Support document to webinar of 21st September 2017 performed by Frederic Plais and Celine Mechain on Frenchweb and relating to successful distributed company organization

1. Continuous Deployment
Cloud Hosting

2. Agenda
● Platform.sh, presentation of a distributed company
● Benefits of this organization
● Focus on 5 attention points
● Q&A

3. MANIFESTO
We believe developers should concern themselves with
features and code quality, not servers and tooling.
We believe the infrastructure can and should be
abstracted away.
We believe there is no enterprise software. Just
software. That auditability, security and
high-availability are fundamentals.
We believe you can move fast without breaking things,
that software is change, and that fear of change can be
overcome.
We believe that we know how to do this. That it’s our
job to make software just run. On every cloud.
On-premise. Everywhere.
We believe
software should
run.

4. VC Funded
Raised $11M to date
R&D backed by the European Commission and the French Public Bank of Investment bank (BPI)
The French Entrepreneur’s
fund
The Finnish fund created by the
team who founded MySQL
French Technology fund
French Tech &
software fund
Supported by the H2020 R&D program of
the European Commission
R&D programs
(Concours Innovation National 2016)
backed by BPI France

5. 58 people in 14 countries.
Headquarters in Paris (FR) + 3 subsidiaries (US, UK, DE) + 1 subsidiary to come (CN)
21 French - 19 North Americans - 37 years average age - 13 female employees (& working on it!)
25% come more than 2 days per week at the office, 80% are mainly at their home office.

6. 14 countries covering 18 timezones
Americas Europe Asia/Oceania

7. 14 countries, covering 18 time zones!

8. Ori Pekelman
VP Marketing
Paris, France
Frederic Plais
CEO
San Francisco, CA USA
Damien Tournoud
CTO
Montpellier, France
Sylvie Georgeault
CFO
Paris, France
Kieron Sambrook-Smith
Chief Commercial Officer
London, UK
Robert Douglass
VP Customer Success
Köln, Germany
Platform.sh Executive Committee
Nikola Kotur
VP Infrastructure Operations
Paris, France
Céline Méchain
VP People Ops
Paris, France
Joey Stanford
VP Security & Compliance
Denver CO, USA

9. Almost half of my time is spent on internal
communication
Internal communication approximately represents 22 Hours / week (almost half of
my week working time)
Internal communication pattern per week (without prep)
- Exco Team meetings: 2H / week
- 1:1 meetings with N-1 & N-2: 8H / week on average
- Dedicated team meetings (product, marketing, sales…): 4H / week
- All Hands meeting:, 1H / Quarter call with the team and Q&A
- Board communication (incl. regular 1:1): 2H / Week
- Time on slack to follow up and participate in discussions: 5H / week

10. Lessons learned in 3 years on running
a distributed company
WHAT ARE THE PROS?
- Build a truly global company from day 1
- Multiculturalism becomes the norm
- Hire outside of the employment competition
hubs. Get the girls/guys who enjoy a life
outside the metropoles and still want a cool
job
- Better employee retention
- No time wasted in commuting. Better
work/private life balance. More happiness at
work.
- “Writing” is the dominant culture
WHAT’S HARDER?
- Very hard to conciliate both an office life and
a vastly distributed team! You have to choose
- Some people just cannot adjust to this
- Less “weak signals” on employee
disengagement
- Hard to hire fresh girls/guys out of college
- Writing is the dominant culture
- On-boarding of new employees is way harder
- Complex to harmonize HR (compensation,
vacation, contracts,...)
- Need to manage communication very tightly
(and it’s more time consuming)

11. Zoom on 5 “key things”
● Sharing common values
● Avoid employee isolation at any cost
● Pick the right tools! The cloud is your friend.
● Flexible contract management
● Focus on your on-boarding process

12. Platform.sh values
- We are a product company.
- We are nothing without our customers' success.
- We never sacrifice quality.
- We are curious, passionate and courageous.
- We are fair, and we don’t bullshit.

13. Remote isolated :
Recruitment requirements
Successful remote work encompasses :
1. open source active contributors
2. seasoned employees
3. being responsible for your work
4. being used to working remotely
(contractors or entrepreneurs)
5. teamwork spirit
6. proven international experience
Recruitment drawbacks :
1. how to train employees on our product ?
2. video interviews only
3. very few young employees/ interns

14. Remote isolated :
Our internal communication (1/2)
All-company Purpose Tool Yearly Cost (€)
Main working tools Google suite 6 300
Team messaging Slack 12 000
Internal ticket management Jira 5 040
Tech Purpose Tool Yearly Cost (€)
Incident communication StatusPage 14 500
Customer ticket management Zendesk 15 600
Code documentation Github 300
Git repositories management Gitlab 5 000
Alarm aggregation Pager Duty 1 000

15. Remote isolated :
Our internal communication (2/2)
Sales / Marketing Purpose Tool Yearly Cost (€)
Sales management Salesforce 26 400
Social media management Hootsuite 100
Admin Purpose Tool Yearly Cost (€)
Pre-payment of business expenses Spendesk 3 060
Business expenses Expensify 1 800
Absence management Calamari 1 200

16. Employment contract Management
4 countries out of 14 house a legal entity
● local employment contract for entity-based Platformers
● contractor agreement for non entity-based Platformers
40% of Platformers are contractors
Employees and contractors are equally treated (holidays & salary)
There is no or very few voluntary attrition

17. Onboarding process (1/2)
1 owner for the whole process
On boarding starts before new hires join
WHEN OWNER WHAT
Contract Signature
HR Invitation to connect on social networks
Marketing Invitation to scheduled events
HR Recruitment closing
HR Mentor Designation
WHEN OWNER WHAT
Entry Date
Confirmed
HR
Automated Jira on-boarding tasks for
accounts creation
HR Org Chart update
FR Office Manager
Welcome pack shipment
(goodies+welcome letter)
Manager + HR
First week calendar preparation with
manager
Step 1/3 before joining Step 2/3 before joining
funneled through information

18. Onboarding process (2/2)
First week meetings will be key to successful
onboardings
WHEN OWNER WHAT
Entry Date -5
HR
Internal communication proposed to
manager
Office Manager Administrative registration
Office Manager Business cards
WHEN OWNER WHAT
Entry Date
HR
Welcoming new hire
(company pres, internal tools, team & mentor
pres, internal rules, …)
Department
Directors + CEO
1:1 meetings
Marketing Website update
Entry Date +30 HR On boarding feed-back
Entry Date +60 HR
New hire to update on-boarding
documentation
Integrating new hires into the success
of future onboardings
Step 3/3 before joining 3 more steps once on-board

19. THANK YOU!
Q&A