Mattermost is pretty open about what it is: an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Slack.
The team didn’t originally set out to build a messaging tool at all; they wanted to build video games. A few years and one huge pivot later, they’re powering messaging and collaboration for companies like Samsung, Daimler, SAP and Cigna — and they got there without ever actually having an office. All of Mattermost’s 100+ employees have been fully remote from the beginning.
I hopped on a chat with Mattermost CEO and co-founder Ian Tien to talk about how they decided to go full-remote before it was really a thing, what it takes to make a remote team successful and his hopes for the growing number of remote companies. Here’s our chat, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
TechCrunch: Tell me a bit about Mattermost’s origin story. You didn’t originally set out to build a communication platform, right?
Ian Tien: Yeah! So, when we started incorporating the company, we were doing video games — we were doing an HTML5 game engine. 
That’s what we were in Y Combinator as. We were SpinPunch, YC Summer ’12. Wade from Zapier was a batch mate, and it was like the batch that broke YC. It was like 84 companies. It was really big, but it had really great outcomes, that batch. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, we had Instacart, we had Lever, and Clever, and Rainforest and Boosted Boards. It was a great batch.
We ran with the HTML5 video game business for a few years. Things weren’t, you know, growing tremendously, and we ended up sort of changing to open-source enterprise software.
Why?
We were all remote and we were using a messaging service that was sort of before Slack. It got bought by a big company, and… it really started to fail. It would crash, we would lose data. We were really frustrated.
When we tried to export our data, they wouldn’t let us export. It was like 26 gigs of our stuff in there — all of our data, all of our analyses. When we stopped paying our subscription, it would paywall us from our own information! It was just really a horrible feeling, to be so dependent on a system and have it taken away, or down with outages, or to lose data.
We had over 10 million hours of messaging in our video games… so like, let’s try to build a prototype.
We decided to open-source the prototype, and it just really took off. We were just using it for our own purposes and we found that there was this pretty exciting business of people that wanted to self-host their own messaging platform. We followed that and got funding from Redpoint and the YC Continuity fund… and it’s been quite a ride.
At what point in this process did you officially become a remote-first team?
Sort of day one.
I was working with an engineer. I started the company when I was in graduate school. We didn’t have any money, we were all self-funded — but I was able to find office space for free from one of these co-working spaces.
We got in there and like… I’m on the phone all the time, trying to do art and get resources for the video games, and my engineering partner is trying to code. Why are we in the same office?
I went home to Palo Alto. He went home to Mountain View and… we just didn’t really need to meet. As we’re hiring people… there’s not really that many game artists in Palo Alto, Mountain View. So we started to find them all over the world. We just collaborated online and there was really not any problem that couldn’t be solved with — at the time — a Skype call.
How big is the team now?
Over 100.
Where is everyone?
We’re in about 20 countries. We’ve got a concentration in North America — Canada and U.S. Then across Europe and a little bit in APAC.
We set up this interview a little less than a month ago. In the time since, the growing concern around COVID-19 has thrust this topic of remote work into the spotlight. More companies are shifting to work-from-home, even if just temporarily. How has this impacted Mattermost?
Events. We work from home all the time, so it’s not like we had to have a big change in policy, or social distancing, or all the things you’ve seen. But there’s been a tremendous impact in events — we go to open-source events, user groups, enterprise software conferences… all of those are sort of cancelling out. We’re still putting together travel policies for just being really careful where you go, if you go at all — it’s sort of wait and see until March 31st, and as we go we’ll continue to figure things out.
Are you seeing much of an increase in companies/teams needing onboarding support?
[Note: Ian didn’t have the information about recent metrics handy, but later followed up with me on this question via email, writing:]
We are definitely seeing a rise in Mattermost interest with COVID-19. Our core audience is high-security enterprises like governments, financial institutions and technology companies who need to collaborate remotely but who also need to have 100% control of their data and infrastructure.
Mattermost is a way for them to communicate outside a building while meeting stringent regulations, such as ITAR compliance, which requires organizations to vouch for anyone who has access to their confidential communications.
We serve customers at the very high end of the security world, who are now forced to work remotely, and adoption is booming.
As you’ve scaled up to more than 100 employees, have you seen many new challenges? Things you’ve discovered along the way that weren’t obvious at first, with working remote?
I think it’s the same thing you’d see with Zapier and GitLab and these other [remote] companies. There’s gotta be a lot of remote systems put in place — a written culture, and getting people accustomed to that, and being able to have onboarding that’s sort of asynchronous.
As you onboard bigger and bigger batches of people, how do you get everyone accustomed to the same way of working? It’s probably typical for all the remote companies, because you have a mix of people — some who have worked remote before and some who are a bit more new to it. So you’ve got those pains, those sorts of challenges.
It’s really about iterating and putting more and more systems in place as you grow.
What kind of systems?
Checklists. Lots of checklists! And lots of definitions.
At Mattermost, we run our remote company on Mattermost software that we create and we customize. So one example is… there’s a whole bunch of acronyms we use to go faster. So if I’m in a conversation that’s just text, I can’t tell how serious someone feels about something. The emotion doesn’t come through. So we have a shorthand where we say, “where are you ‘out of five?’ ”
Am I zero out of five, which means I’ve thought about this for like two seconds, so I have no idea? Or am I five out of five, which means like, “all of my credibility is on this statement?”
