告别固定的办公区域，初创公司Doist推出远程工作方案
八年多前，当Amir Salihefendic开发Todoist时，并不是想建立一个供员工大范围使用的网络。
Salihefendic在Bosnia长大，他在开发这个任务管理工具的时候还只是在丹麦念书的大学生，主要目的也只是供自己使用。几年后，他决定全心投入在这个工具上，他发现自己需要雇几名员工，而且经济情况不允许他对工作地点挑三拣四。
现在，这家正式名称叫做Doist的公司已经在20多个国家有了40多名员工，遍及白俄罗斯、巴西、加拿大、德国、意大利、日本、葡萄牙、俄罗斯、韩国和西班牙等等，在美国还有五名兼职员工。这个团队为100多万用户提供服务。没有依靠任何风投，公司仅通过订阅内容，从一开始就保持着稳定的盈利能力，每天新增注册用户大约有1万人。
这样的经历让Salihefendic变成了远程工作的传道者。他不是一个人在战斗，开发了WordPress的Automattic以及Buffer多年来都一直在宣扬分布式劳动力的好处，但有趣的是Doist出于自身利益做到了远超过其他公司的程度。它为远程工作者提供工具，并且能将这一过程中学到的东西都充分利用起来。
远离科技城市
Salihefendic正通过Skype从葡萄牙波尔图和我聊天，他和他未来的妻子几年前决定搬到这个城市。Doist有九名员工都在葡萄牙安家，Salihefendic也在一次游玩中爱上了这个国家，所以他们理应在这里建一个办公室。但他们并不需要呀！
Salihefendic说Doist采用分布式劳动力主要是出于必要性。在台湾为社交网络Plurk工作时，他突发奇想地申请了智利的初创公司孵化器，一获得批准他就打包离开了，从2008年起他就不太重视的Todoist重新得到了他的注意。在开发这个应用的第一个移动端版本时，Salihefendic开始远程雇用员工。
Doist的第一名员工来自Salihefendic在孵化器中同事的推荐。为了更好地扩大队伍，Doist采取了“游击战术”，从Hacker News、Github和Reddit之类的论坛上招兵买马，至少在公司发展到足以吸引求职者之前都是这样做的。
“在圣地亚哥并不是我出去转一圈就能雇到厉害的安卓开发者的，”Salihefendic说，“可能是有一些，但是我找不到。”
很快，Salihefendic发现远程工作还有其他好处。不算办公室和管理费用，光是雇用费用和在旧金山这样的科技城市相比就只要二分之一到三分之一，而且还不用担心Facebook和谷歌这样的科技巨头挖自己墙角。
“这不仅仅是开销的问题，还有人才。”Salihefendic说，“如果你去旧金山，你就是在和拥有数百万投资的大公司竞争。”
不过，最大的好处大概就是Doist能按自己的步调发展，一点一点地学着怎样建立一家远程公司。和其他创业者相比，Salihefendic对来自硅谷的投资以及它给公司带来的压力非常谨慎 。
他说：“这种投资会迫使公司非常快速地发展，但却无法真正地去建立一个优秀的团队或去发展企业文化及经历所必要的过程。”
完善及推广远程工具
Doist的发展过程和其他宣扬远程工作的公司相比并没有很大的不同，它也一样在招揽新员工，其中包括一项能看出求职者在独立工作的情况下将如何表现的测试。员工津贴中包括员工的办公场所费用和团队偶尔见面需要的费用。Salihefendic还强调了书面沟通的必要性，并且每过一段时间一定要达成特定的目标。也就是说，雇主必须要完全投入这种远程工作的模式，否则这种工作方式就注定失败。
但在这些年来建立远程公司的过程中，Salihefendic也发现所需的工具并不完备，而随着Doist的发展，它可以制造更好的工具。Todoist本身就已经开始了这方面的尝试，因为公司首先要迎合自己员工的需求。
比如说，遇到支持不同语言的问题时，Doist就因为在中国有一名财务经理而让问题简单了很多，他帮着解决了日期表述的复杂问题。Salihefendic说：“对一般的公司来说，我觉得他们可能不需要为中文日期花费大量的时间来改进、测试，但对我们来说这都是很正常的。”
Salihefendic认为如果一件产品是由世界各地的人制造的，那么它就更有可能和全世界的用户产生共鸣。他说Doist在台湾有一个设计师，提供的观点就和欧洲的设计师很不一样。他补充说：“现在这个时代，我们制造的产品必须面向整个世界而不只是富有的白种人。”
除了待办清单软件，Doist受自己的分布式劳动力的经验影响，正在研发全新的产品。Salihefendic认为它有点像Slack，公司已经在用Slack了，不过新软件更注重线程通讯。
“我们正在研发这个通讯软件，我们内部也在使用它，并对它进行优化，让它更符合我们的结构。”Salihefendic说，“在Todoist身上也是一样的，我们优化我们的产品使它们符合我们的要求，很可能最终它们也能满足其他远程公司的要求。”
虽然远程工作有一些成功的例子，但规模都比较小。并没有足够的事实能证明大型公司也能采用远程工作。但Salihefendic想试一试。
“我不觉得扩大到几千人的规模是不可能的。”Salihefendic说，“我们想做的事之一就是制造出支持远程工作的工具。你会看到我们在这些工具上的许多创新，它们能帮我们沟通、分享以及在一个庞大的团队中安排活动。”
WITH 40 PEOPLE IN 20+ COUNTRIES, THIS STARTUP WANTS TO MAKE PHYSICAL OFFICES IRRELEVANT
A network of far-flung employees wasn't what Amir Salihefendic had in mind when he created Todoist more than eight years ago.
Salihefendic, who fled Bosnia when he was six years old, was just a college student in Denmark when he designed the to-do list manager, primarily for his own use. When he decided to work on it full-time a few years later, he realized he needed employees, and couldn't afford to be picky about their locale.
Todoist creator, Amir Salihefendic
