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Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 6) - Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about running a virtual company. What are some of the benefits that you’re deriving out of a global talent pool and the cost structure of a global talent pool? What are the nuances? I’ve been running a virtual company since 2010.

Dominik Angerer: In 2010, there was not environment that supported you doing that. Now there’s a lot of things you can use. My co-founder Alex moved back to Brazil in 2018. We both knew that if he moves back, we needed to find a way to employ him in Brazil. We actually created a subsidiary. If we wanted to create people in Germany, we had to create a subsidiary there as well. We cannot work with contractors all the time because of all the IP.

There needs to be a service for that. Luckily, there was a push for home office-based which is not remote work. Remote work is different. The cool thing is this allowed us to have employers of record. If you want to ship devices to Chile or India, it’s hard to do that from Austria. We realized that there are solutions. There’s device management globally. You can employ them and they have the payroll in the local state. You have global communication tools like Slack or Teams. This helped us do that.

The biggest upside for us is, we don’t have to move offices. If we would have scaled from two to 230 people, that would not be possible with one office. You wouldn’t be able to scale with the physical space.

Sramana Mitra: For us, one of the tools that has been enormously valuable is Google collaboration tools. It’s incredibly helpful. It’s a very under-recognized tool in collaboration.

Dominik Angerer: Storyblok was somewhat influenced by our use of Google Drive as well. If you click on some areas on Google Docs, you can leave a comment. We have that on Storyblok as well.

Sramana Mitra: Some of the things that you mentioned that is interesting is the whole legal process. There is a lot of remote work going on. This whole digital nomad is big right now. The visa and tax issues are cumbersome.

Dominik Angerer: Visa issues come up when you want to relocate them. If you do a team retreat, that’s a big problem. Visa is really hard to get for 45 countries.

Sramana Mitra: Visas are hard for digital nomads.

Dominik Angerer: I see three or four areas in this whole space. First, we have in-office kind of companies that are becoming hybrid. This is not remote. For a remote company, it’s simple to do it because you have an address where you can send stuff to. Digital nomad is another challenge on top of that. They, most of the time, are staying in an Airbnb for a couple of weeks or months. If they move, suddenly you have different tax implications.

Sramana Mitra: However, digital nomad is a big trend.

Dominik Angerer: If you’re in a job that requires you to be in one location, why shouldn’t you be where you want to be?

Sramana Mitra: In the zero to one million stage, it could be easier to do it as contractors. Thank you for your time.



This post first appeared on One Million By One Million, please read the originial post: here

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Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 6) - Sramana Mitra

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