What Remote learned from making AI training mandatory | Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote

Krishan (0:07)

Hello, everyone, my name is Krishan, welcome back to TNW. Today, our guest is Job, the founder and CEO of Remote. I will let him present himself first.

Job van der Voort (0:15)

Yeah, I'm Job, founder and CEO of Remote. I am Dutch, and I've been doing this for almost eight years now. And Remote, we make it easy to hire and pay anybody anywhere.

Krishan (0:24)

Well, today at HumanX Amsterdam, I think it was easy travel for you.

Job van der Voort (0:27)

It was very easy. Yeah, it was 20 minutes from my house. Perfect.

Krishan (0:30)

Perfect. Also 20 minutes, but from the hotel. For anybody that doesn't know you yet, what do you do?

What is Remote? How does it help companies?

Job van der Voort (0:38)

Yeah.

Krishan (0:38)

Obviously, we know it really well. But still, I would want you to do a short presentation.

Job van der Voort (0:43)

Yeah, of course. So Remote makes it very easy to hire and pay people anywhere. And in particular, what we do is we run payroll for companies from very small. We have many, many startups around the world to a very, very large. We are also an employer of record, which means that if you want to hire somebody in another country in the world, we can make it very easy and really fast for you. And so we do this for companies like Burger King, but also for companies like Anthropic and everything in between.

Krishan (1:07)

Awesome. So Anthropic is a customer remote. Yeah. Amazing. Congratulations.

Let's start with the idea and your journey. I would want to know the journey of you starting, let's say, after high school, after college, and how you came up with the idea to launch something like this, which I think actually boomed during the pandemic, maybe?

Job van der Voort (1:24)

Yeah. So I mean, going back to high school, I studied neuroscience. I was scientist for many years and I realized that that's a very rigid world. It's very hard to gain freedom in that world. So I ended up leaving my PhD and starting a company with a good friend. Company went nowhere, ran out of money really, really quickly. I didn't have any savings, so I had to find a job. But eventually I joined a company called GitLab, which was fully distributed with people all over the world, completely remote, and it worked really, really well. The one thing that didn't work well was that we had to hire and pay people, and it was a huge pain in the ass.

Krishan (2:00)

Different countries, different legislations, different taxes.

Job van der Voort (2:02)

It was incredibly difficult, and it was very unreliable to do this, and there was no really good solution for it. So we decided, well, let's do it ourselves. And eventually I figured, well, somebody has to permanently solve this, and so that's why we started remote.

Krishan (2:15)

Okay. What year was this?

Job van der Voort (2:17)

So I left GitLab in January 2019, and I started remote a week later.

Krishan (2:23)

A week later?

Job van der Voort (2:23)

A week later, yeah.

Krishan (2:24)

That's amazing. Awesome. I know you reached around 300 million in ARR, and obviously you employ a lot of people. But from my own research, I saw that in the past couple of months, you grew a lot, the revenue, without necessarily multiplying the headcount. Yeah, that's true. And I wanted to ask because you are obviously a payroll solution, but you managed to grow the revenue without growing the people number. And I wanted to ask how you do it.

Job van der Voort (2:50)

Yeah, it's surprisingly difficult. So when you have a company that grows, and you have all sorts of teams in a company, the first thing that's going to happen is that people say, well, I would like to do more, or we have more customers, so can I hire another person? And so you sort of have to fight against that habit that people have to say, well, I'm going to hire another person to do more, to be able to do more.

And that's genuinely tricky, because they make good arguments. They tell you, well, we cannot do this kind of marketing because we don't have a person for it. And so what we did is we challenged people. The first thing we did is we said, well, one, please don't hire another person. Try to solve it, try to use AI. And then we realized that there's a group of people in the organization that does that really, really well and a really large group that didn't. And so what we did is we created an AI course, which we made available for free at aiforactualwork.com. And we told everybody you have to do that course first and foremost.