My name is Denis Shershnev, I'm CEO of 6nomads — remote-focused hiring platform for startups. While I was in the US in May I heard that Y Combinator arranges YC Startup Hiring Mixer and decided that I could be useful at this event: could talk about our study of the remote specialists market, about how my distributed team functions, what mistakes I have made myself, what I learned, and why this format is the obvious future.

Then I wrote to Ryan Choi (Ryan organizes these events for Y Combinator startups) and got this answer:

Here we need to go back to 2014, when Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, wrote a great text. You can read it yourself.

There Paul protests against the difficulties that migration policy creates for companies in need of IT talent, and proves that the domestic market can not meet this need. Here are the main points:

It's hard to disagree, isn't it? Paul explains, among other things, that hiring a specialist from India, Russia, or Germany is absolutely not about saving money on these employees. However, this misconception still exists. To help an employee with a visa, to relocate them to the USA, to pay a competitive salary — do you think it is similar to the desire to save money?

Even at that time, in 2014, in the thread "How Paul Graham Is Wrong" disputes erupted. The rhetoric of these disputes, in general, has not changed to this day. As always, the debate is stuck on the irreconcilable points: the variety of tools for great remote work vs the importance of magical personal communication.

Twitter also did not stand aside:

But here is my favorite:

But, let's step back into 2019, a year when Y Combinator still strongly recommends not hiring remote employees and, God forbid, not to build distributed teams. Y Combinator's CEO Michael Sable's tweet looks extremely ironic in this context:

Although recent Trump's promises sound good, to get a visa is becoming increasingly difficult, especially in those countries in the "shithole countries" category, according to Mr.Donald's classification.

Add here the fact that Y Combinator invests $150 000 in startups. That's great. Not so great is that the average salary of one senior developer per year is about $145 000.

$43 000 of this money will pay for rental housing and $46 000 for taxes. It turns out that projects are forced to spend most of the investment not on hiring the best professionals but to compensate for the high cost of living in the Valley.

Hiring a remote specialist from Toronto, Ukraine, or Montenegro, you do not pay them less than a specialist from the Valley. In this case, you just don't pay the "Valley markup" — about $60–110 000 a year.

Especially ironic is that if we go on Angel.co and search for remote developer vacancies in the Valley, what do we see? In 70% of these already not so frequent vacancies, employers are ready to show this courage (to hire remotely) only if the specialist agrees to work for free or on the terms of an internship. They seem to think that if you don't live in the Valley, why do you need the money?

But, jokes aside, here at 6nomads we are against hiring people to work for free. But, to hire two excellent developers outside the Valley instead of one inside it, to refuse to rent an office, to open access to your company to the global talent market — this is something at least strange to give up. That's what we want to tell you, and Paul Graham, as well.

If the world's most legendary business incubator, instead of promoting strong beliefs about the inefficiency of distributed teams, helped create and teach how to manage them, there would not be 15 unicorn companies raised in Y Combinator, but many more. And in Paul's words, "It costs nothing to fix."

Yes, distributed teams are more difficult, they concern investors, but this is something that can be changed on our own (unlike politics and Donald Trump). In addition, remote IT talent is already a well-established culture, they do not have to be taught, they do not need to be nursed: they know how to do their job.

We could list many prominent companies whose teams are fully distributed around the world, you already know them: InVision, Buffer, WordPress, GitLab, Zapier, Basecamp, etc. Instead, we'll give an example of graduates of the same Y Combinator, who managed to succeed, creating a distributed team from the very beginning.

We can talk endlessly about remote work because we practice it ourselves and believe in it. But, the words of СEO's and СТО's of other startups with teams distributed around the world will sound much more convincing. We did a series of interviews with them to convince the doubters, show our case study to beginners, and give new solutions and tips for remote-practitioners.

For some reason, it seems that the guys from Buffer are damn right: Remote work is not a trend — it's here to stay.