Going Global: Establishing a Team and Office Abroad | Kelly Vaughn

**Kelly Vaughn** (0:00)
Some of the best advice that I got from my boss or head of engineering is, don't expect to get it right 100% of the time when you're starting a new office.
And be okay with getting it wrong. Because if you're entering into a totally new country, a totally new culture, a different way of working, different work ethics, different styles of communication, you're not going to nail it every single time on your hires. That is a natural course of management, is that you're not going to get it right every time. But this is really, really important when you're expanding internationally.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:32)
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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I am happy to be welcoming Kelly Vaughn back to the show. She is the Director of Engineering at Spot AI. Kelly, welcome back.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:19)
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be back here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:21)
Yeah, it's always a pleasure having you on here and having a chance to chat with you. You're one of our most popular guests, actually. I don't know if you know that.
It's your third appearance on the podcast and every episode does really well on downloads, so of course we want to have you back.

**Kelly Vaughn** (1:34)
It's because I bring the hot takes. It's cool.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:36)
That's simply part of it, but I think for those of the audience who maybe aren't familiar with Kelly yet, have been introduced, part of the reason we really value her is that it's hard to bring that level of insight and Kelly's experience as a host, a speaker, and a leader, who's also been an entrepreneur herself, brings these really interesting lenses to her approach here. And today we're going to have the opportunity to talk a bit about something that I think is relevant both as an internal engineering leader and an entrepreneur, which is setting up an office in a foreign country, a different area from where you're living, brings unique challenges, it's something we've done with Linear B.
And in the past, you've had some of these other fascinating conversations that I think are informative of this as well.
You've leveraged your background as a trained therapist, discussed how to build healthy dev teams. You joined us for a panel discussion on how to treat developers as creative problem solvers, not cogs and a machine. And these are cultural pieces and understanding of your team that I think is highly relevant, particularly when you're trying to work across cultural lines. Highly recommend folks check out both those episodes. We'll put links in the show notes. As I mentioned, they're two of our most popular episodes of all time. But let's dive into this incredibly interesting, but I'm sure also exhausting process of setting up a company that has a foreign office. How do you even arrive at the idea and kind of get started?

**Kelly Vaughn** (2:56)
Yeah, when you're thinking about expanding your team, when you work in a remote environment, you know talent is everywhere.
And that is one of the major trade-offs you experience when you have an in-house or hybrid team versus a remote team. The remote team has the added benefit of being able to hire from anywhere. And we have some engineers who are already based in Europe, so this is not a new concept to us to begin with. But we are definitely very keen on expanding internationally because there are a lot of benefits that we're absolutely going to be getting into shortly from a cost standpoint, from a culture ad, like value ad standpoint, that we are ready to make that move and expand into another country to continue to build on our team.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:41)
And I remember the last time you were on this podcast, you recommended a couple of great books to me about kind of dealing with leadership across cultural lines. I want to say thank you for that. I actually started The Culture Map and have really enjoyed it. I think it's a great example of understanding some of the different unique challenges or just unique perspectives that countries bring and how those business cultures can interact. But it goes a lot deeper than that, as you mentioned. I think there's that kind of clear example of recruitment in a remote work environment.