long time.
I think Google docs early on was the most important one, which still is, I think one of the best multi-player apps. If you compare it to other multi-player apps.

Remo Kyburz: [00:13:48] Yeah, I still don't really like Google docs as well. The whole Google suite of tools. It's very good to work and collaborate together. Yeah. So I think for me, you know, from an outside perspective looking what you do now with remote, it must've been a very,  good experience to work in a remote first company.
And I want to chat a bit with you about this whole remote first way of work as well.  What do you see as the main advantages for  employees and also for, you know, companies that operate that way , to work fully remotely as a distributed team?

Job van der Voort: [00:14:21] Yeah. You know, if you think about it the other direction, if you think about like, what if you don't do things remotely? What if the world was the case that everybody would work in remote companies and the companies would be fully distributed and you would inverse it to like what used to be the standards you think you'd be insane to do that because why would you go to a specific place between specific times? to then look at your screen all day. And I'll be breathing down your colleague necks?. I wish you did that. Like the only advantage is that you can have lunch together beyond that you get everything else when we're working remotely. You, you would be forced to live in a particular place to work for a particular company that doesn't make any sense.
If we're employers, it doesn't make sense either, because if you are distributed, you can, you know, your talent pool is massive, right? It's massive. It's millions of millions of people. And if you set an office in a particular place and you can hire. From the people that live close to the office and that's it, maybe people that are willing to move close to the office, I think if you look at it the other direction, it's just completely insane.
And, and that's why, you know, it's, you get as an individual, it gets such greater freedom. And then as a business, you get access to so much more talent and happier people and happy people. They produce great work. And it's not to say that it's not nice to be together or not nice to work together. Well, no one is saying that there's not allowed to do, like you're still allowed to do it as with your team or with people that are close.
It's just that, you know, to force everybody to work from same location you're just hurting yourself.

Remo Kyburz: [00:15:48] Yeah. , I find this a really interesting way of looking at it, like in the inverse way. I never heard someone put it that way, but it totally makes sense. So I also, I, someone else told me that like, as an employee, why would you. Go commute to an office. Like I said, every day for an hour, half an hour, then sit at your desk, put on your noise, canceling headphones that you don't hear your other people around.
And then you leave again in the evening all the way back. It doesn't really make sense. So yeah, I think very well put, and I think another aspect as well, maybe I would be curious to get your perspective on that is that from my experience as like someone being 30 year old millennial I would prefer to work for remote first company and they know a lot of friends who say, yeah, I would love to do that.
If I had the opportunity to. To work that way, I would even, you know, accept a lower salary if I could. And I think a lot of companies haven't caught up to that trend. So how do you see that from your perspective, like the, the willingness also from employees to work that way?

Job van der Voort: [00:16:48] Employers

Remo Kyburz: [00:16:49] yeah.

Job van der Voort: [00:16:50] yeah, I, you know, I think a lot of employers will go back to wanting to work from the office, but because of COVID, it's like this secret is out and individuals know, employees know you can actually just do your work remotely. And like, for sure it will be nice to be back to the office if you're used to that, to see your colleagues and do those things that you used to do.
But you also know that it's not hard, like a hard requirement. And like, if your employer says, no, you can never work remotely. You know, that there's plenty of other employers that are willing to so. It's a matter of time. It's a matter of time before, you know, all employers offer this essentially. And what you start to see, for example, in the Netherlands, they just introduced the law or there was already a law, but like they strengthened that law, which essentially States that unless there's like very heavy weighing reasons for an employer to require an employee to not work from home, they should be allowed to work from home or, or anywhere else.
And so. No, that's, that's it like that's the direction that we're headed and yeah. And there's plenty of people that are grumpy about it, but, you know, people were also grumpy about carrying a phony or pockets for years. And then, you know, do you know anyone that doesn't today?

Remo Kyburz: [00:17:56] Good fine. I was also reading during this pandemic and before as well that, you know, there might be some also second or consequences of this trend of working remotely. Some people were saying that, you know, since you can work from anywhere, it has a big impact on how cities are. And also that maybe locations that are now not as popular.
Might be become certain hubs for certain types of people. And you base your location more on maybe lifestyle or very want to live instead of where you have to work. So what is your view on, you know, second order effects of this whole remote trend?

