We've got about 60 people working 100% remote to build the easiest way to setup workflows and integrations between popular SaaS apps like Slack, Trello, MailChimp, etc.
P2 wasn't working for us. We wanted something that used the same authentication as Zapier so it could just be one account. We also had a few other features we wanted to customize a bit too.
I suppose that is true in the narrow case of SF/NYC. We're working to grow profits to make it so that isn't the case in the couple places that have the highest cost of living in the world.
Most of these started as one off blog posts. After a while we built up enough chapters that it didn't seem like it would be that farfetched to make a book. So we filled in the gaps on some chapters that were missing and turned it into a book.
We absolutely hire based on merit. People are living in rural areas making a great salary because we pay mostly fixed to Chicago market.
We don't downsize your salary. But sometimes we can't upsize it. There's a few companies we can't compete with on salary like Google. Most of those employers seem to be in the bay area. Sometimes we lose out. A lot of times we don't. The world isn't quite so black and white here.
Great question. Another section of the book we need to update. We have quite a few folks with kids (maybe half?) and a 14 week parental leave when you have a kid or adopt a kid. We've learned a decent amount on making kids and working at home a good experience.
We get asked this a lot and unfortunately don't have any immediate plans to release it in any way. It's pretty tied into Zapier and would involve a decent chunk of work to decouple the code base to make it more general.
Someday it would be good to release.
You can probably replicate it with P2 the WordPress theme which is where we started before building Async.
Yeah. This stuff is hard when you're a startup and can't pay Google rates. But as we've grown we've generally been able to grow salaries so folks are above market in the market they are in. Sometimes we lose out on folks in really high cost of living areas. But it's happening less often.
We have on institutional VC and no outside board. Remote is more and more common especially with engineering and support teams so they didn't have any pushback. I think if we weren't performing as well they might have more concerns.
Hi HN! Co-founder & CEO of Zapier here. We wrote this book a little over a year ago. It's mostly up-to-date though there's a few things I need to update.
I'm unavailable for about ~2 hours but you can AMA and I'll respond later. :-)