[systemtrigger]

Outstanding talk and q/a from a startup grandmaster. Kevin reveals wise strategy and insight repeatedly. In particular I liked the simplicity of everyone storing their self authored todo lists on the company dropbox and using these lists to hold one another accountable. Another point that hit home was the idea of respecting one another's time and what that means if you think it through. From the q/a I wonder what the other two YC companies are that have the same sort of disciplined remote working style that Wufoo has. Since only 3 YC companies have made remote working work, if Kevin Chris and Ryan had it to do all over I wonder if they would choose the remote approach again. My impression is yes, because of the efficiencies gained when remote work is done well.

[kevin]

Yes, we'd definitely do it the same way again.

To be honest, there certainly might be more than 3 (it's hard to keep track of 700 companies!). The Zapier guys write a lot of great stuff on remote working on their blog.

[jipiboily]

There's more than 3 companies, I can think of:

- Rainforest QA (for which I work for)

- Heroku

- Librato

- CircleCI

- Zappier

And there's probably a lot more than that.

What are the 3 companies you had in mind?

[clairity]

i really enjoyed this one too, but just for clarity's sake, this talk could have been called "great customer service with a sprinkle of product on top". it was all about how to organize a company with the goal of making customers love you, which leads to benefits like having no sales & marketing spend (not sure if they literally had no s&m costs or not).

the anecdotes, research and techniques that kevin used and drew upon were impressive. had to try very hard not to feel dishearted about how clever you need to be to succeed.

[rubiquity]

I believe RainforestQA is one of the other remote startups.

[jipiboily]

Yes, we have some remote employees. I am myself in Quebec province, Canada. We have people in Brazil and in different US states too.

[frankdenbow]

iDoneThis.com has essentially productized the to-do list part with the "done" list for companies.