955: Terminal - Building Skilled Remote Teams For Tech Companies

The Tech Talks Daily Podcast

Terminal is a company that is putting a unique twist on the remote work experience. They're building offices of remote teams (not just hiring remote workers) in places they've identified as emerging innovation hubs with skilled tech talent so that startups can access engineers all over the world -- not just Silicon Valley. This includes places like Montreal, Vancouver, and most recently Guadalajara.

I found myself fascinated by the story behind Terminal and how it was founded in 2015 with a mission of pushing the world forward by bringing global opportunities to talent. Its founders all shared a common struggle: an inability to find enough engineering talent to scale their businesses because the demand for engineers far exceeded the supply of talent.

They knew they had a market-level problem that required a macro solution. That's when they conceived of Terminal — a way for forward-thinking tech companies to avoid the war for talent altogether by building remote teams of skilled engineers around the world.

Today, propelled by the same mission, Terminal taps into engineering talent around the globe who want to do meaningful work at innovative companies.

Dylan Serota, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Terminal joins me on my daily tech podcast. We discuss how the startup is building remote teams and offices across emerging innovation hubs to help scale (engineering teams/IT operations).

Under his leadership, Terminal has attracted multiple rounds of investments, opened four Terminal Campuses and helped top technology startups like Eventbrite, Hims, Bungalow, and Dialpad recruit engineering talent.

Dylan brings over ten years of entrepreneurial and enterprise experience. Dylan was an early employee at Eventbrite, where he rose to become head of the platform and led the company in building a third-party developer ecosystem and platform partnerships. Dylan currently also serves as an advisor to Bus.com, a technology-powered marketplace for private/ride-share charter buses.

The company is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Thiel Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Atomic, David Sacks' Craft Ventures, and Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang as an angel investor, and clients include Him's, Bungalow, Eventbrite, Dialpad and Ever AI. Some of the companies that use Terminal include Hims, Bungalow, Eventbrite, and Bluescape.

We also discuss startups can compete with the tech goliaths in the hiring wars. Overcoming the remote work mind block, and genuine roadblocks. Tangible actions that leaders can implement in their companies to ensure remote workers feel included and apart of the company and retention strategies for remote workers.