Global gumption in start-ups
This is a cross-post from Yellowbrick's blog.
We're lucky to have many tens of thousands of users of our data warehouse all around the world. We've never gone to the usual lengths of announcing global expansion because we've always been a global business with global employees. I thought I'd share a little bit about the benefits and challenges of this model, especially given the pandemic of the last couple of years. It's a choice many new startups are now considering given the scarcity and cost of technical talent.
We've always been a global company even before we incorporated the business. Our co-founder Mark and I wrote Yellowbrick’s first code in the US (San Mateo, California) and Hong Kong Much of the code in Hong Kong was coincidentally written on quiet afternoons at the bar of a pub called The Globe (no quality jokes please) along with a pint of Old Speckled Hen, London Pride, Gweilo or Yardley, where I've been a regular for a good fourteen or so years. The next tranche of code was written by Thomas in Estonia, then more by the staff in California, Denmark, Virginia, UK, France, Poland and elsewhere.
The team structure meant that we were used to working with remote teams and doing late night or early morning meetings from Day One, which certainly made life easier when transitioning to the "everyone remote" way of working during the pandemic.
The global nature of Yellowbrick goes beyond the engineers and code. Our Beta customers were in the US, Europe and China so we hired early support staff and support engineers in all three of those regions. Having staff scattered around the world meant we could provide 24-hour coverage at a much earlier stage than most startups.
Our first paying customer was fully US-based. The second has users in the US and Pakistan. The third is in Macau. The fourth customer was based in both the UK and California, with users across Europe, the US and India. Over time we've added customers and users in Iceland, India, Thailand, Mexico, mainland China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere. We're growing in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Many of these markets are being developed in conjunction with partners like Apptech (Latin America), NI+C (Japan), Zelesia (K0rea), HKBN JOS (Macau), Bairui (China) as well as global Systems Integrators. We've worked on projects with Accenture, KPMG, PwC and others, enabling joint customers to comply with standards like IFRS more easily. Working with partners is a win/win situation; they make good money selling the best enterprise data warehouse and it saves us from having to open more offices.
We're still fans of office culture, despite the distributed nature of our business. We've got wonderful new offices in Mountain View, CA and London, UK. We’ve seen that certain activities go far faster and more efficiently in person, like intense, focused workshops, brainstorming, architecture discussions and design white-boarding. What would take multiple spaced out Zoom meetings interspersed with Confluence editing sessions and reviews can be accomplished in a mere 2-3 hours in person. For a while, we'd forgotten just how productive seeing each other face to face can be. There are some key strengths to this "go global early" model of operating:
That said, there are also operational complications and downsides that must be managed as well:
Overall, we've found the benefits of being a global business far outweigh the costs, from our earliest of times to today. If I were going through this journey again, I'd do the same things. However, next time around I'd make sure we had multiple staff in each region from Day One-and perhaps be even more aggressive given talent is now even harder to hire and retain than 7 years ago.
Cheers ??
W4YOU = ANY DATA ANYWHERE ANYTIME
3 年Reminds me on the ION Accelerator project & team @Fusion-io: 23 colleagues out of 7 countries in the beginning [~25 people from 9 countries later on]: Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, UK, China, USA (CA, MN, UT, PA) and Germany. One colleague of the UT gang moved later to Mexico and an other one lived and worked partially on one of the Hawai'i islands. Plus a lot of ideas and support from partially engaged colleagues out of Denmark. And the very best: we had customers in China, Japan, Korea, USA, UK, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Philippines, Singapore, Canada ...(those I do remember, pls forgive me if I do not remember them all). And you, Mr. Carson, had been a not insignificant part of it :-)
Always a great read! :)
Oracle Healthcare Cloud - former Tableau | Okta | Microsoft | Teradata | DoubleClick
3 年God speed my man!