Today, Doist—that's the official company name—employs more than 40 people in more than 20 countries: Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and elsewhere—including five who work in the U.S. at least part of the time. This team serves more than one million active Todoist users. Through optional subscriptions, it has remained profitable from the beginning without any venture capital, and is adding roughly 10,000 new registered users every day.
The experience has turned Salihefendic into something of a remote-work evangelist. He's hardly alone—companies like WordPress creator Automattic and Buffer have been preaching the benefits of distributed workforces for years—but what's interesting about Doist is the extent to which it's powered by its own self interests. It's a distributed workforce making tools for remote workers, drawing on everything it learns in the process.
WORKING OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE
Salihefendic is talking to me via Skype from an office space in Porto, Portugal, where he and his wife-to-be decided to move a couple years ago. Nine of Doist's employees list Portugal as home—Salihefendic fell in love with the country during a visit—so having an office makes sense. But no one is required to be on the premises.
TO BUILD ITS WORKFORCE, DOIST USED "GUERRILLA TACTICS."Doist's distributed workforce arose largely out of necessity, Salihefendic says. He'd been working from Taiwan on the social network Plurk, when on a whim he applied for a grant from a startup accelerator in Chile. He packed up and moved upon acceptance, and Todoist, which had been on the backburner since 2008, became his focus once again. Salihefendic started hiring remotely while building the app's first mobile versions.
Doist's first employees were recommendations from Salihefendic's accelerator colleagues. To build the workforce further, Doist used "guerrilla tactics," he says, recruiting through forums like Hacker News, Github, and Reddit—at least until the company was large enough to attract applicants directly.
"It's not like I can go out and hire great Android developers in Santiago," Salihefendic says. "There were probably some, but I could not find them."
Salihefendic quickly figured out that a remote workforce had other virtues. He estimates that his employee costs are a half to a third what they would be in a tech hub such as San Francisco—not counting savings on office space and other overheads—and he doesn't have to worry about tech giants like Facebook and Google stealing his best employees.
"It's not only about expenses, it's also about talent," Salihefendic says. "If you go to San Francisco, you're competing against companies that have a lot of millions in investment."
Perhaps the greatest benefit, however, is that Doist was able to grow on its own schedule, learning how to build a remote company as it went along. By comparison, Salihefendic seems wary of Silicon Valley funding, and the pressure it puts on companies to rapidly staff up.
"This kind of thing forces you to grow really fast without having time to really build a team, build a culture, build a process," he says.
