The office was never what made your team great. Geography was just what made hiring convenient.
Most founders still build teams based on who’s within commuting distance. They call it “culture.” What it actually is, is a constraint they’ve stopped questioning.
I was recently featured in a piece on Big Techoro that digs into why distributed teams have stopped being a pandemic workaround and become the actual operating standard for companies that are outpacing their industries. Here’s what struck me most about the conversation.
The talent you need probably doesn’t live near you.
That’s not a workaround. It’s just math. When I built the distributed infrastructure behind Alive DevOps, I wasn’t trying to be unconventional, I was trying to find people who had already solved the exact problems I was staring down. Those people exist. They just aren’t all in one zip code.
Building a team and building a product should feel the same.
Custom, lean, and aligned with what the business actually needs, not what an org chart suggests. I’ve scaled from six to seven figures in annual revenue without outside investment, running operations from Costa Rica with a team spread across multiple countries. Restraint, applied consistently, compounds. Every role we filled had to earn its place.
The real distributed team problem isn’t tools or time zones.
It’s leadership precision. When there’s no office, there’s no ambient information, no hallway conversations, no read-the-room moments. What replaces that isn’t software. It’s sharper expectations set before a meeting starts, not negotiated inside one. That discipline came directly from competitive golf. Of course, ambiguity costs you strokes. In a distributed operation, it costs you far more.
Speed without clarity is chaos. Clarity without speed is just a nice idea that never ships.
Both failures show up in distributed teams constantly. The article gets into exactly how I think about closing that gap and why most companies get it wrong by trying to replicate the office instead of rebuilding the model.
If you’re running a remote team and wondering why execution still feels like pulling teeth, the full framework is worth your time.
Read more about it on Big Techoro →
The companies building this way are not managing a workaround. They’re running the operating model everyone else is still trying to reach.
