15 ms·

Fast-Growing Remote Startups

218 points by warp 7y ago

KyleBrandt 7y ago
I wonder what the criteria is for "startup"? GitHub jumped out to me as maybe not a startup anymore. Glitch, formally fogcreek is 20 years old... Maybe has employees about the same age as the company :-p
- itronitron 7y ago
  yeah, neither is Elastic which is a public $6B company
  - camwoodsum 7y ago
    Hey guys! I created the product so I can answer this one. You're right that Elastic and Github (and Stripe and Twilio) aren't startups. The list is really just the fastest-growing companies (not necessarily just startups). This is good feedback. I might clarify this in the text before the table itself. Even though these companies are big, they're growing fast and I thought it would be helpful to add them.
    - travisjungroth 7y ago
      Not your fault, you're in the middle of using a messy term. People call Google a startup.
    - tasuki 7y ago
      Elastic is marked as "Remote First? No, but heavily remote" - I work at Elastic, and would say Elastic is very much remote-first, though our preferred term is "distributed": https://www.elastic.co/about/distributed https://www.elastic.co/about/distributed Edit: Also, we're bigger than GitLab! ;)
      - camwoodsum 7y ago
        Fixing this now! Thanks for letting me know :)
- hinkley 7y ago
  Maybe at this point 'startup' = 'tech company' in some people's heads.
bigcohoneypot 7y ago
hcaptcha.com is remote only and hiring
philsnow 7y ago
By "fastest growing" they mean by employee headcount: > Understanding employee growth numbers: Employee growth measures how fast the number of employees has grown. i.e. 100% employee growth in 1-year would mean the company has doubled in size in the last year. 200% employee growth would mean the company has tripled in size. Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  >Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to. Perhaps revenue-growth and headcount-growth are proxies for different aspects of the company? For example, revenue-growth might signal how long the positions are likely to last, and maybe something about chances of the company being acquired. Whereas headcount-growth may be a better signal regarding how much the organizational / management structures will need to change, and what the odds are for carving out your own role amidst the chaos.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    They're proxies, yes. Headcount is an easier number to come by because companies (misguidedly?) think that "we quadrupled our headcount in the last 12 months!" is something to brag about, so they're more public with these numbers than with revenue / cost numbers. Yeah if you're okay playing game of thrones and don't particularly care that the company you work at might not be serving a viable market, headcount is a good metric to go by.
    - camwoodsum 7y ago
      Hey guys! Cam here (the creator of the product). Thanks for taking the time to check out this list and for commenting about it :). Revenue growth and profit growth would be awesome metrics to have but those aren't publicly available for most of the companies on the list. I think employee growth is the best objective metric because it captures fundraising and/or profit growth in one combined metric (because companies that are hiring either raised money, are making money, or perhaps aren't good at running their business). This is really just a starter metric to compare thousands of companies to each other but obviously if you were going to join one of these companies you would want to do much deeper due diligence.
inertiatic 7y ago
My experience is that it's extremely hard to even get to the interview stage with most well-known remote companies, I assume due to the sheer volume of applications they get. At the same time, the initial application form for a lot of them keeps growing so for myself it just seems no longer worth spending the time to craft responses to these questions for a very small response rate.
- cheschire 7y ago
  So then the process is working. Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably an amazing candidate, but so are 20 others that they have to find in the sea of 280 applicants. Who am I kidding? It’s probably 750.
  - clarry 7y ago