Job van der Voort: [00:18:31] Yeah, I think a lot about it. You know, for one, I think I wouldn't underestimate like how much people like to live in a city. You know, I have two small kids, but if it wasn't for them, I'd probably live in a, in a center of a city New York or ramps that I'm more alone than, or something. So that's something that I think you shouldn't should definitely not ignore, like there's value beyond just your employer there.
But yeah, I think it makes a little sentence. Like there's a lot of people that don't want to live in a location that they live because of their employer. And they'll probably look for something else, even if it's just to, you know, get, get more value out of your, out of your money. Even if you earn less.
Right. Like if you live in a big city, you will get a paid a good salary, but like moving out of it at a lower salary is usually better for your lifestyle in that sense. So yeah, I think we all start to see dads. I think it will be a long time, you know? Sociological changes are very, very slow. And like urban planning changes rules are very, very slow.
So we, you should respect the fact that that will take many years to come into effect. But I think what you're starting to see already is like really intense hot spots for particular things. For example, San Francisco rent prices have been dropping significantly over the past months and it will continue to do so.
And it's not to say that, you know, it won't be the most expensive place in the earth. Probably continued to be so, and for good reason, because there's an amazing amount of tech companies that are also not just moving out, but, you know, things will start to even out a little bit more than they were before.
And that's going to be interesting. There's still a lot of limitations on this as well. Things like the, what we deal with at remote, which is like, you know, compliance, like the ability of actually being able to work somewhere, like where it is legal, how you pay taxes on that, then you know how that's structured.
And that will limit some of these changes as well, but for sure, you're going to see, and especially in larger countries, like the United States where the disparity in prices is massive. Yeah. You're probably going to see a lot more people for, for example, moving inland.

Remo Kyburz: [00:20:30] Yeah. Thanks for , sharing your perspective here. That makes a lot of sense. And I got to ask you since you are the remote guy , what kind of tips do you have for ? Best practices to work remotely for, you know, listeners or people that maybe do it for the first time.
, since this pandemic?

Job van der Voort: [00:20:46] Yeah. A million things. I think the most important thing, it helps to take care of yourself, like your physical wellbeing first. And to do that, if you work remotely all day, you have to get an ergonomic setup. It hurts me to see people hunched over their laptop all day. It's not expensive to buy an external monitor.
And usually your employer is willing to pay for that. Even if they're not. It's like it's worth the $200 that, you know, cheap monetary or, you know, a little bit more for a nicer monitor. So that's that's like that's step one. Just get a good setup. Whereas Ergon, I'll make a good chair. If you buy, like one of those really expensive chairs or Herman Miller, like the one I'm sitting on, which is an error on it's extremely expensive, but they never break.
You can, you'll use it for the rest of your life. And then your children will inherit that that's how good they are. But even if it's not like the top of the line, like don't get a cheap chair, let's say on like a kitchen, they will share, you know, like that's, that's what I see often. Beyond that try to separate work your work area from the rest, if you can.
Especially if you have a family, you know, but even without that, it's good for the psychological distance set up a wired internet connection to your computer that you work with saves you a lot in latency, which is ultimately what kills or makes video chat. Yeah. And beyond that, yeah, I'm familiar in little tubes, but those are really the most important ones because it's all it's fundamental.
So once you get those rights, everything beyond that becomes easier because at least you're not dealing with, you know, there's connection issues that everybody was struggling with. You're not dealing with ergonomic issues that will physically hurt you. So I think those are the basics to nail.

Remo Kyburz: [00:22:22] . Can you say again, the name of the chair? I didn't really catch the

Job van der Voort: [00:22:25] Oh, it's an airon as an A E R O N. Yeah. It's it's like it's the chair for many years. And now the Herman Miller has a few more, really, really, really nice chairs. To me, I've never said that a chair, this comfortable like is ridiculous. It's ridiculous. It's like, It's far more expensive than any other chair I've ever owned, but it's like $1,500 or something, but it's also so worth it.
So, and I w I, I, when I bought it I think this one actually get paid for. And then when I left, I had to pay for like the leftover value. And when I bought it, I got my wife to see that because I was like, Oh, we should order I for you as well. I was just like, no, I don't need it. I don't see that much. She sat on it and she was like, okay, sold.
Buy another one. That's that's how good they are. So, yeah, it's an excessive expense, but it's like a mattress, you know, if you work eight hours a day, you spend most of the day sitting totally worth it.

