ChiselStrike is a fully remote company (and we are hiring for many roles!). Even the founders are spread around the world. We have worked like this before in at least two companies (before it was…
Glauber Costa
ChiselStrike is a fully remote company (and we are hiring for many roles!). Even the founders are spread around the world. We have worked like this before in at least two companies (before it was cool!) and one thing we learned is that as much as you may not need face-to-face as an everyday thing, every now and again it is helpful to get everybody together and work on general things as a group.
Even the remote companies we've been at, however, had some form of office. So company trips usually mean you bring the remotes to where the office is, because that saves on air fares: that is already where most people are, so no need to pay plane tickets for everybody.
But hey, we're fully remote, remember? There's no office, so we can go anywhere! Granted, it would be too expensive to go to a location that is far away from everybody (Sorry Australia! 😥🐨) but usually there are clusters of people relatively close to each other. In our case, East Coast of Canada and Eastern Europe. Still a lot more options than just a couple of cities.
We are also a small seed stage startup. We don't yet have an office manager, assistant, or anybody like that. In our previous trips, we always had fun activities every carefully planned every day after work, interesting guided tours, etc. So I was worried. How can we match that?
One thing about “cities where the office is” is that often you are not the only startup there. You are there because of the ecosystem to begin with, which means they tend to be expensive. (San Francisco, hint hint). What if we can go somewhere with a much cheaper cost of living, where we can stay somewhere really nice, and is still close to a lot of our people to keep costs down?
In that spirit, we decided to go to the beautiful city of Porto, Portugal. With two people flying from Brazil, another two from Canada, one from California, and three from Europe, it definitely kept our travel budget under control.
As for accommodations, with a budget that would land us in a cheap motel in San Francisco, we stayed at the Vila Foz Hotel: an absolutely gorgeous palace by the beach. Our agreement had “breakfast included”, but what the rate got us was not your usual coffee and toast: breakfast had even Oysters and Champagne, which I swear, I only had in the last day!
With two years of remote-only and no travel, it was great to see folks such as @glcst live last week at our first ever @ChiselStrike company meetup! It was a great reminder that there are some things like design sessions and brain-storming that just make more sense in person.
And although we didn't have anyone planning all of our activities, the hotel staff, (shout out to the ever helpful Vanessa and Veronica) helped us with our every need. From finding a place to enjoy the traditional Fado and reservations to nice restaurants, to a private visit to learn more about the traditional Port Wine: they had it all.
It's true that they could not plan every single activity that we had, but the vast majority of us actually found that to be an advantage: without strict bus schedules and every minute packed and planned, some of us could stay in the city for a walk a bit longer and just Uber back to the hotel. More freedom to tailor the experience to each one's liking, which ended up being a big plus.
The result? According to Colin, our Developer Advocate, “this was by far the coolest offsite I've been to!”
We used the first day to set the tone: we had presentations about stuff each person in the team was working on. Our CTO, Dejan Mircevski, talked about the upcoming integration with NextAuth, which will allow ChiselStrike users to reference to authenticated users in their models out of the box through any provider that is supported by NextAuth. We discussed the ChiselStrike compiler, our plans for making data always available at the edge, etc.
Our original idea for days 2 and 3 was to do a hackaton. But at the last minute, we decided to do design sessions. For big ideas, and things that will influence the direction of the company for many months to come, nothing beats the old school whiteboard. The results were fantastic, and we're definitely planning to repeat the model next time.
For our last day, the team had a blast learning all there is to learn about Port Wine at Graham's. Ruby (not the language!), Tawny, Vintage, ending with a fantastic tasting. Unfortunately we had to pass on the opportunity of buying a bottle of their special 130 year-old bottle of Port Ne Oublie which is sold locally by just 12,500 Euro — a bargain. Maybe a sign we should go back after our IPO?
Doing our offsite in a location like Porto, where we have no offices, affiliates or any local presence was a bit scary at first. But at the end of the day, being in an affordable yet stunning location got us a fantastic hotel that we deeply recommend, with a staff that was happy to help us with whatever we needed to not only match but easily surpass many other experiences we had in the past.
Some of us had been working all this time without having ever met any coworkers, and the ability to sit down, discuss, whiteboard, but at the end of the day replenish with a nice port by the beach is just what we needed to keep pushing towards our goal of allowing Typescript developers to just express their every backend need.