FASHIONING THE TOOLS
Much of Doist's process doesn't sound drastically different from what's being preached by other remote-work evangelists. The company's screening for new hires, for instance, involves a test project to see how well the candidate works independently. Employee perks include an offer to pay for co-working space and the occasional team meet-up. Salihefendic also stresses the need for written communication and an emphasis on achieving specific goals over time. In other words, employers must go all-in with a remote-work mindset, otherwise they'll fail.
But in building a remote company over many years, Salihefendic has also started thinking that the tools are incomplete, and that Doist can build better ones as it grows. Todoist itself has already been part of that process, as the company adapts it to the needs of its own employees.
SALIHEFENDIC BELIEVES A PRODUCT STANDS A BETTER CHANCE OF RESONATING WITH A GLOBAL WORKFORCE WHEN IT'S CREATED BY PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.When it came to supporting different languages, for instance, Doist's job was made easier by having a financial manager in China, who helped deal with the complexities of date parsing. "For a normal company, I don't think you would focus on implementing Chinese date parsing, and spending a ton of time on improving and using and testing it, but for us it's just natural," Salihefendic says.
More broadly, Salihefendic believes a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world. He points out that Doist has a designer in Taiwan, who provides a different perspective on design than someone in Europe. "In the current world, the product that we need to build has to target the whole world, and not only white rich people," he says.
Beyond just its to-do list product, Doist is working on something completely new, borne from its own experience as a distributed workforce. Salihefendic describes it as somewhat similar to Slack—which the company already uses—but with an emphasis on threaded communications. It's in early alpha, but the plan is to eventually release it publicly. Not unlike Todoist in its dorm room days, it could be another self-serving tool that ends up being useful to millions.
"We are doing this communication app, and we are using it inside our team, and we can evolve it and fit it to our structure," Salihefendic says. "And the same thing with Todoist: We can develop stuff that solves our needs, and maybe in the end will solve the needs of other remote companies as well."
While remote work has plenty of success stories, most of them have head counts in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. There's not a lot of proof that a massive organization can have a fully distributed workforce. Salihefendic wants to try.
