Getting off the ground
A busy office is like a food processor – it chops your day into tiny bits.
– Remote
From the team that brought us Basecamp, ‘Remote’ is a timely book for an industry that is currently going through a broad debate regarding the topic of remote workers. At Jobber we currently hire all our workers out of our Edmonton office as we believe in the value of buiding a culture through the physical attributes of an office (though we do have flexible policies about working away from the office), but ‘Remote’ makes a strong argument for taking the alternative strategy.
This topic has been thrown into the mainstream with some large companies making very visible statements reverting their remote working policies. Certainly this is not a straightforward decision, so it is only appropriate for managers, founders, and workers to arm themselves with good research to help in making that decision. ‘Remote’ has timed itself well to try and be one of the resources used for such a purpose.
Marc:Do you know the best thing about startups?
Ben:What?
Marc:You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
– Ben Horowitz – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
To put the book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” into context it’s important to know a little bit about the author, Ben Horowitz. Personally I knew about him from his arguably industry leading VC firm Andressen Horowtiz firm which he founded along with Netscape cofounder Marc Andressen. Previous to that venture he founded the cloud infrastructure company Loudcloud and took it through a rollercoaster existence seeing it swing from success to failure and finally to a $1.6 billion cash exit to Hewlett Packard. Basically he’s a guy that’s done some real things.