Remote Work Is Dying - Here's Why That's Good for Founders

0:00remote work has been a big Advantage for microconf type bootstrap startups for almost two decades but all that stopped in 2020 with the global shutdown during the covid-19 pandemic suddenly one of the few advantages we had over big tech companies vanished overnight it made hiring so much harder as employees of companies everywhere looked for the highest paying job that would allow them to work remotely and founders of bootstrap startups scrambled to figure out how to find talent and how to hire people in a Global Talent Market that had suddenly seen a dramatic shift upward in wages for highly skilled Tech workers in this video I'm going to talk

0:37about how remote work is dying and why that's good for Founders and if you stick around till the end I'm going to tell you the three job boards that I use when I'm looking for remote team members I'm Rob Walling I'm a Serial entrepreneur with multiple exits I've written four books on entrepreneurship and invested in more than 150 companies something that's been obvious for many years is that big companies as well as well funded smaller companies have a lot of advantages when it comes to hiring they can offer higher salaries they can offer better benefits and the promise of more stability now whether that stability is real or not is perhaps less

1:14relevant it's the perception of stability because when someone goes to work for a thousand person company versus a five-person company some folks are more risk-averse and they feel like they might be safer at that larger company so there are several advantages that bigger and well-funded competitors have over smaller bootstrapped counterparts but us small Scrappy Nimble startups also have a few advantages over these bigger incumbents one advantage is that it's so much more fun to work at a small company it's more fun to have a small team to have a huge impact on what you're building and to not have to deal with the politics or all the BS of a 500

1:52or 10 000 person company for most people all things being equal it's a much more enjoyable experience to work at a small all startup the second Advantage we've had historically is remote work because we have never had big budgets we're bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped and therefore we usually can't hire in major Metro areas so we would either hire in areas of our own country where it's cheaper to live or we go to another country altogether it's something that venture-backed companies never would have considered prior to the past few years but then covet happened the world shut down and it became much much more difficult for bootstrapped and mostly

2:30bootstrap companies to find good talent because big Tech was paying huge dollar amounts for people to live anywhere and so there was this big scramble as people looked to the highest bidder almost if I can live in Minneapolis or in Alabama or in San Francisco and I don't have to go into an office and I can make generally the same money what am I going to do I'm going to look for someone who's gonna pay me the most to do a job that I kind of enjoy but remote work at big companies is coming to a fast end big tech companies that have fully ended remote work and this is a very

3:02abbreviated list you can obviously go to Google and find a list of dozens if not hundreds of companies that are ending remote work but big tech companies that are ending fully remote work include Apple meta Facebook Amazon Dell Disney Activision Blizzard and so on and this means opportunity for our types of microconf tiny seed companies across the 150 or so companies that I advise or I'm invested in I'm absolutely seeing an easier time hiring great talent for remote first companies than we've seen over the past couple years because I wanted to hear firsthand from a few Founders on at this topic of hiring I asked in our tiny seeds slack and a few

3:43Founders weighed in with comments like we hired our head of engineering who was working at Google Switzerland because they didn't let him work remotely I'd argue there were other things in the decision but certainly this helped him a lot in joining us and another comment my most recent hire said she's been looking for a work from home position and told me it was harder than she expected to find one although she's hybrid coming in once per week but highly values being able to work from home now not everyone values being able to work remotely but enough people do that it's a really nice swing of this pendulum back towards

4:14favoring smaller startups and while remote work is here to stay in one form or fashion bigger companies do seem to have a lot more issues with it than smaller teams and this will continue to be a good thing for our kinds of startups these bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap startups as it is such a nice advantage to have over large incumbents in a minute I'm going to tell you the three job boards where I look for remote employees but first I've mentioned tinyseed a few times in this video that's the fully remote startup accelerator that I run that's aimed at SAS bootstrappers applications for our next batch open in the next couple weeks

4:50if you have at least 500 in monthly recurring revenue and you want the perfect amount of funding world-class mentorship from yours truly and are stable of more than 40 mentors like Heaton shot Jason freed and Asia eragio and a year-long batch program inside an amazing Community with 15 or 20 other like-minded Founders head to tinyseed.com apply to be notified when we open the doors for applications so now the three job boards that I've been hiring on for years are Dynamite jobs we work remotely and authentic jobs and a couple of these are more smaller Niche job boards where you won't get 50 resumes but the people who do apply even

5:27if there's only a handful are usually highly qualified to work with our microcomp type bootstrapped and mostly bootstrap startups if you think your job might be going away because of a return to office policy or perhaps you're worried about layoffs check out this next video about how to make the most of this transition make sure you're subscribed to this channel to get videos like this every week see you next time