Remo Kyburz: [00:23:20] Yeah. It's, it's an investment for a  lifetime, as you, as you said, it's like, it lasts a really long time.

Job van der Voort: [00:23:25] Yeah. I don't even know exactly how much I paid any more. I know. I don't feel it, but every day I sit in a chair I'm like, Oh yeah, this, this, this is the most comfortable chair to sit down.

Remo Kyburz: [00:23:33] very cool. And I got to ask, like, the listeners cannot see it, but we are here seeing the videos of each other. Like you have a really nice lighting Is this a special setup you have, or like, what is your tip around webcam usage, et cetera.

Job van der Voort: [00:23:46] Well, my tip is this is use whatever works. So, you know, if you have an external monitor, it's easier to just buy, like one of those  USB cameras and put it on top of your monitor, because then you look straight ahead, which looks natural. So you don't have like a weird angle. You mostly look into Into the camera, which is, makes it look nice as well.
And it's easy because you just plug it in and it works what I have, I don't recommend, but if you want to go crazy, you can, which is I use an DSLR. So it's like professional camera to take pictures and I hook that up with a cam link. From El Gato to my Mac. And and then you need to Mount that on a thing, which you Mount to your desk or tripod next to your desk, and then you can use it as a webcam.
But I don't really, usually we recommend that because it's a lot more fiddly involves a lot of cables. It is slowly getting easier, but still it's like, it's significantly harder than anything else. So you still have to set up the whole tribe volts or like I have a desk lamp. So yeah, I don't actually recommend it, but it does make for a very nice looking, looking feed.

Remo Kyburz: [00:24:46] great. Yeah, I guess some listeners will, you know, might be interested in it. So curious to hear any feedback of people not getting this chairs or changing their webcam set up.

Job van der Voort: [00:24:56] Yeah. If you have links to your podcast, I'll send you a link to the whole

Remo Kyburz: [00:24:59] Yeah, I put everything in the show notes so people can check it out there as well. Great. So we were kind of stopping before when we talked about Gitlab. So now I want to switch to. Find out a bit more about the origin story of remote the company you founded and working on now. So could you walk us through what happened when you left Gitlab and then how you came up with the idea for remote and kind of expand on that whole origin story?

Job van der Voort: [00:25:30] The idea from remote.com Came while I was working at good lamp. So We face the problem that we're solving, we'd remote. And I'll starting from a start, you know, with good luck, we would just hire the best person. We would find so independent of where they would live. But then once you hire someone, you have to pay them.
And if you treat someone like a full-time employee, you have to give them. And full-time employment agreement with benefits and the employment agreements has to be local to where they live. So you would need a Swiss employment agreement, even if you work for me independent of where my business is. So. With that every time we'd hire someone where we never hired someone before we would have to figure that out.
And what we found like, and the only way to do this properly is to found an entity locally. So it means that if I want to hire you, I have to fund a Swiss company and there I have to run Swiss payroll and I have to get the benefits that are local. And it's and I have to comply with local labor laws.
That's really hard. That's really complicated. And we found that that good lab does exactly the problem and our service providers to help you with that. But there were all terrible. They were expensive and they were really slow and were hard to work with. And so we knew that this was a necessity to build something that does this better.
It took us. So I knew that this was something I wanted to solve. I was working for at Gitlab for five years. So I started to set up things to be able to build a company. And I figured I would just call it remote. That's the best name. And I would call it that if I could get remote.Com, which I got.
And so, yeah. I, I worked on, on getting that I joined up with Marcello was one of my best friends and together we founded the company and the rest is history.

Remo Kyburz: [00:27:10] Yeah, it must not have been easy to get that domain name.

Job van der Voort: [00:27:13] No, it, it was not easy. The people that were there was a business running on remote with COVID before. And initially we started talking with them about taking that over, like running it at for them. And over time, it became a, an a matter of how can we just acquire the domain and the assets that came with the previous company and build something new on top of that.
So it took a while that, you know if you want something, you really fight for it, I think it works. And those, those owners there are now small shareholders in remote as well. So I think it worked out really well for, for everybody, a fullest.

Remo Kyburz: [00:27:45] ,  And after you founded the company, I believe in early 2019 how did you go about that? As you mentioned, it's probably a very legal, driven process to set up these entities in all different countries where you want to offer your services. How do you think about that? It seems like a huge problem to tackle?

