Teamsake

📣 We're launching a cohort-based course (3-4 one hr sessions) on: ** How to Hire and Fire Well ** ➡ Free for first 25 ppl, $499 after that. ➡ ...drawing on our collective experience scaling (esp remote teams) at two companies we co-founded: one unicorn (IPO'd) Carbonite and (successfully exited) Ionic which had off-the-charts employee NPS scores. 📈 Interested in learning how to build and scale (esp remote) high-performance teams? Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gJsjHBUY

Spoke to a couple of highly experienced serial co-founders (5 exits, 2 unicorns) the other day. As their hybrid (mostly remote) team grows, it has been increasingly hard to bring about team cohesiveness, build relationships and make sure team members feel appreciated when they don't all live/work in the same place. And that's in spite of the fact that the company is doing extremely well in the marketplace. Remote work is here to stay, but it's hard to get right. Do you find yourself/your company in the same boat? What's going well? What's harder? Let me know in the comments 👇

Remote work is broken. Teamsake is on a mission to change that. Though its prevalence is down from pandemic highs, remote work is here to stay. Forced into it by the pandemic, everyone had to make the best of the situation. But few companies became truly good at it, which is one reason we’ve seen such a backlash from senior people, especially at large companies, demanding that people return to the office. Good luck with that. Companies need to understand that most knowledge workers want the benefits it offers, and that embracing it and learning to do it properly will actually yield better business results. But the tools and business practices most of us have today don’t make that easy. Teamsake is building a suite of tools and resources designed to help founders and management teams build and retain happy, high-performance remote teams and create an atmosphere in which they can thrive. My co-founders Max Lynch, Ben Sperry and I have a lot of experience in this arena. Collectively, we’ve built and exited two great, high-growth companies with well over $100m in revenue at exit. The first went public and then sold for $1.4B. The second was sold after 10 years of building a high performance, highly engaged, remote team. That’s what we’re most proud of: having built a team that was high in talent density and happy and engaged (not a coincidence). We were able to keep our best people motivated and engaged through the ups and downs, and consistently had employee NPS scores in the 80s (scale of -100 to 100) and very low attrition, even during the Great Resignation. How’d we do it? We were very deliberate about engineering our culture. We spent a lot of effort hiring the right people. We made sure they were actually the right people in the critical months after they started. When they weren’t working out, we dealt with the situation quickly in almost every instance. We were explicit about the behaviors we wanted to see in the workplace (and tried to model them!) and about those we didn’t. We made sure people felt recognized for their accomplishments, large and small – not only by us, but also by their peers. We know those are all things that every founder can learn to do with the right guidance. And many of the behaviors that make for a happy, high-performance organization can be facilitated using the tools we’re building. When recruiting, we’d often joke with candidates that ours was the only company we’d ever worked for that actually improved people’s mental health. But we weren’t really joking. Our teams were able to spend 99% of their energy doing their best work. That wasn’t just good for mental health, it was great for business results. But sadly, it’s also uncommon. We’re on a mission to change that at Teamsake. Our first product (Q1 2024) is a Slack app that helps create a strong sense of workplace community (and just plain good vibes) by encouraging peer-to-peer employee recognition. Follow us here or at teamsake.com and stay tuned!