    One remote company I applied to said they got about 2000 applications, and they interviewed about 2% (me being among them). And it wasn't some prestigious or well known company or a startup pulling off something crazy. Just a tiny company doing a rather boring web application for businesses.
    - jawns 7y ago
      I saw Basecamp brag on Twitter that they received 1,200+ applications for an open role. To me, that's not something to brag about. If you get 1,200+ applicants for a single position, you're doing it wrong. You've just wasted SO many people's time. Instead, companies advertising open remote roles should be more frank about qualifications (to deter unqualified people) and about demand (to save the time of qualified candidates for whom it's still a long shot). If I knew there were 1,199 other people who had applied for a position before me, I would likely not waste my time, even if the application process only takes a few minutes.
      - camwoodsum 7y ago
        You make a valid point. It's important to note that they weren't bragging though, they were trying to showcase why other companies should hire remotely: "We ended up with over 1,200 applications for the programmer opening at Basecamp. If you’re having trouble attracting talent, feel free to copy our playbook: Hire remote, be explicit about pay, detail job exhaustively."
freenergi 7y ago
Freenergi is a renewable energy startup company based in Indonesia. We provide solar power installation, provide solar as service, manufacture solar power products to reduce residential customers electricity bill and providing clean energy solutions for indoor and outdoor. https://www.freenergi.com https://www.freenergi.com
jonahbenton 7y ago
Trick question! Everyone is remote now.
k__ 7y ago
Pro tip: If you can't land a job at one of those "high perferformers" try freelancing. Freelancer are even accepted as remote workers in non-remote companies, after all, you're just another "external" company they are working with. The barrier to get hired on a project are lower than getting hired on a permanent position, because the companies take less risk. If you living somewhat frugal, the money you get from 3-6 months project work can be enough to pay for the whole year. So you only need 1-2 "yes" on your applications a year to get along.
- camwoodsum 7y ago
  This is an awesome tip! Thanks for sharing.
- Cyberdog 7y ago
  As someone who has been struggling while freelancing remotely for about three years now, I'm having many of the same problems getting noticed. I've only been able to land two long-term clients, and the one that's left is starting to fizzle out on me. With 13 years of professional experience, I don't think it's a lack of skill, but just for whatever reason I'll get to the interview stage maybe once for every 50 applications or proposals I send out there, and then almost never get anywhere past that. I can only imagine that even with my qualifications, the sheer number of applicants these listings get (perhaps combined with my unwillingness to work for a rate that's too much below market value) is working against me.
  - k__ 7y ago
    Maybe it's because of the specific tech skills you got? I have to admit, what I wrote was 2 years of my freelacing career. I started blogging 2017 and now requests from clients are coming to me.
sailfast 7y ago
Can I ask where the rocket is going? Or is that also too presumptuous?
polishdude20 7y ago
To the author: Can you please include a location column as well? The non-remote companies don't have a location column and I'd like to skim past to see if any of them are near me.
- camwoodsum 7y ago
  Thanks for the request, maybe I'll add this on the next edition! Would be a fair amount of work to go back and add that now. If you click on the jobs link for each company then it will take you straight to their job listings (will show you locations).
javiramos 7y ago
I would love to see hardware startups attempting a remote model. I think that there is a lot that could be done remotely even in the hardware space. New web-based tools like Onshape enable easy remote collaboration. I could imagine services that do all assembly/prototyping/debugging so engineers don't need to have labs in their homes.
- jlokier 7y ago