Job van der Voort: [00:28:03] Yeah. And maybe to provide some context because I think it actually didn't say what we actually do. So what we do is we if you want to employ someone in different countries, so let's say you have a company Swiss and you want to employ someone here in Portugal. What'd you can do is you can use a remote for that.
And what we do is we have entities in all these different countries and we employ people for you. And then we take care of payroll and benefits and anything else that comes with employing someone locally. We just invoice you every month and you just treat the person. As any other employee. And so to be able to do that exactly, as you said, we have to set up those entities.
And and so yeah, starting out with this, the first thing we thought we are going to work with partners, so we're not going to set up our own entities. We're going to work with partners and they are going to help us locally. And once we started exploring that, we learned a few things. One is that the partners would be expensive and hard to work with.
And with that, we would be re re recreating the problem that I faced earlier with good lab where, you know, these companies are hard to work with. And so. We decided that the only way to do this as well, and the only way to connect the whole experience is to set up everything ourselves. And so, yeah, we started out with the countries that we were comfortable with.
I'm from the Netherlands originally. So they're Portugal where both me and my co-founder lives at the time we're still live right now. And and a few other comedy countries that seem obvious to us. Yeah. And that process is a matter of, you know, starting to talk with the attorneys, starting to read into local labor laws, setting up the entities, opening bank accounts.
There's a lot to it it's really complicated and really, really expensive to do. But yeah, it's just a matter, you know, , we had some money available, so use that and just. Go edit. It took us a long time to actually start. It took us until April this year for we could serve any customers at all.
So yeah, quite a while.

Remo Kyburz: [00:29:54] and I guess also this costs is the reason why you went down the route of venture capital again?

Job van der Voort: [00:30:00] Yeah, it would have been impossible to go at this speed without venture capital. We would have been in a business net. We would be probably doing reasonably well, but significantly smaller and not, you know, with a big global footprint. So yeah, that was exactly the reason. Yeah, my co-founder and I we had long conversations about this because we both worked in, you know, extremely well funded venture capital firm.
That's a companies before, and it certainly has positives and negatives, but we saw this opportunity where like, this is the one to take and so we should go as fast as possible here. And so, yeah. That's, that's what we did.

Remo Kyburz: [00:30:35] . I guess speaking of venture capital first of all, congrats to your recent series a fundraise in, in early November. So I truly have to say you have like the creme de LA creme of all the VCs on your cap table. So that's very exciting for you. How was your experience fundraising for remote?
Like, was there a lot of. Excitement with the VCs and, or, or was it still very hard to, get the funding?

Job van der Voort: [00:31:00] no, I, I don't like to talk about it very much because it, wasn't not very hard. We, we are a startup to this quite well in a very hot space. We already had really good, like index hula. There's less rounds. It's already an investor in us. So yeah, there was obviously a lot of interests. And so it was not very, like, it's exciting and it's great that we have such great support and the investors are amazing.
Like the names there are, they are their names. But it's, it's not like there was something special about, I can't tell you an interesting story about how hard it was to his, right. Because honestly, like there's, there's a difficulty about doing it in itself and negotiations and even the paperwork.
There's a, you know, you learn a lot there, but it's not like we sweat it away. And we had, you know, hundreds and hundreds of calls with, with different investors. Now it was not that I had many calls with investors, but yeah, if you, yeah, if you have the, if you have the privilege that we had to raise from these kinds of investors, then no, it's not it's not because you barely get by

Remo Kyburz: [00:32:00] Yeah, no, I mean, I'm very happy for you. I think that's, it's really amazing as I mentioned too, to have this type of support from, from these investors. So it's a very good job and to learn a bit more as well about remote, like, what is your typical customer, for example, like what type of businesses do you see using your services so far?

Job van der Voort: [00:32:19] Yeah. So the way we set up, we're basically agnostic to the kind of customer, right? So we can help any kind of business, small to large and any, any nature of business, whatever did this, that they do. So.  The customers we have now are the ones that we happen to be known at. So there's the companies that our investors have invested in.
Companies that you know, are ran by friends. The companies that are in our space, which is usually tech and such. So we see a lot there. And any size, essentially, mostly companies, you know, that are not enterprises yet with everything below that in size from, you know, tens to hundreds, thousands of employees.
We, we see coming by just not tens of thousands yet. And But then beyond that we see actually quite a few interesting other kinds of cases, these companies that make particular food items, for example, or make physical products that are very much not tech or not even direct to consumer like more traditional businesses.
So yeah, we, we see all of it and, and for us, it doesn't really matter because we are essentially set up in a way that we are agnostic to that.

