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Today, we’re announcing Runlayer has raised $30M from Felicis and Khosla Ventures to help companies go all in on AI.
Runlayer is the golden path for AI: enablement, security, and control in one platform.
So, how does it give your team the right tools for AI? 🧵
Runlayer
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Met with the CFO of a multi-billion dollar tech startup this weekend.
He told me every smart CFO he knows is cutting office space to reduce burn instead of firing employees.
Pretty simple choice IMO:
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After the last two years of working remotely, I decided to try working in person again. Here are some observations from a week of returning to work:
Spoiler alert: In-person work is dead 🧵
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Given that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is better at writing code than the average computer science grad, what’s the future career path for junior engineers?
If you’re enrolled in a boot camp, it’s time to ask for a refund.
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I'm a huge fan of remote work. I've now started two venture backed companies that have been fully remote.
But, I’ve also seen my fair share of good and bad remote managers.
If you’re joining a remote company, here are 8 red flags to look out for with your new manager 🚩🚩🚩
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Nothing makes me happier than seeing people 10x their productivity with Vowel.
It’s an absolute game changer for all teams.
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Remote work is not just young, privileged tech workers.
Here are the real faces that benefit from the remote work revolution:
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Most companies are taking advantage of the benefits of working remotely, but few are building great remote cultures.
Here are 10 things I've seen great companies do to build best in class remote cultures:
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5/ If you can hire remotely and get access to a competitive talent pool, why would you not shed office space, focus on retreats and re-invest the savings?
And the kicker? This CFO told me they have seen an increase in productivity + applicants for open roles. It’s a win-win-win
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Last week I tweeted about in-person work being dead – and it is.
With remote teams, you get to hire the best people across the world, eliminate commutes, and build/operate 24/7. It’s 💯 the future.
But it’s also really hard – here's all the challenges remote teams will face:
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Today, I’m excited to share that Vowel is officially launching out of private beta!
Since we launched in mid-2020, we’ve had thousands of people use Vowel while we were heads-down building the future of video calls.
Here’s all the amazing stuff we’re sharing with the world 🧵
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6/ Offices are going to shift back to closed floorplans. The open concept plan is going to go away and more individual offices will return.
People will need quiet places to take calls from the office
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1/ In 2022, office space seems like a particularly terrible use of funds, especially in expensive cities. Cost per square foot in big cities like San Francisco can be upwards of $87.
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I keep hearing from our customers that Zapier has shipped some of the most interesting agentic behaviors out there.
Our customers want to have an agent navigate to a website, scrape the content, and send the data to an app like Google Docs.
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9/ Bottom line: if your company wants you back in the office when you don’t need to be in the office to do your work, that’s a red flag.
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2/ With an office of 500 people, that’s $6.5M/year! At $130k fully loaded salaries, that’s the same as 50 jobs.
Deeper dives into the cost of office space below:
squarefoot.com/leasopedia/do…
iofficecorp.com/blog/space-m…
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1/ I spent half my days in a phone booth. Most of our team couldn't make it in on the same day, so I spent half my time looking for a quiet space ☎️
Days turned into endless blurs of calls in the office versus at home. A good read on this dynamic here:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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2/ Everyone missed social interaction but didn’t feel the need to be in person every day. People want to meet up in person but don’t care about getting together every day.
The most important thing – getting out of the house frequently
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If you’re forcing people back into the office, you’re going to lose the talent war.
We interviewed ~10 top tier engineers in the last week all looking to leave their current jobs because their employers want them in an office.
Here’s why your shitty culture is my opportunity 🧵
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4/ Co-working spaces will be the preferred workplace of choice for most employees. They want to live where they want but work in a social environment.
I am bullish on WeWork and others for the long term
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3/ What this CFO told me – is they saw only 2% of their employees come into the office on a given day. Their investors said the choice was obvious. Cut the office space.
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Each employee needs ~100-150 sq ft of space in an office, meaning that it costs >$13,000 per employee annually. That doesn’t include the cost of amenities or furniture.
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We just built some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen at Vowel:
Generative AI- powered meeting summaries.
TLDRs automatically created at the end of your Vowel meetings that you can share with the whole team in 1-click. Here’s a quick demo on how it works:
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4/ Yelp and Salesforce have made the same decisions, seeing the obvious trends in office utilization.
How can you spend investor capital on costly offices and layoff employees?
sfchronicle.com/realestate/a…
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Zapier Central’s Chrome Extension is live.
