If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
You do a 'team building' week once a year where you fly everyone in, do a team photoshoot and a 'productivity' photoshoot, and then provide paid-for options of fun things to do (ski pass, jetski / paddle board rental, company tab at a local bar, cook-off or potluck competition, short film competition, etc. ). Your team gets a short vacation from working, investors and press get photos and videos of people doing their job, and you don't have to pay for office space again that year. Hopefully your revenue exponentially scales to cover the linear expense as your team grows.
> For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
How on earth is this healthy? If your "company" continues to exist by sucking up investment money gained by doing a song-and-dance with a group of folks in an office, but never churns out a product, this is success? Good lord.
Tell them that facilities are obsolete and if they don't want to become an obsolete dinosaur, they should jump on the remote-working trend before it eats the world. Then show them your Slack channel, git commit log, and issue tracker to introduce them to the new world.
Some will probably leave, but then, they're dinosaurs anyway, and why would you want an investor who just doesn't get it?
> Tell them that facilities are obsolete and if they don't want to become an obsolete dinosaur, they should jump on the remote-working trend before it eats the world.
And then what data do you show them to back up that grandiose proclamation?
My comment is intended to be semi-ironic, a commentary on how the tech industry works by instilling FOMO (fear of missing out) in people who are deathly afraid that somewhere, someone is doing things better or more efficiently than they are.
But to answer your question - you don't show them data. You show them social proof. Show them the tools - GitHub, Slack, Google Docs, videoconferencing - and people using them, and the companies that have made it work, like GitHub, Automattic, Google, Cisco, etc. The whole point is to create an emotional reaction, not a rational one.
You let your devs finish stuff and show them the product. What you built. Without interruption a small group of good engineers can build some amazing shit.
Another source of this might be Labor Ready - warm bodies to fill an office space. And for those with higher skill, maybe we could tap some Hollywood extras?
Right before the first dotbomb I went on a tour of LoudEye/Encoding.com which had lots of Hollywood clients. The place was in a gorgeous antique building, wrought iron railings, full rack sized silicon graphics multiprocessors, and all of the front desk, office staff were Beautiful People (tm) and very busy and serious. It looked like a set for what a futuristic tech company would dream of.
We need that as the face of distributed remote companies so that the old money can have a nice artifact to look at while everyone is at home on IRC.
