How He Built Remote into a $3 BN+ Company in 6 years.

Wouter Teunissen (0:00)

Job van der Voort is the founder who built remote.com into a $3 billion company in six years.

Job van der Voort (0:05)

You know, we did the craziest shit. I was flying around the world when the pandemic hit and we started closing airports, and I was on the last flight home, and we realized quite quickly, oh, pandemic, everybody's gonna work from home, everybody's gonna work remotely. We have a company called Remote, but we raised a bunch of money so we could start to build the team because we knew the demand was coming. And so we had a few goals. One, expand to as many countries as possible. Two, make it work, make it work.

Wouter Teunissen (0:28)

In this episode, you will see the mentality needed to build a multi-billion dollar startup.

Job van der Voort (0:33)

It's a lot of suffering. You're constantly facing failures. Because you're the CEO, you can literally do all the things. You can fire everybody. That's shitty, but that's the kind of pain we're talking about. You know, you live through this pain. You can be much more successful.

Wouter Teunissen (0:46)

And you will also hear how Job runs a 2000 person remote company and what it takes to build beautiful products. We're also going to hear how Job went from earning $700 a month as a PhD student to starting a company with no money.

Job van der Voort (0:58)

And it's a really complicated business, you know, we have hundreds of entities, hundreds of bank accounts, we process billions of dollars in payroll. In 2021, we grew from 50 to 650 people, something like that. And it was hiring like crazy. And the only reason that it didn't completely blow up was because it's also been for a really large part, just a learning experience, right? Like on one end it's focused, like at first we had to build all this foundational infrastructure. Well, on the other end, it's just learning over time to trust my own gut and to figure out. I still have many times when I felt I should trust this leader or this person that I hired and their opinion, even though my gut set to do the other direction. And every time that happened and I went with the thing I should do, I regretted it. And so I stopped doing that. And now I do think like, if I feel strongly about something, I'm going to do it my way. Like as long as I'm in this role that I am today, then I'm going to do it my way. And that has changed a lot.

Wouter Teunissen (1:55)

Do you remember a time, because I know, the founder mode essay from Paul Graham and Brian Chesky talks about how the CEO should be the chief product officer and that you actually should be in the details. And it's sort of a paradox where actually being in the details allows you to give more autonomy to people and sort of direction. Were there specific moments over the last couple of years where that was really apparent, where you weren't following your gut maybe in one of those moments, and the pain or the result was really noticeable?

Job van der Voort (2:26)

There's been things that I had to rebuild from scratch, and it was really painful. And there's things today that we are doing where I'm like, oh, if we had followed my gut, then we would have been in a different place.

And the good thing is that over time you learn that, the bad thing is that now there's things where I'm like, oh, we're going to have to address that thing, because we're going to have regret in the future. Yeah, there have been many things. And to me, it's been all sorts of things. It's been things related to sales, to marketing, to things like our website, which I'm happy with, to very specific things in the product where I feel like, oh, we really shouldn't have done it that way.

So yeah, unfortunately, many.

Wouter Teunissen (3:08)

We talked earlier about the priorities. Is that like an acceptable failure early on or in the first couple of years that you can build up those mistakes?

Job van der Voort (3:18)

Yeah, I don't think there's such a thing as an unacceptable failure, right? Like as long as the company is alive, I think you should be fine. And I think if I speak with founder friends, we all sort of feel the same way. That it's a lot of suffering, you know? And the suffering I think in part comes from the fact that you're constantly facing failures. Failures of different kinds, right? Like very direct failures of not getting the customer that you want or not achieving the goal that you set for yourself or for your team. The fact that some hire that you really hoped it would work out, that doesn't work out. But also, you know, the failure of, you know, your past self and seeing like, I wish I could have done differently.