Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

I'm at a company now where we are trying to do this but the CIO/CEO keep weighing in on EVERY conversation where they disagree with the approaach. The whole reason we are having the open conversation is for ideation and good communication but when a high level person comes along and says "well thats not the way I would do it" everyone decides to go back to 1:1s, direct messaging, and calls so as not to document anything publicly in feat of being called out by the higher ups.

Sounds like they need to spend their time differently. Yuk.

I was going to say the same thing. Had this setup at my last job and the CEO would chime in with irrelevant, outdated, not feasible, or already considered ideas. We'd then have to spend time communicating and explaining the shit we had already been talking about for the last month or whatever. It was incredibly frustrating because it gave a public impression that our team was either incompetent or combative. It was gross.

Private team channels sound like a good compromise

Also someone with good standing in the company to politely point to the CTO that it's not his job to give his 2c at every conversation in slack (typical behaviour of people coming from the technical side)

You need a private channel with everyone except the C-level. We find this very, very effective at our 2500+ person org

A thousand times this.

I find it very dangerous when you have some technical people who moved upwards into non-technical roles still being involved in technical discussions.

Their words carry a lot of weight, yet they have no idea about the actual context of the work being done.

Sometimes this is useful and a fresh perspective from an experienced colleague can unblock things, but more often it stifles discussion and discourages the juniors from thinking freely.

I wonder if they would behave the same way in an everyone in the same office situation. Team leads should take this as an issue to the CEO.

Quick note that if you're actively working around the CEO on a regular basis, you need to stop and find another job. Or possibly replace the CEO but that's a high stakes low probability of success endeavor.

That CEO would also micromanage in an office anyway. Oh wait, now it's called "founder mode" and it's something good.

I don't think this would be such a problem if people were comfortable challenging the CIO/CEO. So maybe that's the cultural aspect that needs to change on the exec's behalf?

It’s still a waste of time to have to debate every single thing every day.

What's happened here is precisely why communication should be public, it's revealed a real problem in the company you're at.

I've been on teams exactly like this, but the problem isn't public channels, it's "leadership" not knowing how to let go and trust their teams. Doing more work in private is the negative consequence of this bad practice, but I assure you this issue will eventually cause problems no matter how clever people are in avoiding public conversations.

And startups that are on the path to long term success will have leadership abandon this type of butting into every day communication very early in their growth. A good C-level must learn the build teams that can scale beyond their individual interventions. You literally cannot grow beyond a 30 person organization (and survive) if this much intervention is required.

The CIO is the problem here, not your setup.

Incredible. Every point of data shows the highest compensated members of a firm doing the least work / being the most harmful to productivity lmfao. Wonder what the takeaway here is