How Our Two-Office Startup Turned a 9-Hour Time Difference into a Powerful Advantage
When I joined MadKudu ten months ago, I was afraid that more than half of my company (including our three co-founders) would be on another continent separated by an ocean, nine hours’ time difference, and with an American culture I wasn’t used to.
It’s been an amazing journey, but today I can say we’ve turned this double-office setup into our secret weapon. Here’s a brief rundown of how we did it.
The MadKudu value I appreciate the most is authenticity, so be prepared to hear our story in gory detail!
MadKudu is an actionable lead scoring platform that uses predictive analytics to help SaaS marketing teams accelerate revenue. We’re a two-country company, with nearly 20 kudus based across Mountain View, California, and Sentier, Paris.
When MadKudu had the idea of opening an office in Paris two years ago, our friends and investors were a little skeptical. Our founders decided to go for it anyway. The idea of having two amazing talent pools was dreamy, and remote management wasn’t an issue for our engineering team. Plus, our founders all have family in France and could come back at least three times per year.
After six months with two offices, investors were 50/50 on the idea. Now, after nearly two years, our founders, investors, and friends’ companies all love it. We deliver more than ever, our metrics are great, and hiring has never been so easy.
How we juggle two offices
We overcame the challenge of having two offices by celebrating our existing culture, staying connected, and making a few changes to our organizational design.
#1) Celebrating our unique culture
At MadKudu, we have a strong workplace culture with distinctive values shared by our co-founders, who have known each other for years and worked together at AgilOne (two of them even lived together for more than five years — though this is another story!).
Our challenge was to strengthen this culture between our two offices. We did this by:
- Spending time together. We have an open travel policy, which means every kudu spends time in the other office to get to know everyone. We also organize at least two retreats each year to spend time together offsite. Startups shouldn’t be afraid to spend money on this kind of team-building — compared to the benefits, the investment is very low.
- Being authentic & transparent: We think we should share everything between kudus. That means investor notes, candid feedback, our financial situation, and our quarterly objectives. We speak out whenever something isn’t working or could be improved. We also have our Mad Weekly meeting each Monday, where we update our teams on business metrics and present and new hires coming on board. Each Mad Weekly meeting ends with a Q&A, and we have presentations from each of the teams. This authenticity and transparency helps to build trust, and lets everyone know what is at stake for us. This way, we understand where we need to push harder, and how we can help each other out.
- Making user manuals. Remote culture makes it hard(er) to stay in touch — that’s why we use the excellent user manual technique to communicate with other kudus. With a simple click you can find out how this person would prefer to receive feedback, when is the best time to book meetings with him/her, and more.
#2) Staying connected
As a very talkative and extroverted person, I expected communicating between our two offices to be a real challenge — especially having our co-founders in another country. At first, it was!
Having two offices can make it harder to build a shared culture of collaboration, and make silos a lot more likely. To overcome this obstacle, we stay connected by:
- Communicating clearly: We use Notion to explain e-ve-ry-thing in detail (aka knowledge management), and because we’re an American company, we make sure everything is written in English. This can be a little frustrating for me whenever there’s a killer French reference or GIF I would like to post, but I love learning about the American culture’s GIF instead! Here’s our welcome Notion page for the MadKudu team:
- Using Zoom everyday. We have an automatic video connection on two very big screens between offices every day at 6pm Paris time / 9am San Francisco time. Sometimes this is a chance to say hi, or to discuss football (or soccer 😜) results. Other times, this is just an occasion to smile because we hear all the laughs going on in the other office, and we feel like one office with 5,525 miles between us. We actually use Zoom without moderation for every meeting: with clients, to have 1:1s, to say hello, to brainstorm, and to meet candidates.
- We also use Marco Polo for 1:1 or group conversation. This is an amazing asynchronous tool, and there’s no need for us to be in the same time zone to follow the conversation.
- Testing the mood. Our kudus are the most important part of our journey, and I need to make sure everyone is feeling happy and well. That’s why we test the mood across both offices and take steps to address any problems and celebrate any wins. Each kudu has a regular stand-up meeting with his or her team, a 1:1 meeting with his or her manager each week, and a kudu growth review each quarter. We also use Office Vibes to ask for anonymous feedback. For a growing team like ours, this is crucial.
- Using Slack (and Asana) without moderation. We realized that non-verbal communication is also key to building a shared culture — you want the different offices to feel like they’re in the same place, share the same inside jokes and custom emojis (for us, this means Nic Cage — if you want to know more about this, click here). My favorite is definitely the Kudus channel, where you can praise, celebrate, and give thanks to people. Here’s a sample of some of the magic that happens in the Kudus Channel:
- Using the donut system 🍩 Each week, everyone receives a ‘donut’ notification in slack to take 30 minutes to discuss non-work related stuff with another kudu randomly assigned by the app. I love this system, but it’s important that it’s not mandatory — we let our kudus schedule donuts whenever they want.
#3) Making each office autonomous
With two offices, we had to adjust our organizational design to ensure strategic independence between Mountain View and Paris. We did this by:
- Strengthening our leadership in Paris. We had to make sure our engineers in Paris weren’t always depending on our CTO, and that we could make strategic decisions on our own. Instead of hiring a more senior person, we decided to trust our team and redefine roles to include more responsibility. With coaching, and with a focus on management, we have readjusted and rebalanced the ownership between countries.
