HELP WANTED! Technical co-founder to build the future of remote work
HELP WANTED! Lead engineer to build the future of remote work
Unintentionally, I was an early adopter of remote work.
I built my last company with the goal of being location independent, and was fortunate enough to travel and hire all over the world while growing VisualCV to millions of users.
V1 of Holopod was built as a side project to solve some of the problems we experienced while operating a remote team. That simple project grew exponentially when everything changed in March.
COVID forced remote forward a decade, and there’s no going back.
Whether it’s fully remote, satellite offices, or hybrid offices — any company that can, will offer remote as a benefit. The scale has tipped. Flexibility will be table stakes — companies that don’t offer it will struggle to recruit and retain talent, and ultimately compete.
Over 500 companies signed up for Holopod as they looked for solutions on how to navigate this new world.
Defining remote as “working from home” is a recipe for failure.
Remote work needs the same thoughtfulness that was put into building out office culture. It needs a playbook for creating an environment that allows teams to get their best work done — focused deep work, engaging meetings and calls, and well-drawn boundaries between work and personal time.
We think we can help build it.
Our long term vision is to build the operating system for remote teams.
We want to create the playbook for how to optimize your work day as a remote team. The tools already exist, and they’re great. Slack is an excellent chat app. Zoom is great for video calls. Google Calendar gets the job done.
What’s missing is the glue that holds all those together. The physical office, despite its drawbacks, does a few things well:
Helps you feel connected to your team
Encourages impromptu conversations and collaboration
Coffee breaks, lunch, and happy hours to build culture
Creates a boundary between work and personal life
Remote work can sometimes lose that important feeling of being apart of something bigger than yourself. It’s a bit clinical to just sit down, code all day, and check out. For some, that works. But not for everyone.
We’re solving those problems with Holopod — helping teams design an optimal operating framework that suits their culture, with the goal of resulting in every individual having their best day at work.
State of the union
Currently, Holopod is a Slack app that helps teams:
Automatically update their Slack status based on their work state and calendar
Manage do not disturb based on their status
Schedule messages
Drill down into personal work analytics and happiness
We’re live on the Slack store. Over 500 teams have signed up, including some of the world’s biggest companies.
Our activation and retention is excellent, and NPS is promising.
<a href="https://medium.com/media/c1246af606413fc23abe0560a1e61989/href">https://medium.com/media/c1246af606413fc23abe0560a1e61989/href</a>
Our Roadmap
Step 1: Slack
We are focused on Slack as a platform, and gaining widespread adoption among teams transitioning to remote. Our goal is to be a must-have Slack app for every remote and hybrid team.
We plan to tie a bow in our Slack features in Q4.
Step 2: Beyond Slack
Our goal is to build a better way to collaborate and operate with your team, with a simple desktop application that focuses on your status of the main driver of your work day.
We want to solve some of the deeper problems that teams experience, and are extending our desktop application to allow individuals to:
Get to work, without checking email or Slack
View your entire team’s status — without any noise
Quickly collaborate and connect with their team through 1-click integrations with tools like Zoom & Loom
Step 3: Scaling
There is much we want to build, and the opportunities are endless.
Integrations with the best remote tools (like Zoom, Loom, and Asana).
Team culture building features like virtual coffee hangouts and water cooler chats
A focused work buddy system
Meeting analytics
Anything you can dream of?
I’m confident we can build a massive company here. While remote is hot right now — it is still very early days.
About me and how I work
I’ve been a lifelong entrepreneur, and built my last company to over 4 million users and millions in revenue. I want to go even bigger with Holopod.
I’m passionate about working with exceptional people to build amazing products that improve people’s lives.
I believe in collaboration over dictation. In setting up good processes and empowering people to do their best work.
Obviously, we will be a fully remote company.
Expectations
As the technical co-founder of Holopod, my expectations are high. You’ll be the lead on all things engineering — from architecture to devops.
Ideally you have experience starting a company, or as an early engineer at a startup. You’ll be in charge of best practices for testing, deployment, and shipping great software. You’re passionate about the space, have strong opinions on what we should build, and can hire/lead a team.
Initially, you’ll be writing code. We need to get to escape velocity — moving fast and shipping weekly.
You’ll be involved in product planning, hiring, and managing the team.
Our current stack is:
Ruby on rails (with Sidekiq)
Postgres
Swift (we have a dedicated Mac developer)
HTML/JS/CSS
We’re considering a rewrite with a more dynamic stack — experience with React and GraphQL would be great too.
Compensation
I’m offering a combination of salary + a healthy equity, with both being negotiable.
If this sounds interesting, please send me a note (james@holopod.com).