Article · 7 min read

How We Started Kipwise as Remote Co-Founders

Kipwise founding team · Kipwise Blog Free Beginner

A first-person account of a founding team split across Hong Kong and Estonia (7,852 km apart) who made distance work because they had already worked together for nearly four years first. It is the concrete proof of the answer's core point: distance amplifies existing cracks, so the trust has to be earned before you sign, and the written-knowledge-base and comms process have to exist from day one, not after the first fight.

  • Do not go remote with a stranger: their four years working together before splitting up is what made the trust survive the distance.
  • Being forced remote pushed them to build a shared written knowledge base and a real communication process from day one, which later made hiring distributed staff painless.
  • Geographic split can be a strategy, not just a constraint (one founder near European B2B customers and investors, two staying home to keep burn low).
Open on kipwise.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. Can I find a co-founder in a different city, and how do we make a remote founding team work?

Read with it

  1. The Tuft and Needle founders ran a distributed founding team on purpose (Palo Alto and Tempe) and wrote down exactly how they... Entrepreneur Article · 9 min read The Survival Guide to Co-Founders Living Far Apart JT Marino and Daehee Park
  2. YC is openly skeptical of a remote co-founder (they discount the plan if a linchpin is distant), which makes this the most... Y Combinator Video · 35 min Best Practices for Managing a Remote Team Y Combinator
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