 So, my name is Dave Look, and this is 10,000 hours distributed. Why being remote is the best way to run a team. So if you're not in the right place, feel free to move, and if you leave halfway through, I'm going to assume it's because you're just in the wrong place, not because I suck. So I use the word team here. I think I could have used the term Drupal team or web-based team, but I think that's a matter of semantics. So how many people in the room work for a distributed company? How many people work remotely individually, or work with remote clients? Okay, so I think this will apply to pretty much everybody, and you'll probably hear some things that you already know. Like I said, my name is Dave Look, I'm a partner at Chromatic. You can reach me at davidchromaticsites.com or at Look at Yeti on pretty much everything. So who am I? I attended Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, back in the States. After I left Bradley, I worked as a video producer on a large project for Tyson Chicken. That was for a website called cluckhere.com, which lived for about two months before it disappeared. I spent some time working at an advertising agency called Tribal DDB. I then went to Northwestern University, where I spent three years helping bring Drupal to Northwestern. In my time there, we launched, in three years, I think we launched 26 Drupal sites and 14 companion WordPress sites. So it was quite a bit of fun. I'm married to this wonderful woman. She makes purses and handbags. I get to watch this little pup every day. I do endurance challenges called go-rocks. I love to be outside, fish, hunt. I love playing with my jeeps. And like I said, I'm a partner at Chromatic. There's three of us, Chris Free and Mark Dorison. As you can see, I'm the handsome one. Chris also went to Bradley. And he was formative in bringing Chromatic into the Drupal industry probably six, seven years ago. Mark used to work at Martha Stewart before he left and started his own company called ARCHIC. And about a year and a half ago, Chromatic and ARCHIC merged. I couldn't run this company without these guys, so I really appreciate them. Chromatic was founded in 2006, so we're almost 10 years old. And we've never had a centralized office. From the beginning, we've never met in a co-located space other than occasional face-to-face meetings. So we've worked with a huge range of clients. We've worked with State Farm in the United States. We've worked with Martha Stewart. We worked with Lullabot on MSNBC.com. We worked with Meredith Publishing. We just launched Parents.com with them at the beginning of this month. And Shape.com for Shape magazine project kicked off this morning, or will kick off this morning in the States. So like I said, we're registered in the United States out of the state of Illinois, technically. But we have employees everywhere. And the closest we've ever come to having a centralized location is Chicago, where we had a few people within the city, but miles apart. And as many of you know, that just because we're in the same city doesn't mean we're not an hour away from each other. So we're a team of 13. We have a couple full-time, or not full-time, but we have a couple of independent contractors that work with us every month. And we have an awesome executive coach, Jen Derry, from Plucky, who we consider part of the team. We kind of consider ourselves to be about 16 right now. And like I said, we're an entirely distributed company. You can try to keep count how many times I say distributed while I'm up here. So we're distributed from coast to coast in the United States. We have people from New York to California. We have two team members in Europe, one's in Lyon, France, and the other's in the town of Estonia. And the title of my talk, 10,000 Hours. So if you all read my proposal, which I'm sure everybody did. So I'll only tell this for the couple of people that didn't hear that. But it's the story of Picasso. He was sitting in a cafe later in his life. He'd become famous. People knew his name. And a young woman came up to him and said, will you draw a sketch on my napkin for me? And he took five minutes, and he drew it, and he handed it to her. And he said, that'll be $25,000. And she said, what, $25,000? That only took you five minutes. Well, it took me 60 years to learn how to do that and for my name to be worth something. So I thought about this. I thought about the fact that what we do, everything is measured in hours, in billable hours. And the theory of 10,000 hours is debated. And that's for a TED talk, not for here. But as of today, I looked at just 2015, and the chromatic team has just under 15,000 hours logged this year. In my time at Chromatic, I've actually logged to a system 8,000 hours. And I'm going to say that I probably have another 2,000 hours that aren't logged. So I'll make the claim that I've got 10,000 hours working distributed. And you can use that as our credibility. Before I forget, a lot of these topics are talked about. There's been a lot of sessions on these this week. So I've done my best to reference anything that I've borrowed from somebody else. And all the photos should have links. But if they don't, I apologize. Let's just remember everybody's stolen everything from everybody else. So