Virtual Pizza, Anyone?
November 18, 2006 · Print This Article
End of September, Om Malik asked me to share Sphere’s experiences (on his new, very popular blog Web Worker Daily) of what it’s like to build a virtual company. Everyone of our key team members are living in different areas - the four founders are based in San Francisco, Seattle & Denver. We have team members living in Vancouver, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Our Advisors are based in San Francisco, Connecticut, New York, Boston and Atlanta. In the post, we talked about the tools we use to keep everyone on the same page, working toward the same goals.
We also talked a little bit about the challenge creating a culture that serves as a foundation for success. The culture piece is a little less straightforward. In fact, I’ve never met five of our key team members. Here are a few obvious things we do to develop a feel for each other:
- we make sure we talk multiple times each day, EVERYDAY
- we do a group call every Tuesday (Tech team) and Friday (Business Team)
- we engage people on a series of projects before signing them on as team members
- the founders meet physically at least once a quarter
We’re also trying a few new things. We’re opening our internal blog up to our Advisors and Investors who have a vested interest in Sphere - we hope this will foster a stronger bond between our team and the people most supportive in helping us pursue our dream. Another example, last month we had a pizza party - the idea was that each team member would receive a pizza at their homes for a group call and mini celebration of our accomplishments to date – it kinda worked and kinda didn’t. Everyone was excited about it but it was logistically a bit hard to pull off. A couple of our team members did get their pizza (see below photo from our SysAdmin Mike) while the rest of us were jealous to hear their greasy hands on their keyboards. I think we’ll try it again as everyone liked the idea.
If you’re building a virtual company, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what does/ doesn’t work in your virtual environment.
Sphere: Related Content
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Thanks!
Regular communication, especially of the casual nature you described, is always the key to maintaining a company like this. It eliminates that sense of isolation, and reminds people that they are members of a team, not individuals carrying the burden alone.
thanx
[...] been know to have a virtual pizza party. It didn’t really work but you’ll have to join our team to get the [...]
What a great idea, though I still think working in the same room is more beneficial.
http://nobosh.com/
We have a virtual team working on our websites from all over the world. The biggest problem was finding the right people to do the job. We ended up with specialists in specific areas rather than generalists doing lots of different jobs. This works particularly well for us and these days communication with fellow workers is not a problem with the exception of the time differences
I think that , first of all, these are not in fact virtual companies . They are very real because they put together real people and they deliver real results. Either they deliver programs, scripts, codes, graphics or they just develop projects. They void only the office infrastructure. This is the future !
Actually I think the work you’re doing is pretty inspiring