Remo Kyburz: [00:33:23] Yeah. Yeah. And they also read on your website.  You described yourself almost as like the Stripe for  remote work or something like that. How do I have to match? And if I'm a company and they want to use your services, can I just, you know, visit your website and kind of plug and play kind of start employing someone over your platform?
Or how does it work?

Job van der Voort: [00:33:44] not yet, but by the end of the year, you will be if you employing someone is it's complicated. And so what we found is that, okay. Almost without exception, all our customers have questions for us about how to do that and how to and like, what should I do and how much should I offer, et cetera. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's good to still talk with us, but for, for a large degree, it's, it's, it's pretty quick though.
It's important to realize that if you employ someone it it's a serious thing. Like you should not take it lightly. And so, yeah. Making that like as full self-serve experience is extremely hard and it is not something to play around. They can't like, if, if you say I'm going to have to employ someone anywhere, but particularly in European countries we actually registered a person with a Texas.
The moment we need to, and we, we will have to start paying taxes. They will have to start paying Texas and you cannot miss payments on those Texas and it's so yeah, it's serious business. It's not something that is easy to play with. So, so fully self-serving and fully self enrollment we'll have it live this year, but it will also be extremely gated in a sense that if he wants something custom, if you want something special, if you have questions about a contractor, you want a custom contract.
You'll have to talk to us because we need to protect our liabilities and everybody else's liabilities. And yeah, that's something that is very hard to automate or maybe something we might never be able to automate fully.

Remo Kyburz: [00:35:03] I can only imagine the complexity must be imense for that type of business. And I guess you said you wanted to be live in 30 countries until the end of the year is that's a lot to date.

Job van der Voort: [00:35:15] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it will, it will happen less like one of the countries. Doesn't I'm I'm just checking out the status right now, so I can give you an up-to-date. Yeah. Out of the ones that are, are, are Planned for the end of the year, only three are at risk of not making it. The rest is all.
So yeah, it will be either in 27 or 28 or 30 31. So yeah. Yeah, we're getting there.

Remo Kyburz: [00:35:38] Hmm. And as you are also a fully distributed company how many people are currently working in remote? Like kind of that the listener gets an image of how the company looks like today.

Job van der Voort: [00:35:50] Three months ago, it was 27 people today. It's 57. And I think by the end of the year, it will be 80, 90 people.

Remo Kyburz: [00:36:01] Oh, very nice growth. 

Job van der Voort: [00:36:03] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've got a bunch of venture capital money, right. So we can hire more people to serve our customers better.

Remo Kyburz: [00:36:09] And where do you see your own vision? Remote being in five years?

Job van der Voort: [00:36:14] Well, I hope to be on path or IPO in five years. But like what really, what do we want to do as a business is we want to enable people. From anywhere to have access to better opportunities and ultimately build wealth more sustainably. So, you know, even if you're born in the middle of nowhere and you choose to want to live there, or you're forced to live there because maybe you have to take care of your loved ones you, as soon as still be able to get an amazing job and like really well-paid, if you're very good at what you do now, where I live in the middle of nowhere.
And of course I'm an extremely bad example for this case, but it is possible to, you know, do these kind of jobs from, from the middle of nowhere. And so the only thing that we really see that is stopping people from doing it is what we're solving. And so if we are everywhere as a business, we can actually make a meaningful change and have a meaningful impact on the way people live their lives in a way people perform their jobs and the jobs that they get.
So that's, that's the main goal. And that's where we want to be. And I hope in five years we can be in all countries in the world. There are sanctions countries where we can never go. But beyond that, I think we, we will probably be in most countries.

Remo Kyburz: [00:37:19] that sounds super exciting. And wishing you already best of luck and success the world for that for that plan. And  having you here as a guest, I'm also curious for me. And also of course, for the listeners, what would be your advice as like a, I would say accomplished founder, you've worked in like now two really successful companies or one ways to do success for aspiring entrepreneurs or.
People that just started their company, their own startup, what would be your, you know, your main takeaways? So your main advice for someone who tries to do the same?