You can now take your personal AI assistants anywhere on the Internet.
Chat with any web page, summarize and transform content and take action in 6,000+ apps like Google Sheets, Slack and Shopify—all without leaving your current tab
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3/ Collaboration tools are nearly as good as a whiteboard and working in person. There wasn’t anything we did in person that couldn’t be accomplished remotely.
Synchronous collaboration tools have come a long way
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Offices have so often been idealized in our work culture, even more so in tech where new offices get press coverage to show off all the perks (nap rooms! kombucha on tap! etc)
But let’s be real — even the coolest looking offices suck. Even more so if you have to go in every day
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5/ There is still no great way to replace in-person lunches and social gatherings on a frequent basis. Employers will struggle between travel expenses and remote celebrations.
Hiring people in hubs will help make this easier
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There's been lots of recent news about layoffs and shutdowns, but working at the right startup can be a life-changing opportunity.
After starting two successful venture-backed companies, here are some red flags you should look out for when interviewing at small startups 🚩🚩🚩
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We just launched the "Catch Me Up" feature at Vowel, and it's my favorite feature we've shipped.
Show up late to a meeting, press the “Catch Me Up” button, and Vowel AI generates notes so you can catch up on what happened before you joined.
It's amazing!
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No-Code is booming📈 Bunch of great companies 🔥
1. @AdaloHQ
2. @webflow
3. @glideapps
4. @retoolapp
5. @zapier
6. @NotionHQ
7. @bubble
8. @voiceflow
9. @landenapp
10. @airtable
Then, there are communities like @makerpad accelerating this movement🚀
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Huge announcement!
Vowel AI is now live for every Vowel customer today. This means that Vowel will automatically create summaries from your meetings using the power of generative AI.
Host a meeting -> end the meeting -> a summary is immediately generated.
Here’s how it works:
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of remote work on office space. Millions of square feet of office space is now sitting empty, with very few new tenants to fill it.
As more people move out of cities to work remote, here’s what I think happens:
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One of the biggest challenges with remote work is isolation and loneliness.
As a leader, here’s how you can build a transparent culture that helps your team feel less lonely and more certain about the company, their job performance, or the economy:
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Our biggest news yet: Vowel AI is now available to everyone!
No waitlists, no “limited previews.”
We've built best in class AI powered meeting software that help teams automate all the annoying parts of meetings.
Here's how it works:
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6/ This is what we’ve been doing with @vowelhq from day 0 – we’ve started remote first and are re-investing the cost savings into talent, retreats, and professional development.
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7/ Our team loves it, we’re shipping weekly, and can hire from anywhere in the world!
Remote is the future but don’t take my word for it.
blog.yelp.com/news/the-futur…
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The average driving commute is 55 minutes round trip.
At 260 working days in a year, that’s 14,300 minutes spent commuting.
Over 43 years, that’s 614,900 minutes, or 10,248 hours wasted driving to an office to do work that could be done from home.
Remote work is the future
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Every startup CEO should be using this.
Meet your new AI SDR.
When @runwayco launched, their website gained a lot of traction, and generated dozens of signups every minute 🤯
@blader needed a way to automate lead qualifications, fast, so they used Zapier.
Learn more about how @runwayco uses Zapier here: bit.ly/3QIZ1V6
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We're up there with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
The amount of AI product @zapier has shipped is totally underappreciated
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1/ Parents of young children
The pandemic made life extremely hard for parents – especially working women who quit when schools and child care became unreliable.
Remote work enables parents to move closer to their support systems while not giving up career growth
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🚨 Big launch from the team at Vowel 🚨
We’ve been heads down for 6 months building a whole new suite of tools to turn your meetings into instantly searchable, shareable knowledge.
Today we’re live on Product Hunt, introducing our new mobile app, universal search, and more👇
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I genuinely believe that the metaverse is the future of work and that future is already here.
Let me explain:
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3/A Here are some helpful templates we use to run 1:1s at Vowel
vowel.com/meeting-agenda-tem…
ALT Vowel 1:1 Templates
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We raised $11M from Keith Rabois at Khosla and Felicis to make MCP work at scale.
MCP is everywhere, but it's MESSY.
No security. No auth layer. No visibility. No control.
We built Runlayer to enable AI.
Runlayer
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But it doesn’t really matter if you’re remote, hybrid or anything in between. The future of work is video, whether you’re in SF, Montana, or searching for a quiet room in an office in NYC. Video isn’t going away!
