The life of a startup founder is not typically relaxing. Long hours are a given and days off are few. Your startup is your baby, and it needs care and

What I learned after running my startup while traveling for a year

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2021-10-20 15:00:11

The life of a startup founder is not typically relaxing. Long hours are a given and days off are few. Your startup is your baby, and it needs care and feeding 24/7.

So what happens when a pandemic forces office shutdowns and a move to remote work for everyone? Great things, as it turns out.

For several years, my partner and I — normally based in Paris — discussed living a more nomadic life, spending a few months in one city and then moving on to another. When we started talking about it, we both worked in jobs (customer support and software development, respectively) that could in theory be done from anywhere. Then I co-founded my company, and we put our plans for a nomadic life on hold.

We already had a small number of employees working remotely. But when we shut our Paris office and went fully remote in March 2020, some of our staff were in a bit of a panic.

Inbound sales requests skyrocketed — within just a couple of weeks of the pandemic being declared, our leads had increased by 10x. We were signing clients left and right. We even made dozens of new hires while completely remote, doubling the size of the company — we now have people working from 17 countries.