virtual companies. This is something that everybody, we hear from time to time. Oh, you're a virtual company. No, we're a real company. This is just a pet peeve of mine, so I want to throw it out of the discussion at the beginning. If you Google virtual and you look for the definition, it's really confusing, actually, just to read it. But I like the one under computing where it says not physically existing. And I'm positive that we physically exist. Our clients know we exist. We invoice them every month. They pay us. I'm pretty sure they believe we're real. Now, what we produce for them might be virtual in that it's a piece of software, but the company exists. So distributed is the right term. Virtual is not the right term. And distributed is the right term. So distributed is a little different. Different tends to make people uncomfortable, especially people that are in the status quo or working in a traditional organization. They hear you're distributed and they say, that'll never work. Or when it does start to work, they'll say, well, it's not really professional. It does not have an office for people to come into. But for us, sticking with the status quo isn't what we're about. And I'm guessing most of you that work for distributed companies, that's not what you're about either. Obviously, there's professions that you have to be co-located. You can't be a plumber and not go fix the pipes where the pipes are. You can't be a mechanic and not go into a shop that has tools. You can't build a building and not be at the building site. It's pretty obvious. But there's a lot of co-located companies that don't have to be, especially in our industry, dealing with technology. Take the catwalk. So why are those companies staying co-located? Is it just tradition? Are there values that are keeping them co-located? For us and what we do, the nature of what we do led us to being distributed. We work on the worldwide web. We build virtual pieces of software. And like all of you guys, we are most of you guys, I would assume. We use Drupal. Like I said, this type of work naturally led us to being a distributed company. We build sites or applications that live on the web that people all around the world can access. This has helped us, even with our clients. We have many clients that we've actually never met face to face. Kodiak College in Alaska bends communication out of California, Outside Magazine outside of New Mexico. We've never actually sat in a room with any of those clients, yet we're still able to work with them. So why am I making the claim that this is so important? And it's not just about Drupal companies. But this is for larger companies and our clients. The reality is we're all connected 24-7, more than a lot of people want to be. And there's a great book out there by Douglas Rushkoff called Present Shock. And he talks about this overload of information coming to us all the time. I'd really recommend you take a look at that and think about the causes of burnout and things like that. But the reality is that work doesn't stay at work, even for people that are working in a traditional agency. They take it home in their back pocket. So if that's the case, why can't we make it better for everybody all the time? So with that, I want to talk about the strengths of being in a distributed company or working remotely. The first one that I think is the most important is diversity. And this isn't just diversity in people or gender, race, color, creed. This is diversity in location. You can get people that speak the same language to come in the same office. You can get people of different genders to come into the same office. Those aren't unique to a distributed company. But what you get by being distributed is that you get to spread out your risk in diverse locations. So if you think about a power outage in an office, that takes your entire company down. It doesn't just take out the one person that's at home who lost power. A natural disaster, a hurricane, a flood, that affects the entire company. It affects your bottom line and it affects your client's bottom line. Think about the flu going through an office. Again, we're spreading the risk by being distributed. It gives us boots on the ground, as we like to say, in more locations. So for Chromatic, we have an employee in every time zone in the US, except for Hawaii and Alaska, which maybe I can convince my wife to move there. But we have somebody that can be in five out of the ten largest cities in the US without taking a plane. So if a client wants a meeting, we can be there. And I think this is a benefit to our clients. So we have coverage for almost 24 hours a day when you include the folks that are living in Europe. So we have somebody that's available to pick up the phone or troubleshoot something any time, and that's a tremendous value to your clients. So another benefit of being distributed is hiring the best talent. People talk about hiring the best talent all the time. We're gonna hire the best people we can. Well, if you're in Boise, Idaho, and you have an office, or I don't know a good European city that's tiny, but pretend I do, a little town, you're stuck to that pool that's in that town, or that's within an hour of there, maybe. Here, Chromatic was able to build a