Session Lab

Session Lab started as a hobby project 10 years ago before Robert Surty and his co-founder realized they actually had customers and a real business on their hands. After five years of side-project status, they went full-time and began hiring as revenue grew. The product itself emerged from a real need: helping facilitators, consultants, agile coaches, and learning & development professionals design better workshops through an intuitive drag-and-drop agenda planner and a library of reusable workshop activities and icebreakers.

From day one, Session Lab was fully remote. Robert lives in Hungary, his co-founder in Sweden, and the company is officially Estonian. The 13-person team spans 10 different countries across Europe and beyond. This remote-first approach wasn't a strategic choice so much as a practical necessity—bootstrapped founders looking for the best talent couldn't afford to hire in major tech hubs. As Robert explains: "We don't have the money to hire in these major cities. And so we look around for the best people we can find."

What started as constraint became their operating model. The challenge, though, was realizing that building and maintaining a cohesive team was itself a job—something that didn't come naturally to product-focused founders. Robert describes the evolution: "Initially, as founders, we are into product and figure out marketing and sales. And then realize, oh, we have now people on the team... we need to figure out what is our culture and how to keep people engaged."

Session Lab implemented a multi-layered approach to remote engagement, treating it as a core business function rather than HR theater. Every weekday starts with an async daily check-in via Geekbot where team members answer four questions: How do you feel today? What did you do since yesterday? What will you do today? What obstacles are impeding your progress? The tool captures both social and work context—people share not just tasks but personal context ("I spent the weekend with friends and my kids").

These daily check-ins serve dual purposes: keeping everyone loosely aligned on what others are working on, and creating an "async water cooler" where vulnerability and openness breed connection. As one team member noted after joining: "When I was working in person, I never knew that much about my colleagues."

Beyond daily pulses, Session Lab structures regular synchronous moments: Monday team alignment calls (30-45 min per sub-team: product, marketing, customer success) to discuss weekly priorities and quarterly OKRs; bi-weekly all-hands (they reduced from weekly to cut meeting fatigue) focusing on strategy, big design projects, and customer personas rather than operational updates; and monthly team bonding events—online games like "Cozy Juicy Real" that facilitate gratitude and vulnerability.

Twice yearly, the entire team retreats together for a week, mixing focused work sessions on complex projects with leisure time and unstructured bonding. Robert emphasizes the "trust battery" concept: in-person time builds collaborative momentum that fuels months of remote work. "After the retreat, we communicate more, we shift things faster, we solve disagreements faster."

One creative tool they tested: Spatial.chat, a spatial video conferencing platform where avatars can hang out asynchronously during the day. Dev teams found it useful for complex projects requiring quick real-time alignment without forcing constant synchronous presence.

Perhaps most interesting: a monthly reflection survey (sent directly to Robert, not managers) asking about accomplishments, challenges, satisfaction ratings, and how leadership can help. This catches people struggling quietly—those not frustrated enough to proactively seek help but unhappy nonetheless. It also gives every team member a direct outlet to leadership, creating psychological safety.

Robert frames all these practices through two lenses: efficiency (enabling people to do great work) and belonging (making people feel valued and appreciated). Most tools serve both purposes. He emphasizes iteration: "It's a very iterative process to come up with what works for you and your team." What works at 5 people differs from 13; what works with overlapping time zones differs from fully async teams.

Critically, most engagement activities are optional. People aren't forced to join monthly hangouts or random coffee chats (scheduled via the Slack app Donut). Yet most do, because the culture signals that connection matters.

The tradeoff is real. Two recurring meetings weekly (one for alignment, one for team spirit) plus monthly bonding events and retreats requires discipline. But Robert sees the ROI: people perform at their best when they feel valued and connected to teammates they know and trust. As he reflects: "People want to be part of a workplace where they are valued... whenever I felt that my boss has valued me, I really put my best there because I don't want to let people down who care about me."

Robert acknowledges one critical variable: time zone overlap. Session Lab enjoys the luxury of plus-minus one-hour overlap across Europe. Truly async remote companies (zero overlap) face a harder problem—they must lean heavier on documentation, processes, and hiring experienced remote workers who need less synchronous interaction. "If I would not have overlap with somebody who I work together with, then I would be very cautious to handle somebody who just starts it out," Robert notes. The infrastructure of connection looks the same, but the lift is steeper.