"I can't really see why you should not be able to scale to thousands of people," Salihefendic says. "One of the things we want to do as a company is create tools that enable remote work. You will see a lot of innovation in the tools that we have access to that enable us to communicate, share thoughts, and organize thoughts inside huge remote organizations."
Source:Fastcompany
Fastcompany
2015年07月24日
Fastcompany
“反Office”的Quip想要革新传统办公文件
从Office时代到如今的Google Doc，互联网的发展一直在改变着人们的办公方式。然而这一切还不足以满足Quip的创始人Taylor，他希望未来是一个去文件化的世界。人们随时随地可以分享修改设备上的文档。当革命性的变化来临时，习惯于传统的人们又将如何应对呢？
Quip的首席执行官布Bret Taylor认为，在不远的未来，电脑文件将成为过去，同时成为记忆的还有我们一直习惯于点击保存的软盘图标。
尽管有此想法的不只 Taylor 一人，但是Quip在过去的几年里一直在努力尝试加快“去文件化”的步伐——Quip对自己的轻量级、专业网络文档和电子表格编辑器的定位为反Office的协作软件。Quip不使用任何传统文件系统或者格式；每一个文档直接建立在应用内，任何改变都会迅速地保存到云端存储。你可以导入或导出Office文件，但这似乎更像是对Office办公软件普遍性的妥协而非特定设计的功能。
如今，Quip对传统文件发起了进一步的挑战，除了已有的iOS、Android和网络平台，本地化Windows和Mac应用程序也加入到了Quip大家族。新的应用程序看上去和网络平台上的版本几乎无异，但是少了浏览器的混乱以及没有网络连接时也可以使用全部的功能。Mac版本的应用程序还支持Spotlight，因此用户可以直接从苹果系统的菜单栏内直接搜索文档内容。当然，即使你在浏览程序目录，在Quip上你仍然找不到任何文件的影子。有人说，Quip就像Google Drive和Office的结合体，但同时又摒弃了两者的冗余功能。
“我们一方面努力使桌面软件可以离线使用，另一方面坚持摒弃以文件为核心单位的概念。” Taylor说道。
Taylor认为，Quip之于文档的创新改革，正如Netflix和Spotify之于视频和音乐的创新改革。虽然无法修改自己的文件，但大量的按需媒体库大大地弥补了前者的不足之处， Taylor 希望简单高效的Quip编辑工具可以逐步淘汰对传统的文档需求。
多么充满诱惑力的创意！然而私下里我却仍有那么一点点希望 Taylor 的观点是错误的。
流媒体文档的兴起
对于音乐和视频，我们很容易理解为什么面向用户的文件会逐渐消失。类似Netflix和Spotify这样的服务给用户提供了更多的媒体选择，更不用说在你的所有设备上存储媒体。随着高速互联网的普及，从云存储端按需下载流媒体则明显合适方便。
但是Quip对于去文件化文档的解释却又有些许的不同。Word和Excel文件本身不大，足够快速完整地下载到本地设备，并且只占据少量的硬盘存储空间。所以，为什么不用Dropbox或者微软的OneDrive等云存储服务来随时随地保存读取你的Office文件呢？为什么一定要用Quip呢？
“对于个人用户而言，使用云存储服务确实可以解决很多麻烦，” Taylor对此解释道，“但是协同合作的时候，你就傻眼了。”
Taylor继续解释道，如果用文件的话，在共同撰写修改文档的时候会造成大量的同步问题。两个人同时上传一份相同的Office文件可以导致系统无法识别，只能生成两个不同版本的文件。再比如，在无线网络不通畅的情况下，人们可能无法同步其他同事的文件更新操作。
“两个人一起修改同一个文件永远是个令人头疼的问题，”泰勒说，“我们的突破则是把文档分割成一个个更细小的单元。”
举例来说，如果有人离线编辑了某一段落的内容，而另一个同事移动了这个段落，那么当这两个用户重新连接到网络的时候，Quip可以做到同时更新两人的操作。这个软件的优势在于只同步文档中被修改过的那部分，避免了版本冲突，也加快了同步速度。倘若发生重复修改的意外时——比如两个人修改了同一个单词——文档的侧边栏会显示出“动态消息”，让用户迅速识别重复编辑操作。
有的文档并不需要直接的协同操作，比如公司新员工培训材料，同样也可以系统操作而且会更加方面。比如从云端自动同步需要的文档到用户的个人电脑上，之后用户仍然可以快速地编辑存储。“因为Quip是为团队和公司而设计的产品，这里有全世界的文档，虽然不属于你但你可以访问下载，可以在你的电脑上阅读编辑。”
文档的共同编辑和流媒体的无尽目录在某种意义上有他们的相似之处，它就是：摒弃文件！
文件保卫战
在与Taylor的交谈中，我坦白地承认他的观念让我感到有点担心。去文件化文档编辑确实有种种优势，但是操作实实在在的文件也有它的特殊意义。
如果是文件的话，我可以随意的选择文档编辑器，比如放弃Office365改用LibreOffice，而不需要转化文档。同样地，我也可以切换到另一个Quip不能支持的平台，比如Windows Phone，并且只要兼容程序一直运行我就可以随意地浏览这些文件。我可以给文档添加安全保护密码或者把文档放在加密文件夹里，我可以完全掌控文件存储位置，随意地备份到多个云存储服务中或者备份到本地硬盘。相比之下，Quip这样的服务需要建立在更高的信任基础之上。
对此赞同必须有某些措施可以保证用户对自己的文件有控制权。但是，他依旧认为这个问题利大于弊。
为此，Taylor以自己过去的经历作为例子。他回忆道，一开始他很少使用智能手机发邮件，通常只会在手机上阅读信息，然后用笔记本电脑回复。随着时间的推移，他的习惯也发生了彻底的改变。现在他更习惯于在手机上写邮件，随时随地都在手机上检查邮件。“我觉得两者之间有相同之处，所有这些产品为我们带来的，不管是实时协作还是其他，正变得越来越重要，尽管一开始新旧世界的转变会令人感到恐惧不安，然而最终人们还是欣然接受新事物。”
这并不是说在诸如文档便携此类问题上就没有其他改进的空间或方式。如果Quip当真想要彻底去文件化，它需要做的事情还有很多。至少得让像我一样的用户慢慢接受“去文件化”这种转变。
也有可能，只是我过于执着我原本的习惯方式，是我需要接受这样的现实。无论如何， Taylor 似乎对我们的谈话很感兴趣。“情感上确实有点不一样，”他继续说道，“但是我相信随着时间的推移我们最后可以找到一种使所有人都满意的用户体验。”
Source:fastcompany
Fastcompany
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