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7/ Some teams will continue to work in person because of the nature of the work.
Hardware is an obvious category, but I expect sales teams and other hyper collaborative teams may return to the office
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Overall, I think this shift is for the better. As I build @vowelhq, I am thinking about how we successfully create an inclusive hybrid culture.
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Many people claim remote work kills company culture.
I disagree completely.
Here’s what’s actually killing your culture and ways you can build a thriving culture with a global team:
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1/ They drop the ball on onboarding and leave you to fend for yourself
If you start your new role and feel on your own and at a loss of where to start — it’s not on you.
Your manager should give you a clear onboarding plan and set expectations on what they expect with the role
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Everyone's talking about AI-powered web crawling. At Zapier, we built this into Zapier Central, focusing on the GTM use case.
On 8/14, we're hosting a webinar on using Zapier Central to Scrape Web Data for AI-powered sales 🧵
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8/ You may be reading this and saying “he’s biased — he runs a remote-first company, hires talent globally, and is making a video conferencing product that focuses on the future of work.”
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@Zapier Central is now in beta! Say hello to custom AI assistants that work with you to analyze data, get answers, complete tasks and more.
Here’s what's new in Central🧵
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2/ They randomly cancel or ghost you on your 1:1s
If your manager cancels your 1:1s or doesn’t show up, it’s a big red flag.
It means they value other work over touching base with you and won’t ever set you up for success. A good manager makes time for her direct reports
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Over the last 10 years, I have started and scaled 2 venture-backed companies, interviewing thousands of candidates and hiring hundreds of people.
Here are my top lessons learned for building a high-performance team:
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Throughout my career I’ve held and been in thousands of meetings. Most are bad, some are great, very few are excellent.
Here’s 6 things you’re probably doing wrong in your remote meetings and how you can consistently have excellent meetings:
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2/ Single parents
For single parents, in-person work was always a challenge. Trying to coordinate drop off and pick up times, after hours childcare, and a routine that doesn’t operate on a 9-5.
Remote work means a more flexible schedule with no commutes and more money saving
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Excited to share that we are launching MeetingGPT so you can get answers to any questions you have about your meetings simply by chatting with Vowel. AI-powered Q&A is finally here.
No more sifting through meeting recordings or transcripts.
Let me show you how it works:
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3/ If they do show up to the 1:1, they dominate the conversation
A bad manager talks and doesn’t listen. They make it all about status updates — not about how you’re doing, your workload, or how they can unblock your work.
They often interrupt and talk over you. All red flags
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We constantly get asked the question, “How is Vowel different from Zoom?”
Here are 7 problems with the big-name meeting software that Vowel solves.
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5/ Minority workers
As the NY Times pointed out, some minority groups can have a hard time fitting into standard office culture. Remote work levels that playing field and makes it more about the work and less about the playing into office politics.
nytimes.com/2022/06/04/busin…
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4/ People with medical conditions
Remote work levels the playing field for folks who have a medical condition limiting them from being in person.
It's much easier for these groups to find jobs that match their skills instead of creating barriers that arise with physical spaces
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What a week at @zapier. Zapier Central just shipped our most requested feature yet, Web Browsing.
We also shipped Instant Actions and a new dynamic data source, Zapier Tables 🧵
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3/ Caregivers
For caregivers – you are where you’re needed – and that’s not always in an office or the city the office is located.
Remote work means you can take care of the people who need you while not sacrificing a career being thousands of miles away
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6/ People who live in rural areas
Cities are expensive, and many people can’t afford to spend more than half their paycheck on rent or a mortgage payment.
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5/ Bad managers micromanage (or worse, track your time and activity)
I see this all the time. Managers go fully remote and don’t trust the team or think you can be productive at home.
To make up for their insecurity, they micromanage and keep tabs on your activity. Huge 🚩
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Best remote companies to work at
- @doist
- @trello
- @gitlab
- @stripe
- @zapier
- @github
- @Upwork
- @airtable
- @HubSpot
- @VowelHQ
- @automattic
- @basecamp
- @FirstbaseHQ
- @loom
- @InVisionApp
- @StackOverflow
- @coinbase
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👍Great remote companies pair employees up with onboarding buddies. This buddy helps demystify the organization and process for new hires.
👎Bad remote companies give employees an onboarding document and force them to fend for themselves.
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Simply because 95% of the companies in the past two years hired people all over the 🌎 and your existing team spread out.
