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> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I know at least one company who did that: Mobile Jazz. I sta

by znq 10y ago

> It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. I know at least one company who did that: Mobile Jazz. I started that company in 2009, initially as a freelancer, because I wanted to focus on lifestyle, rather than business success and I wanted to surround myself with other smart people, but also such that have a similar philosophy in life. We're now a 20 people company with our HQ in Barcelona. However, everyone is allowed to work from wherever they want and (if it is planned properly in advance) also as much as they want. Some of us travel a lot. I've been "homeless" for 2 years now and spend most of my time living out of a camper van: https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg https://i.imgur.com/qZy6Vkd.jpg One of our employees is currently taking 1 year around-the-world trip with his wife, not rushing, but settling down at least 1 month at each place in order to work comfortably. I've just met up with them in Bali. On top of our personal freedom and travels we also organize about 3 company events per year, which are voluntary to attend. Some examples: * Remote office in Thailand: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical-island-in-thailand/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/working-remotely-from-a-tropical... * Skiing in the Alps: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-company-for-a-week-to-enjoy-a-magnificent-winter-holiday-in-the-austrian-alps/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-we-decided-to-stop-the-compa... * Summer Camp in the Spanish Pyrenees: https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish-pyrenees/ https://mobilejazz.com/blog/work-life-balance-in-the-spanish... * Remote office in Cape Town (blog post pending) * Remote office in Martinique (coming up this fall) We pay everyone the same salary (a fair basic salary), but the interesting thing is that every quarter we share a huge chunk of our profit with everyone in the team through bonuses. We've managed to build an amazing team, hiring mostly through our personal network. Same goes for our clients. We are doing zero sales, but all the work we get comes through word of mouth. And we're constantly overbooked. We're fully transparent with what we do and even share it with our clients in a monthly newsletter. Now, the funny thing is, they love it. They sometimes even tell us, that they want to stop hire us and they want to start working for us ;-) By giving my team a lot of freedom and trust, they've learned how to be responsible and act as if would be there business. I can even trust them so much that I just took of a whole month from my role as the CEO and voluntarily worked on a sailing boat crossing the South Pacific from Micronesia to New Caledonia: https://goo.gl/KPXI21 https://goo.gl/KPXI21 Happy to answer any questions :-) EDIT: for completion, we're mostly a consulting/services company: http://mobilejazz.com/ http://mobilejazz.com/ - but we also run a couple of our own products, e.g. https://bugfender.com/ https://bugfender.com/ and https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology https://mobilejazz.com/products/enterprise-push-technology

aaronbrethorst 10y ago
> because I wanted to focus on lifestyle, rather than business success If you want to be able to focus on lifestyle, you must have the business success part pretty well sorted out. Otherwise, how would you be able to underwrite all of the activities and profit sharing you describe?
- znq 10y ago
  Depends what you define as "success". Probably my wording was not the best. Our business is extremely successful, but in different ways that most people define success. We don't have a huge monetary success and no one is going to buy our company for multiple millions, but we have a lot of freedom, cool people and pretty fun adventures together without having to worry about financials either as long as don't start driving Lamborghinis ;-) That said, the financials need to be good to support the lifestyle part. But if you live smart (not wasting money on a lot of things you probably don't need anyway) you get pretty far.
deleted 10y ago
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sandGorgon 10y ago
This is awesome and something to be proud of ! How many hours per day do you expect your employees to work ? (I realize it may be task based...but what does it end up spending?) Second, can you talk about the tools you use to manage the company ? How do you track everyone's work,etc - is it self reported like Google Snippets,etc. Have you ever fired anyone?
- znq 10y ago
  Thanks. I appreciate it. You know, sometimes I develop envy when I read news about the financial success of other startups, but then when I take a break from work to go kitesurfing or for a yoga class in the middle of the day I feel pretty happy and proud of what we have achieved :-) > How many hours per day do you expect your employees to work? We don't expect any fixed number of hours. As long as stuff gets done and no-one suffers we're pretty cool about it. It does require discipline in planning by everyone though. Taking a day or two of spontaneously usually also isn't a problem. > Second, can you talk about the tools you use to manage the company? - Slack (we just recently moved over from HipChat as we couldn't deal with constant connectivity issues any more) - Asana (best investment ever) - Google Apps (Gmail, GDocs, tons of spreadsheets, calendar, etc.) - Trello - Harvest (for tracking of hours, invoicing, etc.) > Have you ever fired anyone? Yes we have. We have a very special culture with a lot of freedom and flexibility, but that also requires high responsibility. We hire mostly on gut feeling and are pretty good at that. But honestly, you only know after you've worked with people for a couple of months. And while some might be technically excellent, there are those that are no team players, can't communicate well when it's needed or don't have a sense of accountability. Basically these people need supervision, and the way we work we don't have supervision and also don't want it.

by znq 10y ago

aaronbrethorst 10y ago

> because I wanted to focus on lifestyle, rather than business success If you want to be able to focus on lifestyle, you must have the business success part pretty well sorted out. Otherwise, how would you be able to underwrite all of the activities and profit sharing you describe?

znq 10y ago
Depends what you define as "success". Probably my wording was not the best. Our business is extremely successful, but in different ways that most people define success. We don't have a huge monetary success and no one is going to buy our company for multiple millions, but we have a lot of freedom, cool people and pretty fun adventures together without having to worry about financials either as long as don't start driving Lamborghinis ;-) That said, the financials need to be good to support the lifestyle part. But if you live smart (not wasting money on a lot of things you probably don't need anyway) you get pretty far.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sandGorgon 10y ago

This is awesome and something to be proud of ! How many hours per day do you expect your employees to work ? (I realize it may be task based...but what does it end up spending?) Second, can you talk about the tools you use to manage the company ? How do you track everyone's work,etc - is it self reported like Google Snippets,etc. Have you ever fired anyone?

znq 10y ago
Thanks. I appreciate it. You know, sometimes I develop envy when I read news about the financial success of other startups, but then when I take a break from work to go kitesurfing or for a yoga class in the middle of the day I feel pretty happy and proud of what we have achieved :-) > How many hours per day do you expect your employees to work? We don't expect any fixed number of hours. As long as stuff gets done and no-one suffers we're pretty cool about it. It does require discipline in planning by everyone though. Taking a day or two of spontaneously usually also isn't a problem. > Second, can you talk about the tools you use to manage the company? - Slack (we just recently moved over from HipChat as we couldn't deal with constant connectivity issues any more) - Asana (best investment ever) - Google Apps (Gmail, GDocs, tons of spreadsheets, calendar, etc.) - Trello - Harvest (for tracking of hours, invoicing, etc.) > Have you ever fired anyone? Yes we have. We have a very special culture with a lot of freedom and flexibility, but that also requires high responsibility. We hire mostly on gut feeling and are pretty good at that. But honestly, you only know after you've worked with people for a couple of months. And while some might be technically excellent, there are those that are no team players, can't communicate well when it's needed or don't have a sense of accountability. Basically these people need supervision, and the way we work we don't have supervision and also don't want it.