Why A Software Startup With $300M In ARR Is Refocusing Its Entire Business
Remote was cash-flow positive and growing. In the AI era, CEO Job van der Voort says that wasn't enough.
Less than a month ago, Remote co-founder and CEO Job van der Voort got in front of his entire company to tell them that for many of them, their jobs were about to change.
By traditional startup accounting, things were going well: the San Francisco-based startup with a distributed workforce (van der Voort lives in Amsterdam) had recently reached $300 million in annual recurring revenue for its software, which helped businesses across a range of functions and HR.
Remote – San Francisco based but fully remote like its name, with van der Voort based in the Netherlands – had recently become cash-flow positive. It still had money from a $300 million funding round raised in 2022, valuing the seven-year-old startup at about $3 billion. It had just announced a new chief business officer.
And yet here was van der Voort, appearing by video, telling many of 2,000 employees that the products they were working on were going to be deemphasized – put in ‘maintenance mode,’ in tech parlance – while other unfinished ones, some weeks from launch, were going to be shut down.
Why take such drastic measures? Van der Voort’s own board of directors had posed the same question. The answer, as you may have guessed, has everything to do with building a last software business in the age of AI.
“We were in a really great place as a business,” van der Voort says. “But the cost of spending time on things that aren’t important, or that you believe don’t have a future, is immense.”
It’s a warning – and potential guide – for any software startup building in the shadow of the frontier AI lab. Remote’s CEO shares why he pushed the big button to rethink his entire product roadmap, and his advice for fellow founders, exclusively with Upstarts subscribers below.
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