- Building trust. For two-office startups with no founders at the second site (e.g. our Paris office), it’s crucial to have a high degree of trust between executive and local management. You also need to have emotional support available for anyone who might need help.
- Avoiding bottlenecks. Our Mountain View and Paris offices have to work together, but not co-dependently. Each office can now progress their projects autonomously, including engineering decisions, product sprints, and client support. I’m now also in charge of the Paris office, which means decisions with on-boarding, team management, finance, and office management can be taken independently without having founders on-site.
#4) Using the same talent acquisition and on-boarding processes in our two offices
Finally, we’ve worked hard to make sure our hiring and on-boarding processes reflect our unique culture. We did this by:
- Involving both offices. We try to get Mountain View and Paris equally involved in hiring, so our candidates have a view into our bi-continental way of working. For example, “values” calls with candidates can be done by people either in the US or in France, and we make sure we use the exact same processes. This way, all new hires are a great fit for our culture.
- Training new hires on the company vision, running, and operations. We use (and are always improving) a one-month intense on-boarding process involving: In-depth training about how MadKudu works at a sales and technical level (our goal is for every kudu to be able to pitch it to a potential client or to his or her grandma!), 1:1 mentoring between baby kudus and elders, and sessions with founders and team leads to understand our vision and mission.
The unexpected advantages of a two-office system
Having two offices has also led to some unexpected benefits and unfair advantages, too!
- Enhanced productivity. Our two time zones give us a greater window to get things done. Because our Paris office is winding down just as Mountain View starts the day, one team can start a project and hand it over to the other to continue.
- Greater focus & flexibility. Having two offices forces people to be a lot more deliberate and organized. We have more written communication, document our thinking in greater detail, and have longer ‘focus’ time without interruption. The San Francisco team starts around 5pm — 6pm in Paris, and this means people in Paris can arrive later in the morning for those who prefer to work later. People can also play sports or go to the gym at lunch without interrupting the workflow. Because our overlap is so precious, people tend to be more conscious of their time and how they’re using it!
- A more diverse pool of talent. At MadKudu, we set a high benchmark for diversity and inclusion. We expect everyone to put in the time and effort to understand each other, and this has consequences on our vocabulary. For example, we say “partners” instead of husband or wife, and “people” or “folks” instead of “guys”. We recognize there’s no single way to solve a problem or communicate — instead, people have to be nimble and adapt to new situations. Between our two offices, we now have 6+ nationalities, 45% women, a mixture of different personality types, and a rich French-American culture. According to our engineering team, this has even had consequences on the diversity of our code! As a Head of Talent, I can say our talent acquisition is the best I’ve seen for a 20 person company. We can draw from the connections of our diverse and talented pool of people to find the best players. At scale, this is a real unfair advantage, especially combined with our amazing talent acquisition process.
- Better customer support. The first reason for having our first customer success team member in Paris was a visa problem, however the consequences were exponentially great! Now, we have taken advantage and opened more CS positions in France. This lets us take much better care of our European clients, and improve the connection with our engineering team.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing
Don’t let my breezy tone fool you — our two-office system has been a journey! There were a few things we got wrong at the outset, and if you’re starting the same journey, there’s a lot you can learn from our mistakes.
- Too many meetings. We thought having a lot of common meetings would help our two offices feel closer together but it meant more agendas, less focus during those meetings, and less time for work. Instead, we now cover everything in our Mad Weekly meetings each Monday — this is a great way to start each week.
- Too much dependence between offices. We were too idealistic at the start, and expected our engineering team in Paris to work with leadership in Mountain View. In fact, you can’t progress with prototyping or iterations with just a few hours together. Now, we have transferred responsibilities, and have built new capabilities in Paris to counterbalance this.
- Too much travel. I suffer a lot from jet lag (like a lot!). To make the travel easier on people, we think every kudu should choose between travelling between offices more often and maybe for shorter periods of time. For example, people could take a one-week trip up to four times a year (especially managers) instead of two-week trips just twice a year. Our founders also travel between the offices three to four times a year.
We’re not done yet!
- Organizational design: We’re growing fast and are hiring more team members in sales, engineering, and customer success in Paris. This will help us cover all current and future needs for new markets and European clients and avoid silos.
- The buddy system: So far, new kudus have a buddy in the same office to help them get on-boarded faster and smoother. Now, we’re trying to locate buddies in the other office to create even more interactions.
- Diversity: We need to recruit more international people in Paris, including non French-speaking leaders. We think there’s still room for improvement, and we need to spread more of the American culture in Paris. Amazing things happen when we have a diverse group of people, as this challenges us to be more open and authentic.
Don’t let the time difference scare you!
With a few useful communication, teamwork, and organizational techniques, we’ve been able to turn a nine-hour difference into a major advantage.
If we did it, then with the right amount of effort, some improvements to organizational design, and a healthy team culture, you can do it too 😉
And we’re not the only ones to take up the US / France challenge. Algolia, Front, Sqreen, and now MadKudu did it — who’s next?