world-class team because we weren't restricted to the pool of candidates coming in from the one central area that we were located in. We were able to hire the right people for our team and the right people for our culture. And that wasn't free, though. We had to invest in the tools and the processes, and we had to build our company in a way that allowed us to hire those people. And when we talk about talent, there's a couple other things that happen when you're distributed. And I wanna say this the right way. I don't want it to be misinterpreted, but you're able to hire people at the right price as well. So if you are centrally located in New York, you're inherently going to have a higher cost for your employees because they live in or around New York. Hiring that person in Boise, Idaho, that can still work for our company is not gonna demand the same rates. And that's not to say that they're worth less or they're devalued, but it's a benefit of being in the distributed environment. I also like to say that we also add kind of a societal benefit in that small Drupal shop in Boise, Idaho now has a competing employer in town. So they can't just work their people to the bone and they're stuck there because there's not another Drupal shop in town. So we get to have the right team at the right price and we're creating jobs everywhere, not just in one place. So everybody says family first and we talk about family and team happiness and team retention. This is a photo of Gus Childs. He's been with Chromatic for a long time. He's almost an honorary Lollabot. He's spent enough time working with them. He recently moved from Chicago to Colorado. He didn't have to go find a new job to make this move. And he simply moved because him and his fiance wanted to be closer to nature, wanted to be able to go out and go hiking, be in the mountains and he just wanted to move. He didn't have to find a new job. Joe, recently Joe Schengler from Lollabot and Drupalize Me, we ran into him at the airport and he had recently just moved back to Minneapolis. His wife got a new job. Well, because Lollabots distributed, he didn't have to go find a new job as well. He didn't have to turn in two weeks to move with his wife. So it becomes a benefit to your family. Also, if you're just tired of the winters in New York and you want to move to Tampa, you can do that. So I think this helps. It helps improve the happiness of your team, the productivity of your team, the profitability of your company after that. It helps retain your team members. So they can move and they can continue to stay on your team. And it's a benefit to their family. So it's not just a benefit to the company. It's a benefit to the person, which is important. So being distributed lets us be flexible. We're able to have flexible working hours. It allows vacations to be a little more flexible, but there's a small caveat there. Vacations also become harder. Because people are connected all the time and because we've put the infrastructure in place for them to work all the time, sometimes vacations don't become vacations and work goes with them. So, like I said, there's a lot of pros and cons here. I feel like I'm going really fast, so. Sorry about that. Another benefit of being distributed is that the costs of being distributed have dramatically gone down. Airline travel is increasingly cheap. We have high speed trains. We have cabs and ubers. We can get anywhere in the world really quickly, really inexpensively. I missed a slide here, but broadband internet has become increasingly available anywhere. Internet is blazingly fast, except for maybe at the conference center. And we can transfer large amounts of data really easily. So those are benefits to being distributed that just are kind of underliers that help us establish our company. So while all these things are great, there's definitely some challenges or some non-strengths of being distributed. Like I said, a lot of kind of double-edged swords. So I'm gonna talk through the things that we've identified as the biggest challenges that we've personally seen and some of our ideas to overcome them. So, legal. I'm sure this isn't unique to the United States. I'm sure everybody deals with this problem. But every country has different laws. Every state in the United States has different laws. The provinces in Canada have different laws. Even sometimes down to the county level in the US, we have different laws. So Gus just moved to Colorado. Well, taxes and withholdings are different by county in the state of Colorado. New York City tax. This doesn't just apply to full-timers. This applies to your independent contractors and how they're treated or how they're seen, especially if you're multinational. So there's a lot of hoops to jump through. And the biggest thing that we've done to get through those hoops without catching on fire is hiring a good attorney and a good accountant. And this takes some time and you might have to go through one or two to get to the right one. But having somebody that's on your team that understands multiple state legislation or multiple country legislation is incredibly valuable. Our accountant is the ninth largest firm in Chicago, which seems absurd for a company of our size. But we could not do what we're doing