This is a topic I’ve written about a bunch over the years. I feel like it is becoming more urgent every day.
Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.
The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.
At the same time, we see a growing number of our portfolio companies succeeding with scaling engineering/technical teams in secondary labor markets in the US, as well as going outside of the US to build engineering locations.
I feel that the ability to spin up and then successfully operate remote engineering locations is a skill that technology companies need to develop earlier in their development than used to be the case.
It seems to me that once you get to 100-200 people (or 50+ engineers), you should be thinking about this. The most important thing is not where you put your first remote location. The most important thing is learning how to do this successfully. Because once you can do it in one location, you most likely can do it successfully in multiple locations.
This post explains how Stripe (a USV portfolio company) started with remote engineering hubs in Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore, and then evolved into a structure that supports remote workers anywhere.
The move from a centralized engineering structure to a decentralized one is a process and takes time to get right. And so I think it is best to start building those capabilities long before they become necessary.
