When I first envisioned this company, I imagined a warm and vibrant office space. Bright. Upbeat. Healthy snacks in the kitchen. Yoga mats in the corner of conference rooms. Lots of natural light, with lush greenery everywhere.
At least, that was the dream. Before COVID. Before shifting to 100% remote work.
Nothing has turned out the way I imagined, and that’s okay. We’ve pivoted, we’ve adapted, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about the path we’ve taken.
We knew launching a 100% remote startup during a pandemic wouldn’t be easy, but the doors it unlocks — the ability to offer talented, diverse engineers from anywhere in the country an opportunity to join a promising startup with true unicorn potential — has been well worth the effort.
Here’s a glimpse at our journey thus far, and a peek at how we do remote work today.
The Backstory: Netflix to Noteable
It all began with a blog post describing some innovative work we were doing with Jupyter notebooks. The post was written to help with recruiting — we wanted to provide context to candidates on the type of work they’d be doing if they joined the team — but it had the unexpected bonus of establishing us as industry leaders within the Jupyter ecosystem. Much to our surprise, it also went viral, quickly rising to the #2 spot on Netflix’s acclaimed Tech Blog.
It was the catalyst from which everything started. We were soon inundated with requests to collaborate with other companies and universities — one Googler mentioned his team had met several times just to discuss our blog post. Wanting to capitalize on this interest, we agreed to meet with anyone actively contributing engineering resources to the Jupyter ecosystem. After all, this is who we’d be collaborating with on open source initiatives. If we could better understand what we each were working on, and if we could collectively commit to contributing our work back to open source, there was an opportunity to divide-and-conquer a lot of the work on our respective roadmaps.
Continue reading this post on our Medium blog.
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