without them and it's worth every penny we've paid for them. The second thing is, and I know this is true in the US and Canada at least, but having a payroll service that you're paying to deal with, paying those payroll taxes, making sure that withholdings are correct. Some states require monthly filings. Some states require quarterly filings. Some states require annual filings. That payroll service handles all of that. So I don't have to do it. We use ADP. I think they're the largest in the world. I'm sure there's mixed reviews on them. There's a ton out there. Zen payroll is another one that looks pretty good, but they weren't in all the states that we were in so they didn't work for us. And then plan on a few fines. So no matter what you do, you are probably gonna do something wrong along the way. A great example is that we got a $15,000 bill from the state of New York saying that we didn't have disability insurance. Well, we only have one, or workers' comp insurance, I'm sorry. The only worker we have in New York is Mark and he's an owner. And he's probably not gonna sue himself, but they felt like they needed to bill us for that anyway. So thankfully, I think we're not gonna have to pay it, but we'll find out. Time zones. I know I mentioned this as one of the benefits in that we're in all the time zones, but this does become a challenge for your team. So Mark's in New York on the East Coast and Chris and I are in central time zone. That's only one hour difference. Not that big a deal. We can schedule meetings earlier late and accommodate for that. But Alana's in California and Mark's in New York, that's a four hour difference. So now, all of a sudden, we have a little bit more of a challenge, but it's manageable. Mark's in Estonia and Alana's in California. That's nine hours. So Mark can have worked an entire day before Alana's out of bed. If they're on the same project, that's a huge challenge to overcome. Not impossible, but something you have to deal with. So hire the right people. This is probably the most critical thing for every company. And I'll come back to this a little bit in terms of a distributed team. But having employees that are flexible to these things and understanding that, yeah, sometimes I might have to get up early for a meeting or I might have to stay up late for a meeting and kind of shifting their schedule around is important. We talk about that as a benefit all the time. You need to take the kids to school. Take the kids to school. Work a little late. But sometimes you gotta have a meeting before you take the kids to school just because of where clients are or where the team is. We also try to make sure our clients know and understand that we're in a distributed environment. We're not gonna be in the office from nine to five central time every day. But we do have people available pretty much 24-7. And again, stay flexible. So face-to-face interactions, that's something you lose in your distributed environments. You don't get to have that coffee together. You don't get to go have a happy hour. It's been proven time and time again that trust is built through those types of interactions. And in a way, you have to artificially create those environments. You don't have the same sense of camaraderie and the same sense of, you don't get that group think mentality that happens. So something that Todd from Four Kitchens talked about, I'm not sure when exactly we heard it. It might have been earlier this year at Yonder, but they do hangout happy hours for their distributed team members. So they'll just turn on a Google hangout and people can hop in or hop out and grab a beer and drink and talk about life and work. So we've done that a couple of times at Chromatic. We've also done some just, hey, I've got this thing, I'm gonna grab a coffee and try to problem solve. You guys wanna join me and hop on the hangout. They've been immensely effective. We also do lunch and learns, which is a time for somebody that just did a project. I mentioned we worked on parents.com. Tom on our team did a huge migration and he learned a lot about Drupal migrations from a very specific source. I can't really, I don't even know. But he'll do a lunch and learn on that. He'll spend 45 minutes talking through those challenges and how he approached them and how they solved those problems. And the rest of the team grabs lunch and hangs out and does a Q and A afterwards. I think I had another point here, but I didn't update this slide, so I don't have it. Another challenge and I think this is something that co-located companies struggle with a lot as well and that's onboarding of new employees. And I think it becomes even increased as a challenge for us in a distributed environment. So this is a process that we've worked to refine over time at Chromatic and we've onboarded a lot of people in the last two years. So we're hopefully getting better at it, but we're honestly still working on it. So one of the biggest things we've found is to do onboarding in person. And there's a couple caveats to this. Day one onboarding somebody in person doesn't really work. There's too many things setting up your laptop, setting up your email, filling out your paperwork. All of those things, they take a couple days and you don't need to fly