Job van der Voort: [00:37:53] Oh that you have to be incredibly lucky. That's really it, you know I I'm, I'm good at the things that I've been doing, but I've also been fortunate enough to that's my success sort of like me being good at things was in businesses or in ways that also worked out really, really well. Right. So. at Gitlab. I thought I did a pretty good job, but it was not just me. It was also a good market to be in. And we were lucky in some ways. And you know, there were many successful people there. So I was lucky personally that, you know, I got the lift the long in the, in the, on the rockets, in that sense. And now at remote you know, if it wasn't for this pandemic we would do else business.
I don't know if we would, would have raised 35 million. So I don't know. I just, I was justOne thing to never do, is to compare yourself to other people because your situation will always be different. And I wouldn't necessarily aspire to be an entrepreneur. By itself or for the fame or for the money, you should just follow what you do. What do you think you want to do in life? Right. That's that's ultimately it. And for me, you know, I wanted to do science for a long time because I wanted to understand how the brain works and I really enjoyed science. But I disliked the life around this and I longed for like having more freedom and being my own boss and like the best way to be your own boss to be your own boss.
And so that was a good way, but you know, I think in another life, I would have been a very happy iOS developer, for example, I'm a big Apple geek and I'm. I'm a terrible programmer, but I can program. So, you know, maybe I would have done that then I would have maybe been just as happy or maybe heavier, maybe less let's have a less stressful life.
I don't know. I just, I feel like it's unfair to generalize my experiences to other people. My advice would be to try to follow, do things that you want to do and you enjoy and try to build a life that you want to live. And, and Yeah. The one thing I want to say is like, if you want to take risks, take them as early as possible in your career.
The older you get, the harder it is to take risks. The more dependents you have with the partner be that kids, or even just, you know, other people in your life that you have to, or want to take care of the younger you are, the easier it's probably is to, to not have those situations and to take more risks.
And I'm glad that I took a lot of risks. I moved to cross countries, started my own businesses and none of them, none of it like. And was in particular, but it did give me, you know, that those experiences. And so I guess that's.

Remo Kyburz: [00:40:18] Mm. Oh, that's, that's very, very valuable to see your perspective. I think. Thank you so much for that. I think you, you said it really well, like you should follow your passion and what do you want to do? And A lot of people that I talk to her that I hear that, you know, they want to work maybe not yet, not start your own company, but they want to work for a company that has an impact.
And also that gives them, you know, flexibility where and how they work. And. My experiences or from what I see is that a lot of these jobs like that are remote friendly or that you can work from wherever they're mainly for technical, for like for developers, et cetera. Do you think that also will change or do you like how maybe you have a, I know idea, but maybe you have a perspective on that. Do you think it will also become more common for non-technical people? To, to work

Job van der Voort: [00:41:05] It already is. No, it already is, you know, there's a, there's a huge demand for engineers. So it might seem like that, but there's a greater demand for designers, for example. And now what we see is when there's a massive demands for great marketers. So no, you know, and like salespeople, haven't been working remotely for many years and that continues to be the case and there's almost.
An endless demand for salespeople as well. Any successful business is looking for any sales kind of role, right? From, for any level of entry to very senior. So no, I think we're already there. If you, if you look at like who we employ it remote, my thoughts was similar to yours that we would start out by just.
You know, helping companies hire developers during South to be the case. It doesn't, that's not true at all. We hire all over the board, all sorts of roles. And it's not necessarily majority engineers it's we're way past that. So yeah, there are plenty of jobs for now. There still is a shortage of remote jobs like international remote jobs versus the amount of people that would like to, you know, work at these kinds of companies, but it will change.
It's a matter of time and it's changing really, really, really fast. So if you, if you really want a remote job, just keep looking for it. Like there's plenty of remote job boards. We have one it's it's small, but there's many, many, many, most of the existing job alerts that are also pivoting to, you know, showing remote jobs.
So yeah, it's, it's, I'm not saying that it's not that it's easy to find a job like that. It's not, you still have to be very good and like match the company really well, but it is possible.

Remo Kyburz: [00:42:36] Thanks for sharing that. I know we are short on time, but still, maybe let's quickly jump into a few rapid fire questions before we, before we wrap up. So if I could just get your quick, you know, first thoughts about, about where you think that will be. Great. So what's a book that had a big personal impact on your life on and thinking?

