13 months ago, I joined what I thought was the most exciting startup at the time — Orbit. Finding Orbit felt like fate. I had just spent the past 6 months furiously learning about how to build good communities, and here was a company that was helping people do exactly that.
But what excited me more than the product was the team itself. Even though Orbit was just a startup, they chose to make their team global. I thought it was brilliant. What better way to build a great community tool than by working with people from communities around the world? I was tired of working for your typical Bay Area startup with its Bay Area perspectives. At Orbit, I’d get to learn from teammates in France, Benin, Slovakia, Nigeria — and that was really exciting.
Joining Orbit meant that I had to make two big changes to my work life. First, I began working completely remote. Second, I had to spend most of my day working asynchronously from all my other teammates.
Despite being remote and async, the team’s communication and trust in each other was beyond that which I had experienced anywhere else. People took full ownership of their work, proactively sharing updates, asking for help, and responding to teammates’ questions before they came online the next day. Everyone created paper trails - using Loom, Zoom recordings, Notion, Slack - so that anyone could follow an important call, brainstorm or technical discussion. Meetings were set up and then constantly re-evaluated - was this meeting still useful to have? Were the right people part of the conversation?
Those first few months, I was in awe. A global, remote, async community worked — and at Orbit, it worked well.
Type: Remote, global, async
Size: ~ 60 employees
Who’s in it: People across the globe who care about humans and relationships enough to want to invest in a new space in the tech industry: community building.
The shared goal: Build a tool that people can use to manage and grow communities.
It was just another work day. And like any typical morning, I was catching up on Slack and posting questions when I opened our announcements channel.
That’s when I found out that half of the company was getting laid off and would be gone by the end of the day.
I closed my laptop, and I started to cry.
The last few months had not been easy. The head of my team left, and our entire engineering and product structure had shifted. We were given a new lead, new teams, and a new focus. We had to re-invent how we worked together. The transition had been difficult, but we were doing it, and we were making it work.