Most remote companies struggle with meetings. Too many, too long, too pointless.
We have one mandatory all hands meeting per week. Tuesday, 9am PST. The entire team.
That's it.
No daily standups. No weekly syncs. Just one all hands.
And we make it count.
Why we meet: Three reasons, not status updates
1. Give everyone a chance to lead
Each week, a different team member moderates the meeting.
Not the CEO. Not the same senior person every time. Everyone rotates.
New intern who joined two weeks ago? They'll moderate soon.
Why? Because leading a meeting in front of the whole company is how you learn to:
- Structure your thoughts clearly
- Facilitate discussion without dominating
- Keep things moving when conversation drifts
- Handle unexpected questions
This isn't about status. It's about giving everyone the opportunity to develop skills they won't get from solo work.
You can be brilliant at writing code or crafting strategy in Linear. Leading a group of 15+ people across time zones in real-time? That's a different skill. You only learn it by doing it.
2. Build relationships across a remote team
We're spread across continents. North America, South America, Europe, Asia.
Most days, you're working async. Slack messages. Linear comments. Occasional quick calls.
You can ship great work like this. But you can't build trust like this.
Trust requires seeing how people think in real-time. How they react when surprised. How they disagree respectfully. How they build on each other's ideas.
One hour per week, everyone together, builds the relationships that make async work actually work.
When you've seen someone present their thinking, ask thoughtful questions, help a teammate work through a problem - you trust their judgment more. You're more willing to give them context instead of control. You're faster to assume good intent when a Slack message sounds harsh.
The meeting isn't about the meeting. It's about building the foundation for the other 39 hours of async work.
3. Reinforce culture through repetition
We use "Topic of the Day" to repeat and reinforce key messages:
- Our mission and how your work contributes to it
- Our strategy and how your work connects to it
- Our values and what they look like in practice
Repetition is critical because:
a) We're constantly adding new people. Interns rotate every few months. New hires join. What's obvious to someone here 6 months isn't obvious to someone here 6 days.
b) Hearing something once doesn't make it stick. You need to see the same principle applied in different contexts, by different people, to different problems - before it becomes part of how you think.
"Repetition" doesn't mean reading the same slide deck every week. It means:
- Showing how a recent shipping decision connects to "Fail Fast"
- Highlighting how a teammate's feedback embodied "Total Feedback"
- Explaining why we prioritized Feature X over Feature Y
- Walking through a customer win and which ICP it validates
We don't announce new things in all hands - that's async (Linear, Slack, handbook updates). Meetings are for going deeper on why something matters and how it connects to the bigger picture.
Topics we revisit regularly
These themes show up repeatedly, in different forms:
- Mission and strategy
- Who we build for
- How we work
- Culture and values
- Pricing and business model
- How we make users happy
The topics cycle. You'll hear about "Fail Fast" one week through a product decision, three weeks later through a hiring story, two months later through a GTM experiment.
Each time, different angle. Different example. Same principle.
This is how culture becomes real instead of words on a wall.
Thursday: 1:1s and small group check-ins
Thursdays are for focused conversations. Not mandatory, but most people schedule them.
These can be:
- 1:1 - You and your manager or mentor
- 1:2 - You and two others (45 min)
- 1:3 - You and three others (1 hour)
- 1:4 - You and four others (1 hour 15 min)
The format is flexible. Sometimes you meet solo because you have an individual question. Sometimes you meet as a small group because the topic affects everyone. Sometimes people can't make it, so the group size changes week to week.
Three focuses:
1. How do we move forward better? - Unblock work, clarify strategy, solve problems together.
2. How do we move faster? - Identify what's slowing us down, what experiments to run, what to kill.
3. Build rapport - Create the relationships that make everything else work.
Sometimes these include performance review conversations. Often they don't. It depends on what's needed that week.
The point isn't rigid structure. It's regular time to have the conversations that need real-time discussion, in the smallest group necessary.
What we don't do in meetings
No status updates. That's what Standupbot is for (daily async check-ins in Slack).
No project planning. That's what Linear is for.
No announcements that could be async. If it's a decision that's been made, write it in Linear or Slack. Don't make 15 people sit through it live.
No presentations without discussion. If you're not asking for input, feedback, or debate - it doesn't belong in a synchronous meeting.
Meetings are for: alignment, culture reinforcement, relationship building, and things that genuinely benefit from real-time discussion.
Everything else is async.
Why this matters for a remote team
Remote work has a superpower: deep, uninterrupted focus time.
Remote work has a weakness: culture dilution.
When you're not physically together, culture doesn't happen by osmosis. You can't overhear a senior person give feedback well. You can't watch how the CEO handles a tough question. You can't see what "Fail Fast" looks like in practice just by being in the room.
So we manufacture those moments. One hour per week. Everyone together. Rotating moderators. Topic of the Day that connects work to mission, strategy, values.
Plus flexible Thursday check-ins in small groups to build the relationships that make async work effective.
Is it perfect? No. Does it scale forever? Probably not.
But right now, it's how we make sure:
- New people learn the culture, not just the tasks
- Everyone sees how their work connects to strategy
- The team builds trust that makes async work effective
- Culture stays strong even when we're spread across continents
One all hands per week. Make it count.
Next: Building a diverse team - How we hire and why our internship program matters
Context: How we work - Why async-first requires intentional synchronous culture moments
Deep dive: Our culture - The values we reinforce in "Topic of the Day"
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