  Chip (ASIC) design and FPGA logic design can certainly be done remote. Electronics is sometimes done sort-of remote by shipping kit to little consulting firms of one or a handful or people who work on it then ship it back. For them, remote means the supplier has their own little lab/workshop with scopes, soldering & other electronic tools, and other test & measurement kit. Not a lot else required. CAD for product design can be done remote, and you can get the results manufactured elsewhere. Finally, I know of a stealth-mode startup that is working on making custom silicon available at a low-ish cost, similar to the way you can order PCBs today.
jordank 7y ago
DuckDuckGo should also probably be on this list (and is hiring for a couple director-level technical roles IIRC).
- camwoodsum 7y ago
  They were only omitted because their two year growth is much slower than the rest of the companies on the list. Cool company though!
lukasm 7y ago
shameless plug https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job
- wyclif 7y ago
  On almost all the remote job boards I've seen (LinkedIn, remote.io, We Work Remotely, remote.com, etc etc), you cannot filter for junior positions. I don't understand why. If you search specifically with the "junior" keyword, you'll still get loads of senior-only results. Useless for someone at non-senior level.
  - Etheryte 7y ago
    From my personal experience, junior or entry level work, which ever term you prefer, is arguably a lot harder remote than with direct interactions. Greener employees benefit immensely from having immediate direct feedback and from having someone around to casually discuss problems with. Both of those are arguably easier to achieve in a face-to-face situation. I'm a huge proponent for remote work and I do coach some people remotely as well, but I do think the dynamic for that type of interaction works better when you're in the same room with someone. Not sure if it's the actual reason why the filter is missing on such sites, but it would be my personal guess if we had to take bets.
    - wyclif 7y ago
      While that seems like a logical explanation for the lack of junior remote positions, it doesn't explain why it's so difficult to search for the ones that do exist. And they do...it's just painful to find them.
zkid18 7y ago
Still some of the remote-only companies remained constrained to citizenship and legal right to work in the company's HQ country.
- npsomaratna 7y ago
  Remote company founder and lawyer-to-be here (just finished the finals - hopefully, I've passed!) Labor law is local. If you hire someone in a different country (say, Sri Lanka) and things go south for whatever reason, they can sue you in the relevant local court. To re-emphasize: by hiring an employee in that country, you've submitted yourself to the jurisdiction of the labor courts of that country. This supersedes and replaces any language you might have in the employment contract about the jurisdiction of employment. Of course, enforcement is a problem. If a court in Sri Lanka issues your company a summons and you ignore it, the legal consequences will be limited (although you might be arrested if you ever visit that country). However, if that employee is located in a major country or bloc (e.g., the European Union), not being able to travel there ever again is a high price to pay. In nutshell, this is why many remote companies are careful about hiring in foreign jurisdictions. The potential legal complexity is probably not worth it.
  - Etheryte 7y ago
    Coming from a fairly small EU country, one way I've alleviated the issue before is the equivalent of an LLC. The company makes a long term contract to buy services from me through my company, I pay myself through that legal entity and handle the taxes on the local level. It means the legal interaction is slightly different, as are the benefits and downsides, but it's a good option when it fits both sides. I'm not sure how it compares to the situation you've outlined above, and hopefully I won't have to ever find out, but offering my two cents.
    - npsomaratna 7y ago
      That's definitely one way of solving it. The con is that (as an employer), you'll have to require each individual employee to incorporate their own LLC and contract out their services that way. For obvious reasons, I can see more than a few employees giving this a pass.