somebody in to do those. But once somebody's established and they have their accounts and they have their laptop and they're getting into the groove, having them get some face-to-face contact with somebody on the team, whether it's one of the owners for us or one of the developers, whoever they might be working with the closest, we find it really important. I can definitively tell you day one is too soon and day 30 is too long. So somewhere in the middle there, probably about the two week mark is really good to do that first onsite. Use onboarding tools. We use an HR software called KNHR. It keeps track of all the paperwork and the checklist of what needs to be done to onboard somebody. This helps us internally to make sure we've created every account that they need and it helps them to know that they've been onboarded and they've checked off everything that they needed to do. And this is kind of an underlying thing for everything distributed but over-communicate. Because you're not in the office, because you're not seeing people, you don't know when they're working or when they're not. Communication is key. So working remotely with a co-located team. How many people have been on a conference call, not a video call, and had somebody say, I'm writing something on the whiteboard, I know you can't see it. We'll send you a picture of the slide afterwards. Yeah. Awesome moment, right? So something that Mark said for years, I stole it from him way before he came to Chromatic, is that if one person on the team is remote, the entire team is remote. And that's a mentality specifically for those co-located people that they have to understand. But what can we do to help overcome that? So work on integrating. Make sure you're communicating. Make sure you're integrating the remote team members if you're the co-located team. If you're the remote team member, do everything you can to integrate with those people. If you're co-located, try to reduce the drive-bys. So I'm walking down the hall, I see the developer's working on something, I have a conversation, and now it's just happened, and it's not recorded for everybody on the team to see. If that happens, make sure it ends up in a public channel, Slack and email, whatever. And try to remember the whole team. A lot of people, if they're the only person remote, they've gotten that ping about two after the hour saying, hey, can you join us in this meeting? We forgot to add you to the invite. So try to remember the whole team. And I've said this probably more times than I needed to, but there's a lot of double-edged swords to being a distributed company. So we talk about the no-office, no-commute thing all the time. It's a great benefit. You don't have to commute. Well, what if you were going into an office for 15 or 20 years before you started working remotely, and that's part of your morning routine, and you're very used to having that commute. Tom, I mentioned, he's one of our developers. He's fantastic. He worked in a traditional agency for a long time, and when he first came to Chromatic, he really struggled with not having a commute. He would go and work at somebody else's house. Over time, what he started to do is he's created an artificial commute. So he'll get up in the morning and he'll go drive for 10 or 15 minutes in his car, come back to his house, and then plug in and start working. It works for him. It helps him get his mind in the right place. So sometimes it's a walk, sometimes it's a drive. I put health routines here, but I think I was supposed to say healthy routines. I think both are important. So health routines, we've seen many, many studies that say working out is the best thing you can do to reduce stress and burnout. So I think that's important. But healthy routines in your morning or your day are important. So getting up and taking the dog for a walk or getting up and making coffee and breakfast before you just go from your bed to your desk is definitely important if you're working at home. And I know I break this rule all the time, but no email in bed. Everybody, nobody should be looking at email in bed. So you don't have an office. That means it's really cheap to run your company, right? Well, maybe. Just because you don't have an office doesn't mean you don't have the same overhead. In some ways you might actually have more overhead than having an office. If you're traveling with a team of 20 people and you're paying for flights and hotels, that's probably gonna add up if you do that two or three times a year to be more than an office would cost you. It's not to say that it's bad or it's wrong, but it's something you need to think about. And again, so there's no distractions because you don't have an office. There's nobody pulling somebody aside in the hallway and having an off-topic conversation. Well, also not true. Now, if I post a link in Slack that I think is funny, the entire company sees it and it distracts the entire company, not just the one person that I would have distracted in the hallway. So plan on those travel expenses, expect some of those distractions. I guarantee you the trade-off is worth it over time. So is being distributed really the best? My answer and Chromatix's answer is yes. Being distributed forces a handful of things. It forces