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Comment by unignorant | Hacker News Reader

Similar things can be said about starting a company with a fully remote team. I’d estimate we saved much more than $1M for our thirty-person company. An additional benefit is that you can recruit the best talent from anywhere, so long as they have experience working remotely (it’s a bit of a risk to experiement with someone who hasn’t done remote work before). With this setup, I’ve been blown away how easy it is for us to recruit amazing people. It would be much harder recruiting for local engineers wherever you are based, whether that’s SV or Philadelphia.

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There are some intangibles gained by an office, but I'm less and less convinced that those couldn't be gained as well, by renting a workspace, or hotel function space, loading it up with furniture, and having everyone come in 2-4 times a years for a week or two of inservice, it would still save gobs of money.

We do this as well. It definitely helps build social rapport and trust across the company.

A colleague of mine actually invested in a work/living space for pretty much exactly this purpose. The idea being that the office is rented out completely (not a shared work space) and the upstairs functions as a hotel space. It has fiber internet and it's located in a beautiful place with access to plenty of activities (skiing, hiking, bars, dining). There doesn't seem to be a word for this type of modern "corporate retreat", but I'm sure there's a market for it. There are pictures online if anyone is interested. (https://wofrotahoe.com/)

Your friend's website is missing an important benefit of being in Incline Village. A whole bunch of people who live in Incline are "Silicon Valley Ex-pats". Because there is no income tax in Nevada, a lot of founders who sell their startup move to Incline just before they get their final balloon payment. The tax savings pays for the extra house. And it's only a 3-4 hour drive (or a 45 minute flight if you had a really good exit) back to SV.

So if you leave the house and hang out in town, there's a good chance of running into a successfully exited founder!

The recruiting aspect is key. People get laid off in parts of the country and cannot move because of families, monetary obligations (mortgage) and a host of other reasons. When some companies give up on those people, others gain great talent. The proportion of jobs on job boards that list "remote OK" is usually much lower than I'd expect.

I started my company fully remote but doing payroll in multiple countries is a pain. Have you solved this? I'm limiting my employees to the areas I've already registered with the proper authorities and not hiring in any other locations.

Hire them as contractors with equity. Pay them their accounting costs + health insurance amount + voluntary pension plan if you want to emulate their countries' typical deductions.

Most of the entrepreneurs I know avoid this problem by not hiring employees - they use contract labor sourced from Upwork, which handles the paperwork of dealing with different countries & currencies. There are some challenges around communication, management, finding good people, etc, but once you find someone you can get a very loyal worker for a low price. A Cambodian programmer making $15/hour can live like a king - that's 12x the median income for their country, or the equivalent of an American making about $720K/year, so they have a strong incentive to work hard and not fuck it up.

In US we do payroll. For other countries the employees are legally contractors, though still with equity and not treated any differently from anyone else on the team

We do the same, and the foreign employees take care of their own tax/benefits. We pay enough that this is worth it to them and makes the admin on the company side much more manageable.

> For other countries the employees are legally contractors

How do you actually pay them as contractors? Do you literally just wire them USD or do you some service?

Not OP, but we are fully remote with a similar sized company and we just wire USD every month after they send us invoices. It’s pretty easy.

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