218 points by warp 7y ago

I wonder what the criteria is for "startup"? GitHub jumped out to me as maybe not a startup anymore. Glitch, formally fogcreek is 20 years old... Maybe has employees about the same age as the company :-p

itronitron 7y ago
yeah, neither is Elastic which is a public $6B company
- camwoodsum 7y ago
  Hey guys! I created the product so I can answer this one. You're right that Elastic and Github (and Stripe and Twilio) aren't startups. The list is really just the fastest-growing companies (not necessarily just startups). This is good feedback. I might clarify this in the text before the table itself. Even though these companies are big, they're growing fast and I thought it would be helpful to add them.
  - travisjungroth 7y ago
    Not your fault, you're in the middle of using a messy term. People call Google a startup.
  - tasuki 7y ago
    Elastic is marked as "Remote First? No, but heavily remote" - I work at Elastic, and would say Elastic is very much remote-first, though our preferred term is "distributed": https://www.elastic.co/about/distributed https://www.elastic.co/about/distributed Edit: Also, we're bigger than GitLab! ;)
    - camwoodsum 7y ago
      Fixing this now! Thanks for letting me know :)
hinkley 7y ago
Maybe at this point 'startup' = 'tech company' in some people's heads.

bigcohoneypot 7y ago

hcaptcha.com is remote only and hiring

philsnow 7y ago

By "fastest growing" they mean by employee headcount: > Understanding employee growth numbers: Employee growth measures how fast the number of employees has grown. i.e. 100% employee growth in 1-year would mean the company has doubled in size in the last year. 200% employee growth would mean the company has tripled in size. Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
>Revenue growth is a better metric to use for figuring out where to apply to. Perhaps revenue-growth and headcount-growth are proxies for different aspects of the company? For example, revenue-growth might signal how long the positions are likely to last, and maybe something about chances of the company being acquired. Whereas headcount-growth may be a better signal regarding how much the organizational / management structures will need to change, and what the odds are for carving out your own role amidst the chaos.
- philsnow 7y ago
  They're proxies, yes. Headcount is an easier number to come by because companies (misguidedly?) think that "we quadrupled our headcount in the last 12 months!" is something to brag about, so they're more public with these numbers than with revenue / cost numbers. Yeah if you're okay playing game of thrones and don't particularly care that the company you work at might not be serving a viable market, headcount is a good metric to go by.
  - camwoodsum 7y ago
    Hey guys! Cam here (the creator of the product). Thanks for taking the time to check out this list and for commenting about it :). Revenue growth and profit growth would be awesome metrics to have but those aren't publicly available for most of the companies on the list. I think employee growth is the best objective metric because it captures fundraising and/or profit growth in one combined metric (because companies that are hiring either raised money, are making money, or perhaps aren't good at running their business). This is really just a starter metric to compare thousands of companies to each other but obviously if you were going to join one of these companies you would want to do much deeper due diligence.

inertiatic 7y ago

My experience is that it's extremely hard to even get to the interview stage with most well-known remote companies, I assume due to the sheer volume of applications they get. At the same time, the initial application form for a lot of them keeps growing so for myself it just seems no longer worth spending the time to craft responses to these questions for a very small response rate.

cheschire 7y ago
So then the process is working. Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably an amazing candidate, but so are 20 others that they have to find in the sea of 280 applicants. Who am I kidding? It’s probably 750.
- clarry 7y ago
  One remote company I applied to said they got about 2000 applications, and they interviewed about 2% (me being among them). And it wasn't some prestigious or well known company or a startup pulling off something crazy. Just a tiny company doing a rather boring web application for businesses.
  - jawns 7y ago
    I saw Basecamp brag on Twitter that they received 1,200+ applications for an open role. To me, that's not something to brag about. If you get 1,200+ applicants for a single position, you're doing it wrong. You've just wasted SO many people's time. Instead, companies advertising open remote roles should be more frank about qualifications (to deter unqualified people) and about demand (to save the time of qualified candidates for whom it's still a long shot). If I knew there were 1,199 other people who had applied for a position before me, I would likely not waste my time, even if the application process only takes a few minutes.
    - camwoodsum 7y ago
      You make a valid point. It's important to note that they weren't bragging though, they were trying to showcase why other companies should hire remotely: "We ended up with over 1,200 applications for the programmer opening at Basecamp. If you’re having trouble attracting talent, feel free to copy our playbook: Hire remote, be explicit about pay, detail job exhaustively."

freenergi 7y ago

Freenergi is a renewable energy startup company based in Indonesia. We provide solar power installation, provide solar as service, manufacture solar power products to reduce residential customers electricity bill and providing clean energy solutions for indoor and outdoor. https://www.freenergi.com https://www.freenergi.com

jonahbenton 7y ago

Trick question! Everyone is remote now.

k__ 7y ago

Pro tip: If you can't land a job at one of those "high perferformers" try freelancing. Freelancer are even accepted as remote workers in non-remote companies, after all, you're just another "external" company they are working with. The barrier to get hired on a project are lower than getting hired on a permanent position, because the companies take less risk. If you living somewhat frugal, the money you get from 3-6 months project work can be enough to pay for the whole year. So you only need 1-2 "yes" on your applications a year to get along.

camwoodsum 7y ago
This is an awesome tip! Thanks for sharing.
Cyberdog 7y ago
As someone who has been struggling while freelancing remotely for about three years now, I'm having many of the same problems getting noticed. I've only been able to land two long-term clients, and the one that's left is starting to fizzle out on me. With 13 years of professional experience, I don't think it's a lack of skill, but just for whatever reason I'll get to the interview stage maybe once for every 50 applications or proposals I send out there, and then almost never get anywhere past that. I can only imagine that even with my qualifications, the sheer number of applicants these listings get (perhaps combined with my unwillingness to work for a rate that's too much below market value) is working against me.
- k__ 7y ago
  Maybe it's because of the specific tech skills you got? I have to admit, what I wrote was 2 years of my freelacing career. I started blogging 2017 and now requests from clients are coming to me.

sailfast 7y ago

Can I ask where the rocket is going? Or is that also too presumptuous?