clear communication. You have to have people on your team that can communicate well, both written and verbally. If you just cannot work in this environment if you don't have that. So I think that's a huge plus. It forces to find and repeatable processes. You have to be able to, and like I said, many of these things can be done co-located as well. But being distributed, you have to do these things. You have to be able to onboard somebody and get them the same tools. You have to be able to follow the same production workflow because you can't just tap on your neighbor and go, hey, this didn't work. How do I fix it? And it helps for troubleshooting things across the team. Being distributed forces you to have the best team possible. You have to have people that are self-motivated. You have to have people that are trustworthy. You have to have people that can communicate well. And you have to have people that can deliver quality work because we inherently have that chip that's, oh, you're distributed. You're not quite the same as this place across town that has an office that I can go walk into. It forces intentional interactions. Those happy hour hangouts have to happen. You have to create those spaces for people to become a cohesive team. We're not just out there, you're not just out on an island. You're part of this team, you're part of this company. And distributed forces, scalable solutions. All of these things, if you build them well from the ground up, are scalable to add that next person, to add that next resource, to add that next layer of management. So I've made this claim and I think hopefully I've made a good argument that being distributed is the best. So tactically, what are some of the things that we've done to run a distributed company? Tools. This is probably the most important thing that you're gonna have to put in place. You have to have good practices and good policies and good working tools for your team. So all Google all the time. Google for business, I know there's a lot of other options out there, Office 365 and whatever, nonsense. But we use Gmail, we use Google Docs, we use Google Sheets. The collaborative nature of these editing tools is critical for us in a distributed environment. If we get an RFP, we can have the three partners, no matter where we're at, and anybody else on the team, the developers that need to be, all in there writing on the proposal at the same time. We can see what's getting done, we can get immediate feedback, we can turn that around in a matter of days instead of a matter of weeks. We don't have to worry about who's got the most current version of the file, all obvious things. We also have the benefit that all those documents are stored in the cloud. Everybody on the team can get to them if we need them. Google Hangouts, very, very important tool for us. We're only 13 people, so we're still under the hangout limit, which is 15. So we're gonna hit that pretty soon. But there's a ton of other options out there. And I wanna mention this here, I know this is hard to see, but Lullabot started a conference called Yonder. It happens at the beginning of the year, and I'm pretty sure they're gonna do it again next year. And it's a conference just for distributed companies. And it's very small, it's a round table discussions. It was fantastic. Mark and I went in January, it was in Southern California, so it was a wonderful time to go. And while we were there, everybody was talking about video conferencing and having meetings, and they kept saying, oh yeah, we'll just blue jeans them in. We'll just blue jeans them in. Finally, they said it five or six times, and I looked at Mark and I was like, do you know what that means? I don't know what that means. He's like, I don't know what that means. So Blue Jeans is a video conferencing service for anybody that doesn't know, and they explained that to us. So perfect. So we'll just blue jeans them in. There's also GoToMeeting and Join.Me, lots of collaborative tools. So having some sort of application that lets you see each other face-to-face, virtually, digitally, is important. Slack, hopefully all of you are using Slack. We, if you go far enough back in the instant messaging chain, we were probably using AOL. We graduated from AOL to Skype. We went to IRC, we had channels for projects, and now we have Slack, which is the winner of the deaf match. So Slack lets us set up channels for our clients, for anybody that doesn't know. It lets you do file sharing amongst your team. You can have guest accounts, so you can have a client that has access to one channel that can join that channel. Slack lets you have, like I said, we do channels for every project. We have private groups, so we have a partners channel where we can just talk. Highly, highly recommend Slack. Another thing that we use here is, and part of that team building and that camaraderie, is we have special interest channels, so we have a lot of team members that like the Game of Thrones series. So we have a Game of Thrones channel, so the new episode comes out, and everybody can go complain about what character got killed. There's a few people on the team that really like watches, so we have a watch channel, and we post new watches that we can't afford. It's great. Highly recommend