Job van der Voort is the co-founder and CEO of Remote, which has raised over $500 million to transform global employment infrastructure. Prior to founding Remote, he served as VP of Product at GitLab, where he helped scale the company from five to over one hundred employees across multiple countries while pioneering remote-first practices. He joined Mercury Raise to share insights on the future of work, global employment, and building distributed teams.
Early signs pointed to massive opportunity
At GitLab, Job van der Voort observed a pattern: new hires would often relocate shortly after joining, having previously lived somewhere solely due to work constraints. “They wanted to be close to their loved ones or travel the world,” he recalls. This signaled strong demand for location-flexible work.
That wasn’t necessarily a problem on the surface, as his team was able to be productive from anywhere. But creating the infrastructure to properly employ them was another story. As GitLab scaled beyond one hundred people, providing proper benefits and security across borders became increasingly complex. “We quickly discovered that hiring internationally is an incredible pain,” he says. “[Especially because] we couldn't hire everybody as a contractor — we had to actually provide benefits and security.” Addressing this pain point would become the mission of van der Voort’s next company: Remote.
Founded in 2019, Remote provides the infrastructure that enables companies to employ anyone, anywhere, while ensuring compliance with local labor laws, tax regulations, and benefits requirements. What started as van der Voort's attempt to solve GitLab's international hiring challenges has evolved into a comprehensive platform, handling everything from payroll and benefits to equity compensation and immigration support across more than sixty countries.
The company spent its first year and a half building out its legal and operational framework before launching publicly — a reflection of the complexity involved in truly solving global employment. “For the first year, I spoke with prospects every single day,” van der Voort recalls. “By the time we launched, we had five companies ready to try our product. That felt like a great victory at the time.”
Optimizing hiring while eliminating geographic boundaries
When it came time to expand the team, van der Voort’s experience at GitLab heavily influenced his approach to hiring. Naturally, he’d look to build an international team — but his approach also transcended country boundaries. Rather than focusing on traditional credentials, he doubled down on identifying raw talent and potential, regardless of years of experience or a job history at an impressive, well-known company. His philosophy? "Hire high intensity, intelligent people with high self-efficacy — people that just figure themselves out, no matter what the job.” “Amazing people don't necessarily come from the background you would expect,” van der Voort says. “It's more about being incredibly convinced that you will figure it out as you go.”
How to attract and manage a global or distributed team
Van der Voort has a few helpful tips for founders looking to hire great people from anywhere. The first step, of course, is attracting top talent. If your startup isn’t mature enough to have major brand recognition, he suggests leaning into vision and early-stage opportunity. “People like to work on ambitious, bold things,” he says. “You want to give these people a sense that they can have a really large impact on the future of the company.” This can help attract a certain personality that inherently wants to play a major role on an early team.
While van der Voort encourages his founding teams to hire from all reaches of the globe, he does recommend paying attention to time zones, especially early on. “If you are too many time zones ahead, it's going to be really hard to collaborate and build connections,” he notes. Time zone parity is especially critical when it comes to hiring salespeople. “If you're selling mostly to American companies, you want to have somebody who is able to work in American time zones,” he explains. But he emphasizes that early-stage companies shouldn't be too rigid about location or experience. “When you're early on, [location] doesn't matter” — what matters most is finding people who can effectively engage with your target market. “Amazing people are all over the place.”
Principles for scaling remote teams thoughtfully
Many companies — including Remote— will be comprised of both colocated and remote employees. Van der Voort cautions that companies shouldn’t think of employees who are geographically far away like distant resources. “Don't treat anybody in a company as a remote person. Just treat everybody like your colleagues that you have to work with every day,” he says.
He’s lived by that principle as Remote has grown from a small founding team to hundreds of employees across dozens of countries. He’s also maintained his focus on connection while adding necessary structure. “Default to asynchronous communication,” he advises, “but give teams enough timezone overlap to work synchronously when needed.” For new remote hires, van der Voort emphasizes that intentional relationship-building must be woven into company culture from day one. One key practice he recommends is encouraging regular informal conversations across the organization through coffee chats, helping employees build connections beyond their immediate teams. “Get them talking with a lot of people, like just coffee calls, 15-20 minutes with people across the organization,” he explains. “They start to form some bonds, they have an idea who's there.” These informal touchpoints are particularly crucial in a remote environment where casual office interactions don't naturally occur. The goal isn't to replicate office dynamics, but rather to create resilient distributed teams that can maintain both speed and connection at scale through deliberately crafted opportunities for relationship building.
What’s next for remote hiring?
Looking ahead, van der Voort sees the next frontier as ensuring employees not only feel connected, but have seamless access to the tools and resources they need to thrive. “Access to money, for example, should be easy given that you have a great job. You shouldn't have to wait a whole month for your salary or worry about having enough money in your account when standing in a supermarket,” he explains.
This vision of truly borderless employment — where geography limits neither opportunity nor operational efficiency — continues to drive Remote's evolution and growth. “It's easy to solve [a] problem for one country,” he notes. “It's extremely hard to do it for every country in the world. But that's exactly what we're going to do.”
Phoebe Kranefuss