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

One thing people miss about remote work is that it's inherently transactional. Show up to a meeting, get or give what's needed, then go back in your hole. This is nice but for many people the lack of genuine social interaction is a killer.

A few jobs ago we set up Donut (donut.com) to set up a couple 15- or 30-minute 1:1s per week and tried to stick to the rule that we weren't supposed to talk about work, just chat about whatever. A replacement for break room chatter, not Yet Another Meeting. It didn't always work very well but when it did, it was great.

Some of the best conversations I had were with an autistic SRE who spent his first month telling everyone how autistic he was in case we needed to know. He did better virtually than he would have in person - lack of eye contact due to camera angles, maybe? So yeah, this has value even for you neuro-atypical, "I don't need chatter, just code" types.

I think that you can have genuine social interactions remotely, but that it takes a certain kind of person. Most people, even most younger ones IMO, just aren’t accustomed to interacting with people online via chat. But people who are eg prolific Reddit/twitter/etc users, or heavy users of discord/IRC/chat-heavy MMOs do really well IME (and yeah, a lot of these people are neurodivergent). You also probably either need to be really passionate about your work or have some kind of common interest to chat about to build a genuine connection, and not to be so shy that you self-censor yourself (/have a culture that doesn’t force people to self-censor).

Video calls are nice but I personally think they’re functionally the same as meeting in person. The biggest difference between remote vs in-person work is how you interact with people outside of formally scheduled meetings (eg showing people how to do something or casually conversing with them). Regular “hang out” meetings can’t fill this role, you really need something like chat IMO.

At prior jobs I’d say usually only 5-10% of people I came across directly at work were “good at chat”. If you could figure out how to filter for these people when hiring you could run a remote company very well, and have a strong culture and sense of community.