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Discussion on: Welcome Thread - v14

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Jordan Husney

Hi. I'm Jordan. I'm the co-founder of Parabol, an open-source SaaS application for conducting on-line retrospectives and other meetings with your team. I was inspired to join this community by @andreasklinger 's tweet sharing dev.to went opensource. I enjoy writing software for multiplayer collaboration: I love building the tech that makes building Google-docs easier. I work a lot with GraphQL, extending it for pub/sub state distribution.

Fun fact about me: after starting an office-less, fully-distributed company I'm having a hard time imagining ever working in an office again. I value the flexibility and focus over the social atmosphere.

Fun second fact: the late musician Prince used to live with my parents, and my dad wrote a book about the experience

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Welcome!

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Tori Pugh

Agree about being office-less, once you leave that social environment it's difficult to want to go back.

Welcome!

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Ekim Kael

Welcome!
I'm interested in your experience in starting a business without an office. I hope we'll have a chance to talk.

Feel free to share all this with us

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Jordan Husney

Happy to speak! I'm likely to go out on paternity leave any day now (another exciting thing going on in my life) but feel free to write at jordan@parabol.co and we'll set up some time when I'm back.

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Cory Swainston

You are an interesting guy. What exactly do you mean by office-less? My jobs have had varying amounts and degrees of office

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Jordan Husney

You're too kind. Thank you.

We all work remotely. Currently there are 5 of us:

  • I'm in Los Angeles, CA
  • My co-founder is in Brooklyn, NY
  • We have a developer in San Diego, CA
  • We have another designer and developer in Dallas, TX
  • And a designer in Zagreb, Croatia

We work hard to make it work. Having the personal flexibility to work when we want, where we want is important to us. We work on 3 different teams, Growth (Marketing and Sales), Product (Design, Implementation, Support and Testing), ExCo (Finance, Legal, and Human Resources). One key is having a fixed cadence for all of our teams. We start each week with a Structured check-in meeting to discover if any of us are blocked on anything and setup ad-hoc meetings if we need to jam together. If something gets real harry, we might fly to visit one another. But that happens maybe 3X per year.

There are a growing number of these sorts of companies: Invision, Zapier, Hot Jar, and so many more.

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Cory Swainston

Ahh, I vastly underestimated the amount of officeless-ness you were speaking of. That is a neat concept. Thanks for elaborating!