polishdude20 7y ago

To the author: Can you please include a location column as well? The non-remote companies don't have a location column and I'd like to skim past to see if any of them are near me.

camwoodsum 7y ago
Thanks for the request, maybe I'll add this on the next edition! Would be a fair amount of work to go back and add that now. If you click on the jobs link for each company then it will take you straight to their job listings (will show you locations).

javiramos 7y ago

I would love to see hardware startups attempting a remote model. I think that there is a lot that could be done remotely even in the hardware space. New web-based tools like Onshape enable easy remote collaboration. I could imagine services that do all assembly/prototyping/debugging so engineers don't need to have labs in their homes.

jlokier 7y ago
Chip (ASIC) design and FPGA logic design can certainly be done remote. Electronics is sometimes done sort-of remote by shipping kit to little consulting firms of one or a handful or people who work on it then ship it back. For them, remote means the supplier has their own little lab/workshop with scopes, soldering & other electronic tools, and other test & measurement kit. Not a lot else required. CAD for product design can be done remote, and you can get the results manufactured elsewhere. Finally, I know of a stealth-mode startup that is working on making custom silicon available at a low-ish cost, similar to the way you can order PCBs today.

jordank 7y ago

DuckDuckGo should also probably be on this list (and is hiring for a couple director-level technical roles IIRC).

camwoodsum 7y ago
They were only omitted because their two year growth is much slower than the rest of the companies on the list. Cool company though!

lukasm 7y ago

shameless plug https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

wyclif 7y ago
On almost all the remote job boards I've seen (LinkedIn, remote.io, We Work Remotely, remote.com, etc etc), you cannot filter for junior positions. I don't understand why. If you search specifically with the "junior" keyword, you'll still get loads of senior-only results. Useless for someone at non-senior level.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  From my personal experience, junior or entry level work, which ever term you prefer, is arguably a lot harder remote than with direct interactions. Greener employees benefit immensely from having immediate direct feedback and from having someone around to casually discuss problems with. Both of those are arguably easier to achieve in a face-to-face situation. I'm a huge proponent for remote work and I do coach some people remotely as well, but I do think the dynamic for that type of interaction works better when you're in the same room with someone. Not sure if it's the actual reason why the filter is missing on such sites, but it would be my personal guess if we had to take bets.
  - wyclif 7y ago
    While that seems like a logical explanation for the lack of junior remote positions, it doesn't explain why it's so difficult to search for the ones that do exist. And they do...it's just painful to find them.

zkid18 7y ago

Still some of the remote-only companies remained constrained to citizenship and legal right to work in the company's HQ country.

npsomaratna 7y ago
Remote company founder and lawyer-to-be here (just finished the finals - hopefully, I've passed!) Labor law is local. If you hire someone in a different country (say, Sri Lanka) and things go south for whatever reason, they can sue you in the relevant local court. To re-emphasize: by hiring an employee in that country, you've submitted yourself to the jurisdiction of the labor courts of that country. This supersedes and replaces any language you might have in the employment contract about the jurisdiction of employment. Of course, enforcement is a problem. If a court in Sri Lanka issues your company a summons and you ignore it, the legal consequences will be limited (although you might be arrested if you ever visit that country). However, if that employee is located in a major country or bloc (e.g., the European Union), not being able to travel there ever again is a high price to pay. In nutshell, this is why many remote companies are careful about hiring in foreign jurisdictions. The potential legal complexity is probably not worth it.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  Coming from a fairly small EU country, one way I've alleviated the issue before is the equivalent of an LLC. The company makes a long term contract to buy services from me through my company, I pay myself through that legal entity and handle the taxes on the local level. It means the legal interaction is slightly different, as are the benefits and downsides, but it's a good option when it fits both sides. I'm not sure how it compares to the situation you've outlined above, and hopefully I won't have to ever find out, but offering my two cents.
  - npsomaratna 7y ago
    That's definitely one way of solving it. The con is that (as an employer), you'll have to require each individual employee to incorporate their own LLC and contract out their services that way. For obvious reasons, I can see more than a few employees giving this a pass.