What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Work Together Anywhere
A founder who just closed a small seed round sits at her kitchen table studying a hiring plan. She has budget for three people, none of whom will share an office with her. Her only management experience was running a college project team, and most culture advice assumes a room where norms are absorbed by being present. She hires her first engineer, a stranger from another city, and spends the month unsure how often to check in, what belongs in writing, and whether he is quietly struggling. Her calendar fills with ad hoc calls, and a rushed message soon reads as a rebuke. Building a company, she realizes, means building a way of working first.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Setting communication norms from the first hire
A founder who decides, before the first hire starts, what belongs in a quick chat message, a shared document, or an actual conversation saves the new person weeks of guessing. This is cheaper to set with one employee than retrofit with ten, since habits calcify fast and every later hire copies the first. A short, plain list of channel purposes turns an implicit expectation into something a stranger can follow on day one.
The founder ignores her own norms under deadline pressure, sending urgent decisions through whatever channel is open, teaching new hires the real rule is unpredictability.
Write a one-page channel guide before the first hire starts, covering chat, documents, and live conversation, and revisit it after thirty days.
Building rituals before there is a team to bond
Founders often assume rituals are a luxury for larger companies, but a distributed team of two or three needs deliberate rhythm even more, since no hallway lets trust accumulate by accident. A short recurring check-in on blockers and wins, held at a consistent time, gives a scattered handful of people a shared heartbeat. Skipping it because everyone is busy building is exactly when trust is least likely to form on its own.
The founder treats rituals as optional overhead and cancels them whenever a deadline looms, precisely when the team needs the anchor most.
Protect one recurring, short check-in each week that survives the busiest sprint, and use it for connection as much as status.
Choosing tools on purpose, not by default
A founder under pressure reaches for whatever tool is already open, letting a call handle a decision that should have been a document, or a chat channel absorb a policy new hires later hunt for. Deliberate choice means asking what a piece of information needs, permanence, discussion, or speed, before deciding where it lives. Left unexamined, this drifts into a patchwork where nothing is findable.
Tools accumulate one at a time, each chosen to solve one afternoon's problem, until the stack itself becomes confusing.
Once a quarter, list every tool the team uses and its one job, and retire anything duplicative.
Onboarding people you will barely see
For a founder, onboarding a remote hire is founder-led trust-building that happens in the first weeks or not at all, not a checklist handed to someone else. Stretched thin, it is tempting to skip structure, but a hire without early clarity on norms, rituals, and tools spends months guessing rather than contributing, and may leave before the investment pays off.
A founder juggling norms, rituals, tools, and onboarding feels the pull between speed and structure most sharply. Every hour spent writing a guide or scheduling a check-in feels like an hour not spent on the product. Skipping structure to move faster tends to produce a scattered team that spends more total hours untangling confusion later, since investors and customers watch only the visible output, never the infrastructure underneath it.
Name one thing, honestly
What caused the most confusion for your team this month, and which channel carried it? If a new hire started tomorrow with no access to you for a week, what could they not figure out? Which tools would you keep if limited to three?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Once a quarter, list every tool the team uses and its one job, and retire anything duplicative.