Remote

Remote was founded in 2019 by Jo Bendervoort (Dutch) and Marcelo Leb (Portuguese) with a simple but powerful insight: the future of work is distributed. Rather than build another tool and hire traditionally, the founders decided to become their own first customer. They built Remote as a fully distributed company from day one, experiencing firsthand the pain points of global employment—payroll, compliance, taxes, visas, and benefits administration across multiple jurisdictions. This wasn't a theoretical exercise; it was the lived reality that would shape their product.

The founders didn't just build a product—they built a company culture first. Before they had product-market fit, they defined five core values: excellence, kindness, ownership, transparency, and ambition. These values were intentionally specific to Remote's mission. "Ownership" meant owning customer outcomes, not just areas of work. "Kindness" was operationalized as "clear is kind"—pushing for radical transparency in written communication to avoid wasting time in a distributed setting. This values-first approach became the foundation for everything that followed.

Remote's growth strategy centered on becoming a model for distributed work itself. By scaling to over 1,000 employees across 70 countries and maintaining a strong culture, they became living proof of their platform's value. They operationalized their values through deliberate practices: public employee handbooks, emoji-based recognition channels, values-embedded performance reviews, and documentation-first workflows using Notion. They even published a "Remote Workforce Report" showing that fully remote companies see higher productivity, engagement, retention, and employee satisfaction.

Asynchronous work became the engine of their operations. Rather than forcing synchronous meetings across time zones, they built a culture of excellent written communication, public Slack channels, bias towards action with rapid pivoting, and autonomous teams hired specifically for alignment with company values. This wasn't just philosophy—it was operational necessity that became competitive advantage. The company screens candidates through a publicly available handbook, automatically filtering for mission-aligned hires. They reported receiving 10,000 applications per month.

On measurement, Remote focused purely on outcomes rather than activity tracking. Managers conducted regular one-on-ones and tracked delivery of objectives. The transparency of their async-first, public-by-default culture meant underperformance became apparent quickly without invasive monitoring.

Remote has grown to over 1,000 people across 70 countries, offering two main products: an employer of record (EOR) solution for hiring employees abroad and a contractor management platform for compliant international payments. Their VP of Growth emphasized that culture and values aren't "woo woo"—they point to research showing predictive relationships between organizational culture and performance (citing sociologist Ron Westrom's studies on safety outcomes in aviation and healthcare). Remote's model proves that distributed work, when supported by strong values, transparency, and async-first practices, drives business outcomes while enabling employees to lead better lives.