It’s hard to teach everyone that, so we have “autolinks” within Mattermost. If I say, “Hey, Greg, I’m zero out of five on this, this is how I think about this,” that’ll auto-link the definition [of “zero out of five”] in our online handbook. […]
I’ve been trying to follow along with a lot of people who were [working in an office] before and are now working remote just to see how the experience is going for them. Something I’m noticing already is that they’re starting to hit these non-obvious challenges… these not-so-visible challenges, I should say, of things like cabin fever, or loneliness. How can a remote company support their team’s mental health?
Great question.
We do a survey every six months… it’s really these 12 yes/no questions that come from Gallup. You can search for “Gallup employee engagement survey” and you’ll find it — it’s based on like a million data points. There are 12 questions, yes or no, that calculate a score of how engaged people are. We also do a sort of workplace NPS score, and we’ve done pretty well on that survey after survey.
But the number-one thing that comes up is this question: do I have a best friend at work?
On that scale, we’re actually much lower than normal companies are. There are a lot of things [where we’re ranking] high, like, “I’ve received feedback” or “I know what I’m doing”… but that’s one we have to keep working on.
In a remote environment, it’s a little harder to go and grab lunch with someone, or go out for drinks afterwards and have all those social interactions. Of the things we think about when we take that survey… “how do you get that really close relationship?” is an area of growth for us.
Any ideas there? Any ways to support having a best friend at work?
I think tenure helps. The longer you’re here, the more likely you are to build relationships.
And we travel. Once a year… we actually just came back from Nassau, Bahamas. We bring the whole company together to spend time and really get to know each other. That helps a lot. The year before we were in the Dominican Republic, the year before that we were in Lisbon, Portugal. When you have those experiences, that really helps bond not only within your own team, but cross-organizationally. Over time, you actually definitely build those bonds — but it just takes longer, I think, in remote culture than in an office.
Besides Mattermost, what tools do you rely on?
Definitely Zoom. We do a lot of Zoom.
And we’ll use a lot of standard software development tools. Definitely Figma, the design team likes that. But it’s all sorts of regular tools that I think most other companies that build software use.
Is there anything that doesn’t exist for remote teams that you wish did?
Yeah, [something for] shipping logistics.
There’s a lot of remote companies that are like, “I wanna celebrate! Here’s a swag pack!” — or you try to do something for the holidays, right? And then some [employees] in South Africa get it in like… March, because the postal service just takes that long. And then some people have to pay duty on it.
Shipping logistics is one of the hardest things when you’re in like 20 countries.
Interesting. So shipping logistics regarding celebrating certain milestones, like sending your team swag or something?
Yeah, sending the team swag — also, another thing is when you start buying laptops for people around the world, the spend pattern on your credit card literally looks like complete fraud.
[Laugh] Okay, so the challenge here is just getting things your team needs to your team?
Yeah. The hard part of a remote company is doing the physical things. [Especially] when you’re distributed in a lot of countries.
Any other tips for everyone starting to work from home now?
The one thing I’d say is: it’s about iteration. When you go remote, some things are going to work, some tools are going to work… but you want to change them, and get better. The more you can customize what you do and make it your own and make it really fit what you need it to do — it really helps you accelerate. It really helps you understand where someone else is coming from, and creates a lot of context.
Context, in a remote company, is probably the most important thing. You can’t just go and say, “let’s figure this out over lunch”… you have to provide really good context, all the time, so that people can align.
Is there anything that teams tend to get wrong in the move to remote — either conceptually, or in their approach?
The worst is speaker phone.
If you’ve got some [people in an] office and there’s a speaker phone there. Or they might have a [360º] camera, which is really bad; we tried those, and were like, “oh my god, this is horrible” — people [on screen] in the office will have tiny heads and you can’t see what they’re talking about, and they’re on speakerphone so it’s hard to hear, and they’re having eye contact with the person next to them, and hand gestures… everyone [else] on the call doesn’t understand what’s going on. They end up talking to each other a lot more, they start to take over the conversation in that conference room.
What we do is… say you’re in a hotel room for a conference, and there are like five people [working in that room]. Instead of putting speakerphone on, everyone should go to their own little location, like it’s all remote.
So even if you have part of a team in the same room, effectively make them work like they’re remote for that meeting?
Yes. Make everyone equal.
If you built another company, would it be remote?
Absolutely.
Why? What’s the main draw? What’s irreplaceable versus co-location?
What’s irreplaceable is the energy. The energy that people have when they’re working from home, in that very comfortable environment. They’re not fighting for desk space. They get to control everything — they can decide if the window is open, or what they want to wear, they can design everything in their entire office… and they just come to conversations with this wonderful energy.
When people onboard, they’re always talking about it. “Wow! Everyone here is so helpful, you’ve got this wonderful energy”… that happens when you’re able to work in a very comfortable environment. There can not be a more comfortable environment than working from a space that you created yourself.