I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Remote’s CEO Job van der Voort about their powerful global payments solution, their API strategy, and the trends in remote work that are sure to continue after the pandemic.
What is Remote?
For those that don’t know, Remote is a global payroll solution that allows startups through Fortune 500 companies to hire and pay employees and contractors globally.
Previously, companies hiring in different countries needed to set up legal entities, figure out local laws, partner with benefits providers, and even understand local financial rules to get people paid.
Remote is solving all of this, and making it cost effective to stay compliant. They are also now partnering with other HCM vendors to offer their solution through your favorite HRIS, ATS, etc.
Their first big partner is Rippling. If you’re a Rippling customer, you can now hire and pay workers globally, with Remote’s API doing all the work in the background. I’m sure there will be many more partners who want to get on this train.
Meeting Job van der Voort
In our interview, we talk more about why Job looks to Stripe as the holy grail in go to market strategy, along with their company’s mission of helping the world get access to money through their platform. How interesting that they have an employee centric mission despite selling to employers.
Their mission certainly resonated with me as someone who hires people remotely. It’s incredible the talent that exists all over the world, and the people who are upskilling to fit the digital first economy. Remote will play a large part in helping those people capture the economic benefits of their talent.
I’m also very excited to see where their product goes from here. Stripe has done a phenomenal job of building proprietary products on top of their payments infrastructure, and allowing their customers to build de-novo businesses like credit card offerings, etc.
It’s easy to see how Remote could offer some personal financial products for employees, benchmarking data to HR teams, and other HCM like technology.
While Remote is only a few years old, they are already a unicorn with investors like Sequoia (hands down the best VC over the past 40 years), General Catalyst, Two Sigma, and Index among others.
Their headcount growth reminds me of the best in class global technology companies like Snowflake, and yes Stripe:
It will be very interesting to see how this business evolves over time, and where remote work trends take us in a post-pandemic world (fingers crossed that is soon!).