Job van der Voort: [00:42:57] The man who mistook his wife for a hat, I think that's he's had a head for awhile and now the other way around, there's a book from all of her sex led me to study psychology and then neuroscience. 

Remo Kyburz: [00:43:08] I haven't heard of that one, but . I'll look it up and also put it in the show notes. What is your favorite remote work tool? You mentioned Google docs before, but maybe , some Ellis tools you like?

Job van der Voort: [00:43:20] Figma. I think it's it's my favorites. I think it's, it's it's the one where I feel like the nails, almost everything. And like what they're missing, they're still adding, I think notion is also really high on that list, but I think Nosha still has a lot long way to go before it it's like good, good.
But Figma I'm like, I mean, it's a designer's tool, but it's something, if you build products you use all the time, it's just so incredibly good. It's so good. Yeah.

Remo Kyburz: [00:43:45] Maybe it's just to dive really quick, into Figma. I know the tool, but maybe for the audience, could you tell them quickly what it is and what it makes so great?
Job van der Voort: [00:43:53] Yeah, so it's a, it's a design tool, so you can make vector designs in it. So it's really good for like creating from like rough concepts of what your product is going to look like to high fidelity things or even marketing materials. And it, it's why it's so good is because the multiplayer working together with multiple people. Is perfected in it, but it doesn't really lack in other aspects either. Like it performs really, really well. And it, the SVG too, like the factor tools are also really good. And then they have plug-ins, they have a giant plug-in system. They have, you know, support for design systems. It's. It's just a really, really good tool.
I'm happy to CEO of Figma as an investor in remote. So I, I got him to like, obviously have to do that as a, as a fan boy of his.

Remo Kyburz: [00:44:40] very cool. Awesome. 
, if you could travel back in time, what advice would you tell your younger self when you just kind of started out in your career?

Job van der Voort: [00:44:50] Buy more Bitcoin probably. 
 Not much, you know, I, I, I've been very fortunate to, in everything I do. I wouldn't, I wouldn't change much about what I did. I, I had a very easy life.

Remo Kyburz: [00:45:03] And last question in the context of, you know, life and work, and also in relation to the name of this podcast, what does courage mean to you personally?

Job van der Voort: [00:45:12] That's a good question.  , choosing for yourself and not choosing to live up to someone's expectations. I think that is one of the most important thing for a long time. I thought about how other people would perceive me doing particular things. But letting go of it is extremely freeing and allows you to do whatever you want.
So, you know, choosing, choosing for, for, for yourself. And so, yeah, it helps you, it helped me not look up to, you know, people that did extremely well in their lives or that are, for example, extremely rich, because if you stop. If you admitted yourself that that's not really, what's making you happy and like, you can actually choose to do something else.
It will make your life a lot easier. So I guess that.

Remo Kyburz: [00:45:56] Great. Well, you know, it was a pleasure talking to you Job. Thank you so much for coming on the Leap Takers podcast and maybe some last words from your side. You know, if there's anything you want to share with the audience, or if you want to tell them where I can find out more about remote feel free to do so now.

Job van der Voort: [00:46:12] Yeah, thanks Remo very much. Well remote is calm. If you have anything for me, you can find me on Twitter at @Jobvo. I'll be on that. Yeah. If you want to work for another business and that's in another country. And they are not necessarily hiring in your country. You should tell them I will work through remote.
They'll take care of all the bureaucratic bullshit, and then I can work for you. So please do that. And then if they are not cooperative, you send me an email. It's  job@remote.com Tell me this company does not want to hire me. Can you please help me? And I'll try to convince them.

Remo Kyburz: [00:46:48] Oh, great. So yeah, listen to everyone do that. Yeah. So thank you so much again for taking your time. Really appreciate it. And it was an interesting conversation.

Job van der Voort: [00:46:59] Thanks.

Remo Kyburz: [00:47:00] Hey, before you go. I just want to ask you for a very small favor. If you get any value out of this podcast, please quickly head over to the Apple podcast store or wherever you are listening to this and give the  Leap Takers podcast a positive rating. It just takes 10 seconds. This would really help me to get more visible and I'll be able to continuously bring on great guests to the show. 
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