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How many companies are 100% distributed? (Research Summary)

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guest post remote work Year Without Pants Work

[post updated 1/9/18, originally posted 2/2013]

One common question about The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work is how many other companies are primarily distributed, with a majority of employees working remotely. WordPress.com is among the most well known, with over 200 employees all working from wherever they like on the planet. But how many others are there?

Here’s are some companies we’ve identified. If you know of others please leave a comment, and note how many employees the organization has, and what % are distributed. You can also read the FAQ of questions about the book, many of which are about remote work trends and WordPress.com’s example.

Related:

(First edition of this post written by: Shawn Prenzlow)  

145 Comments

  1. Andrew Berkowitz

    Love the book, Scott!

    TeamSnap has been distributed since day one. We currently have ~40 people spread out across the USA. Nominally we’re headquartered in Boulder, CO, with a small office space, but only about four employees are there semi-regularly and another four or so come in occasionally to co-work. Everyone has the flexibility to work where and when they want to.

    Without a doubt the biggest boost to our company culture has been Google Hangouts. The ability to see each other face to face and have ad hoc meetings of 2 to 15 people has been huge. Some people even host regular Hangout lunches which are just social time to chat about anything at all, company or personal. Of course because we’re in four or more timezones (depending on who is working from Europe or South America at the time), it’s usually only “lunch” for some of the participants. I have a reputation for bringing a giant salad.

    We talked a bit about our company culture here: http://www.wideteams.com/2012/09/12/episode-49-wade-minter-and-andrew-berkowitz-of-teamsnap/

    Also, our big secret is our hiring process: http://blog.teamsnap.com/announcements/the-secret-to-startup-success-in-jenn-uity/

    I find it hard to believe that distributed teams won’t be come the standard in my lifetime. So many things about it make sense.

  2. Zach Abramowitz

    My company, ReplyAll.me has three founders and all of our founders work from home offices. Our writers are also distributed across the Globe.

    1. Nicola Peluchetti

      My current company is 100% distributed and it’s 130 people

  5. Andrew Montalenti

    Parse.ly, 12 / 16 distributed (75%). Engineering team is 100% distributed, sales/marketing is colocated in NYC. Yet, whole team operates under “fully distributed” principles — 100% web-based tools, reduced out-of-band communication, etc.

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  7. Brin Wilson

    Interestingly, only seven* of the companies mentioned in the list above are NOT using WordPress; the rest are all either using it for their whole site or, at the very least, the blog section of their site – which is kind of poetic really since Automattic were, I’m guessing, one of the first to work remotely!

    *at most.

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  9. Alfredo Ramirez

    Tenable Network Security is based in Columbia, MD. and has about 350 employees right now, about 50% of which are remote across North America.

  10. Chuck Vadun

    Our company, Fire Engine RED, is 100% virtual/distributed, with team members across the U.S. and Canada. (We provide marketing, technology, and data solutions for the education market.)

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  12. exim

    Please as well differentiate US vs non-US (world wide) remote positions. Lot of companies you have listed have US-only remote jobs.

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  16. Ani

    Hi Scott,

    Great list here.

    Axelerant is a 6 year old completely distributed company. We are a hard-core software engineering company working with Drupal, RoR and DevOps. We have been developing our own workflow processes and project management tools. We rely heavily on cloud resources such as Google Drive, and collaborative communication tools like Slack, Hangouts etc. Our location independent team-mates are spread across some 15+ cities across the India, US, Israel and Australia. Axelerant in fact eschews traditional offices in favor working from where ever makes us happy. Our primary mission is to Make Happiness Possible. Seriously! πŸ™‚

    1. Ani

      oh forgot to mention: we are currently 36 mad hackers, and growing fast πŸ˜‰

        1. Tanya Storm

          Hoooray Articulate! Fully distributed, and fully awesome. πŸ™‚
          ~drinking the Kool-Aid

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  20. Michael Keeler

    LeaseAccelerator’s workforce is 100% distributed. There are 28 people in the company distributed across the US, Canada, India, and China. We have one flex office in Montreal for the people in the vicinity. It works great. We have been able to attract top shelf, highly experienced A players whereever they are. Retention is very high. Commuting is time-consuming, unproductive, expensive, and bad for the planet. Telecollaboration is where it’s at. Just beware: many VCs and Private Equity firms are in the dark ages — they won’t invest in distributed workforce companies. Their loss.

  22. Pedro Pombeiro

    I work for Plex, and it epitomizes the remote worked/distributed team story, from hiring, to on-boarding to regular work. We’re around 40 people located in 17 countries. 9 of them work in the Bay Area, but not necessarily “in the office”: https://plex.tv/about

  23. Laure Parsons

    Thanks for this great thread. Gotta get on this bandwagon to mention Olark live chat, with 35 and growing distributed across the US and three other countries so far. Automattic uses us to help their distributed team talk to customers from anywhere! πŸ™‚

  25. Anne Young

    Sococo’s Virtual Office enables virtual/remote workers the ability to fluidly and effortlessly work together as we mimic a true physical co-located experience.
    We’d love to engage and bring your workforce, whether it be 5 or 500 together in an environment that our distributed clients say they couldn’t live without.

    Hop on board for a test drive, would love the opportunity to bring your team together in a way like you’ve never experienced. We are a new way to work…way beyond “Collaboration”

    Check us out…

    https://www.sococo.com/

  26. James

    Mystro (https://www.mystro.co) is also distributed. With 50% of its team in Melbourne and the other 50% in Gold Coast. Expansion to other cities and countries is also looking promising.

  27. Lynn Patra

    I just wrote a post that provides an in-depth look at PeopleG2’s transition from brick-and-mortar to virtual (save for one small physical office) here: http://wp.me/p2Z6Qz-X8 . Other mentions of virtual companies, such as Envisioning Technological Research Foundation at 100% virtual (here: http://wp.me/p2Z6Qz-WS), can be found at my site as well.

    If any virtual company leaders wish to submit a post regarding your own virtual company on my blog, message me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnpatra/ or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@LynnPatra/ and I’ll provide more contact details.

  28. Rachel

    Hi there Scott! I work with Hubstaff, a time tracking tool for remote workers. Our company is 100% remote with a team of 16+ and we’d love to get added to your great list. How can I make this happen?

  29. Rameesh T

    Enmain / Enmain Consulting is designed to operate as one. Enmain is a single global partnership united by a strong set of values, focused on client impact. Enmain have no headquarters in the traditional sense, their CEO chooses his/her home office, and business partnerships in worldwide.

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  31. Jason Hamilton-Mascioli

    Scott – wonderful article and would like to see an updated version. At TestLauncher we are 100% distributed (7+ countries) so far. We see the trend moving upwards pretty fast especially with so many wonderful cloud services in HR, legal, marketing, development and us (web and mobile software testing) plus so many others that this new shift increases value and drives costs down.

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  34. Ezra Mikhel

    Hey scott! Thanks a lot for the informative post! I would glad to see any updated version πŸ™‚

  35. Panagiotis Kontogiannis

    Blog7 (https://blog7.org) is also distributed. With 30% of its team in Thailand, 30% in Dubai and the other 40% in Bulgaria. In business, there is a rule that if you stand still and get obese. You have to grow and enter new markets to be able to constantly follow the trends and new things, otherwise the competition will overtake you.

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