Slack. GitHub. I'll say this, there's more than the obvious GitHub, so we use GitHub for code repositories, and management, and workflow, and merge requests, or pull requests. But I mentioned Yonder. There was a couple people from the GitHub team at Yonder, and they were talking about using it as an internal management tool, and it really got us thinking like, oh, there's so many things we could use GitHub to do that aren't obvious, so we manage our handbook in GitHub. It's in a wiki, somebody wants a policy change in the company, submit a ticket. We'll create a pull request, we'll change that policy. It'll be talked about, but it's an option. We use it as a management tool. We create tickets for the partners, we create tickets for our operations coordinator, we create tickets for our admin. It's a great place to track and collaborate and see everybody's to-do lists. GitHub's not perfect. We throw Zen Hub on top of it. Gives us things like Kanban boards, and I don't know, there's a ton of extra tools, burn down charts, and things like that. Like I said, for us as a management team, it helps to see the ready, in progress, working, done type statuses. And we've also dabbled with this a little bit for business development, where we have a repository for proposals. So you can create tickets and comments related to getting a proposal done and tracking that through the process. Harvest. This is what we use for time tracking. It has a little widget on our computer that we can start and stop at timer. Make sure we know where our time is going every day. Harvest is what we use for creating estimates and invoices for our clients. We're able to track all that, they're able to log in, and I don't know if they're able to log in. They're able to see their invoices if you send them to them in the right way. There's a couple little quirks there. But again, time tracking software, you need to know where your time's going, especially if you're a time of materials company like we are. Spotify, this one's, I just kind of threw it in for fun. This is something we offer as a non-traditional benefit at Chromatic. Everybody gets a Spotify subscription. You get to listen to music. The cool thing with this is, if you drop a link to a Spotify song in Slack, you can hit play right there in Slack and it'll start playing. Also, to go back to Slack, I forgot there's a lot of integrations. You can integrate Slack with GitHub, so merge requests can post to Slack. Jenkins jobs finished, they can post to Slack. KinHR, I mentioned this before. This is just an HR management tool. It's a place where we can keep track of all of the employees, emergency contacts, that's really only important if you're on a retreat or something. Documents, something else that happens, at least in the US, is you might get a mailing from a state, like the state of West Virginia sent me, or maybe Delaware sent me a poster and it says, you have to hang this in your office. Well, I don't know where to hang it because I don't think the people in Illinois that work in my office, me, need it. So we can post it to Kin, those people in that state get that document and we can be compliant with that law. Jazz, this is formerly ResoMator. We use this as a recruiting tool, so this is more of a management tool. It centralizes all of our inbound applications so that everybody on the team can review them, comment on them, the developers can log in and see somebody's resume and add comments to it. It's very helpful. Know Your Company. This is the last tool I'm gonna talk about and if you've never heard of Know Your Company, please go check them out. They were spun off of 37 signals. Claire Stewart is their CEO. She's wonderful to work with. They'll say on their website that they're only for, you have to be 25 people to start using this tool. We started using the tool. We kind of, we sweet-talk Claire into letting us use it when we were eight. And I think this is an invaluable tool for a distributed company. So what Know Your Company does in a nutshell is it sends out three emails to everybody on your team one time a week. So on Monday it sends out an email that says, what are you doing? So what did you do last week? What are you doing this week? Basic stand-up. And then two days later it takes everybody's responses and it emails them to the entire company. And you can respond privately and there's a couple little things in there. But basically everybody that responds to it, the email goes out and everybody in the company sees the answer to that question. On Wednesday it sends out a company pulse question. This is always a yes or no question that says the best one that we've seen is do you have, is there a benefit that Chromatic doesn't offer that we should? Yes or no? And we got a resounding yes. I'll come back to that in a second. So there's a lot of other ones, as your desk chair comfortable, so on and so forth. And you can modify these, you can create your own. And then the Friday question is just a personal question. What is the first thing you ever bought with your own money? What's something you're afraid of? Did you see a good movie lately? Just kind of a team building type thing. But is there a benefit that the company doesn't offer that you wish we did? We had, I would say 80% of