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Just caught up with a friend who runs a 1200 person company in San Francisco.
They spend >$1m/year on office space and only 10-20% of employees work at it daily.
Their lease expires at the end of the year and they aren’t renewing.
SF is not going to recover from this.
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In case you missed it, LLMs have become cheap. The cost of inference has decreased 100x over the past couple of years (~$50 to $0.50 per 1M tokens).
This is the largest deflationary technology trend we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
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I’ve now started two remote-first companies, love remote work, and think it’s the future, but remote conferences are the absolute worst and everyone should stop trying to make them happen.
Here’s why I think they are dead, a thread:
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4/ Bad managers give unconstructive feedback
You can't succeed in a new role or grow in your career without constructive feedback.
If your manager regularly tears down work without feedback or just says “looks good to me” to everything, they probably just don’t give a shit
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Previously, living outside of a major city meant either:
a) long commutes or b) no access to jobs at certain companies. But remote work opens up opportunities for people who may have never thought they could work for, say, Slack or Airbnb.
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7/ Bad remote managers do not respect work-life balance
They regularly send you messages or emails outside of working hours and expect instant answers.
Remote work means async communications, but if your boss gets antsy when you don’t respond ASAP or wants you “always on” …run
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2020 was the year of N̶e̶w̶s̶l̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ Substacks. Favorites
- Lenny's Newsletter @lennysan (#1 + most creative name 😂)
- Not Boring @packyM
- The Profile @polina_marinova
- Divinations @nbaschez
- The Generalist @mariodgabriele (keep fighting the good fight)
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I run a software company that thousands of teams use to level up their remote meetings.
Here are my thoughts on the future of meetings and how generative AI is going to change everything:
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Not everyone is a tech worker, and remote work isn’t a possibility in a lot of different fields. But the more people who can have access to remote work (or options for remote-hybrid work), the more the world opens up.
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3/ Documentation
Remote teams are inherently async and the teams that suck at documentation are ngmi. You lose the in-person conversations and context sharing. Over-index on hiring people who are strong writers/communicators because the team is going to need to level up here.
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2/ People are tired of commuting.
It blows my mind that companies are mandating top talent back to the office, forcing them to commute. That’s 30 min to 1 hr per day wasted in a car or on a train.
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Team offsites are the key to facilitate bonding and collaboration for remote teams, but you’re probably doing your retreats all wrong.
We’ve now hosted 7 offsites at @vowelhq. Here’s how we make them amazing 1-2x per year:
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Last month, we launched @zapier Central, our first AI agent product powered by 6,000+ integrations.
@mikeknoop gave an incredible demo at Sequoia Capital's AI Ascent.
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Hybrid meetings suck! And as companies start to shift into a mix of in-person and remote work, the problems with them are only going to get worse.
Here’s how we avoid bad hybrid meetings @vowelhq:
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6/ They give non answers or blank stares when you ask about career growth
If you’re a few months into the role and haven’t had a chat about career growth, that’s a red flag.
Bad remote managers try to extract value, great remote managers focus on your professional development
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Today we release AI-powered Action Items in Vowel!
Here’s how it works:
• Host your meeting on Vowel
• Discuss any next steps with your team
• Vowel uses AI to create Action Items for each participant
It’s magical. Here’s how it works 👇
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8/ They lack meeting etiquette
Here are some things to look out for with bad remote managers:
• They regularly keep their camera off.
• They seem distracted or on their phone
• Yell to their spouse or kid in the house
All red flags!
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As a kid, I used to come to Times Square and stare at all the successful companies on the billboards.
Today, my company @VowelHQ is up there.
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Want to improve productivity?
Skip the McKinsey consultants. Give employees 2+ extra hours a day to get shit done!
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We’re a 100% global remote team here @VowelHQ — take a look at our open roles if you’re interested.
vowel.com/careers/
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4/ Socializing
People still want to see their teammates in person. If you’re a remote team you’re going to have to spend more time figuring out ways to get the team together in person.
If not, you’ll end up with lonely team members who don’t know their coworkers all that well.
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👍Great remote companies encourage new team members to make quick video intros to send to new hires
👎Bad remote companies don’t facilitate team member introductions and leave the new hire in the dark
Here’s an intro one of our team members made using @vowelhq
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I’ve now had a chance to play with GPT-4 over these last two weeks.
The tech is amazing but I’m concerned that their pricing structure is going to be unsustainable and could stifle innovation.
Let me explain 🧵
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