How many companies are 100% distributed? (Research Summary)
[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.
- Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals)
- WordPress.com/Automattic (245 employees)
- Genutec
- GitHub (100 employees)
- Kalypso LP
- MCF Technology Solutions
- ProofHQ
- Treehouse
- Copyblogger (source)
- YouNeedABudget
- StackExchange (50/50)
- MySQL (70/30)
- GrantStreet
- SoftwareMill
- Mozilla
- 10up
- Devrix
- Art & Logic (70 employees)
- AsmallOrange
- LullaBot (35 employees)
- AppendTo (23 employees)
- UniversalMind (65 employees)
- Basho (115 employees, 50% remote)
- ScrapingHub (60 employees)
- UpWorthy (37 employees)
Related:
- Inc.’s list of 125 mostly or all remote companies [new]
- A similar list, crowdsourced
- Traditional companies with liberal telecommuting policies can be found here.
(First edition of this post written by: Shawn Prenzlow)
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.
My company, ReplyAll.me has three founders and all of our founders work from home offices. Our writers are also distributed across the Globe.
Upworthy is 37 people, and 100% distributed. We are in the states of NY, CA, WI, DC, TX, OR, WA, SC, NC, ME, MO, GA, and more.
My current company is 100% distributed and it’s 130 people
http://www.addthis.com/careers#.UmgWkBCo2fw Looking for the Add This add on for my new computer, I learned they use remote workers.
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.
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.
Thanks for pointing that out. Interesting.
Tenable Network Security is based in Columbia, MD. and has about 350 employees right now, about 50% of which are remote across North America.
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.)
Please as well differentiate US vs non-US (world wide) remote positions. Lot of companies you have listed have US-only remote jobs.
Hi Scott,
At Scrapinghub we have a fully distributed team of over 60 developers in 4 continents.
http://scrapinghub.com/about
We’re up to 100. :)
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! :)
oh forgot to mention: we are currently 36 mad hackers, and growing fast ;)
Articulate is a fully distributed company with ~140 employees around the world. 10+ years in the making and still no company offices.
https://www.articulate.com/company/careers.php
Adam,
You remote positions boldly state that it is US only…
Some current positions are US only. We have awesome employees working around the world.
Hoooray Articulate! Fully distributed, and fully awesome. :)
~drinking the Kool-Aid
You can find more remote jobs at watho: http://www.watho.net
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.
WooThemes (http://woothemes.com/) is a distributed company with over 80% of its employees working remotely! :) We have an office in South Africa too but even the majority there work from home.
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
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! :)
At Lookback we’re 100% distributed, 12 in total, 5 in US and the rest in Europe. http://lookback.io
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Those are the big boys; but there are probably hundreds (thousands?) of distributed companies. Any gigs listed on boards of the remote section https://jobpigapp.com/blog.html#/1 would be by a distributed co.
Hey scott! Thanks a lot for the informative post! I would glad to see any updated version :-)
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.