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title: Wade Foster about the Future of Remote Work

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###### tags: wade_foster futurism work labor remote_work

# Wade Foster about the Future of Remote Work

In this live Video Q&A Wade Foster, Co-founder & CEO of Zapier and Sam Lessin discussed what the future of remote work might look like after Covid-19. They discussed their perspectives on the productivity of a work from home workforce, how different companies might adjust their policies on working from home after COVID-19, and how previous in-office workers may adjust to a more work from home focus.

- It was a side-project without a budget. Living together in an apartment three founders. Y Combinator and then hiring a bit - in Chicago, Missouri etc, different cities. 

- Resilient model, a remote first company. GitLab also remote. GitLab: people nevr turned up in the office. They realized there was something special and turned missionary (Gitlab, Basecamp...).

- Values: self-starters, action oriented, indepently auto-motivated. Transparency needed: people need to know, to be empowered. Information and communication key. Ability to communicate, write stuff down. 

- Empathic and egoless: lots of employees don't have english as native language. So acknowledge people are different. Predominantly talking in text. So sarcasm don't comes across very well. 

- Asynchronous, Slack but also escalate to Zoom. People talking past to each other: people are trained to jump on Zoom. Recognize when you should escalate to Zoom call. 

- G-chat, campfire, slack. Hangouts to Zoom... Calpfire and Hangouts worked for a five person company, the new ones scale. 

- Accelerating. Zoom. Do pretty good job in many things but some slices could use better solutions. 

- Transition: interpersonal skills really important. One type of person: all charm but no substance. In a remote environment getting exposed: where is the stuff. What are they providing? 

- Commits: measuring quantity but also quality. 

- Tools: Zoom, Slack, async. Slack not so good for high-level, mission, strategy, they use an internal tool async for that. Trheads, Twist, Friday, Facebook Workplace. The market for that is fairly constraint and complex implementation. 

- Future is a lot about these tools, how you measure and get things done through these tools. Will work become more structured but downward pressure on wages, more people can do it. Process is clear. But Valley recruits globally so elsewhere wages may go up. 

- Once you structure the knowledge is becomes more a commodity. 

- Where people live changes. How cities change and evolve - more bike only pedestrian only. Geographic mobility. People move around more for other reasons. Carreers are not affected. 

- Slower lot to the office. At least partially remote. How do you get them into elevators. Very slow to get back. Hybrid could be more challening. Hard work not to get dual class, remote as filling in the gaps. Hybrid but still one global culture: calls all from the desks, not only one person. Now people in offices will remember. Commit to let everyone work fews days from house. 

- Why have offices at all? Very expensive. ROI? 

- Real estate? Might be a new model such as We Work, but it's got to be different. 

- One on one's weekly, we stick to that. Your connection is the manager. Weekly staff meetings. Template every week, the rest is to dive in a handful of critical decisions. Sense of camaraderie, community: thursday all hands every week, boss is there to answer, donut calls (random pairs), donut ai at slack, off topic non-work in slack. prefixed with "fun". 

- social calendar outside of work, playing jackbox tv, codenames (easy to do over zoom all). doing silly stuff together. 

- paying wages at the level of the country. 



## Resources
- [Techcrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/zapier-ceo-wade-foster-on-scaling-a-remote-team-up-to-300-employees/)
- [The Information](https://www.theinformation.com/video/157)
- [GitLab about remote](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/)
- [Basecamp about remote](https://basecamp.com/books/remote)
- [Zapier about remote](https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/) 