our team said yes. We don't have a 401K and we want a 401K or a retirement account. So if you're responding to those questions, you're able to implement a change. So we painstakingly went through the process of setting up a 401K, which could be a talk all in its own. So tactically I think running a distributed company is very similar to running a co-located company. There's a lot of challenges and things that overlap, legal challenges, financial challenges. You still have to do management reports. You still have to do business development. But the big difference is creating those personal interactions with the team from a management perspective. So we do one-on-one meetings with everybody on the team. So every two weeks, everybody on the team meets with one of the partners one-on-one. It's for half an hour, 20 minutes, half hour, whatever it turns out to be. And these meetings are more than just having kind of an open hangout policy or an open door policy. They're a time of intentional interactions to where somebody on the team can say, yeah, I'm not happy about this or I'm really excited about this thing and we didn't get to talk about it or hey, this thing's going on in my life. I just want to share it with you. And it helps bring together that cohesiveness. We also do whole team retreats. So we used to do this the couple of days before DrupalCon. And as the team's grown and shifted interests, we're not sure that that's really the right place to have a team retreat. So we've kind of decoupled that just like we're decoupling Drupal. Nobody? So whole team retreats. We're taking everybody to Southern California at the end of this year. And we're gonna hang out there for a couple of days and talk about the company. And then leadership retreats. So if your leadership team is distributed as well, it's really good to get everybody together. So this is our leadership retreat. We're gonna hang out for a few days after the conference ends today. So I mentioned hiring the right people. And this is critical for every business everywhere. But I think hiring somebody in a distributed environment takes a very specific personality. And I pretty much touched on these points earlier. But it really, really requires good communication. You have to have people that can clearly articulate where they're at. Another huge one is they have to be self-motivated. They have to be the kind of person that's gonna get up in the morning and go to work whether they have to or not, whether somebody's watching them or not. That's huge. And the last one is they have to have some sort of interest in travel. We've had people that have interviewed with Chromatic that have said, I've never been on a plane before and I'm scared to fly. Well, it's gonna be really hard to get that person together and you can't always go to them. So it's not to say that you can't hire somebody like that, but it is something that you definitely wanna you wanna think through. So I know I've covered a ton and I've made a claim that being distributed is the best. Hopefully I've shown why we think it's the best and maybe convinced some of you that it is the best if you didn't already believe that. I shared the tools and this is a topic that we're really passionate about. So if you have questions and wanna discuss this more, we'd love to. Chris and Mark are up front here as well and I'll be hanging out for a bit. So if there's any questions you guys wanna ask now, happy to do that here or come on up. Like I said, we got some t-shirts and whatever other chromatic swag you might want. So go for it. Okay, so the question is, is the scale smaller to larger and how large could it be? Yeah, so like I said, the question is, does this scale? Can it go up to 200 or 300 people? I think the answer is yes. There are companies that are distributed that are that size. Automatic, who runs WordPress.com is distributed and I think they're 400 maybe. GitHub is distributed as well and they're in the 300s. So I think it definitely does scale. However, the thing that those companies see and that they talked about is that they end up having pods. So you will have, at 300 people, you are gonna have 10 in Chicago, you are gonna have 10 in New York and those people might get together more often than not. They also institute things for their teams. So they might have their dev team get together in its own retreat. So at 13, we're able to bring the whole company. Well, some development, Lullabot probably has 20 developers. They might have a developer retreat that's just for those 20 developers or a management retreat for those 10 managers. And I think even we see that. We do the three of us together there. So yeah, I definitely think this scales. But you have to lay the foundation for it to be able to scale. So the question is, are there any tools to do Scrum or Agile remotely? Yeah, I think definitely that tool Zenhub that I mentioned helps you, well that's on top of GitHub, that helps you put those tools together. The daily stand-ups can be done. There's, I don't even, I couldn't even tell you the tools out there, but there's a lot of them. So yes, anybody else? Awesome, well thanks for coming. You can give me a review if it's good, if not, just forget about it. Like it's, and travel safe on your way home.