Culture

So, what's it like working at Telepath?

All remote

Our team is 100% remote, and distributed across Thailand.

All remote has a bunch of advantages:

• We can hire amazing people from a global talent pool.

• Being remote encourages a deeper level of personal thought and writing things down.

• It allows for uninterrupted work.

• It makes results clearer, which helps us hold people to account for outcomes rather than hours spent in the office.

Extremely transparent

We believe it is only right that we be as transparent as possible as a company.

This isn't just a meaningless corporate statement. Most of our communication happens publicly, our roadmap is open for anyone to see, and our open source handbook explains everything from how we hire and pay team members.

Almost everything we do is open for anyone else to edit. This includes things like the contents of this very Handbook. Anyone can give direct feedback on work they think could be improved, which helps increase our responsiveness to the community.

We're committed to much more than just public code.

We write everything down

We're an all-remote company that allows people to work from almost anywhere in the world. With team members across many countries, it's important for us to practice clear communication in ways that help us stay connected and work more efficiently.

• It creates clear and deep thought.

• We have an open core business model. This helps the community understand our decision-making.

• It is usually clearer than a conversation, so everyone can row in the same direction.

• It is very leveraged as we grow a large community and look to hire people around the world.

To accomplish this, we use asynchronous communication as a starting point and stay as open and transparent as we can by communicating through Discord.

Putting things in writing helps us clarify our own ideas, as well as allow others to provide better feedback. It has been key to our development and growth.

Don't let others fail

Everyone should help everyone else raise their game. Fatigue sets in when you complete a task, so it's easier for outsiders to help those creating the work to raise their game.

We are direct about the quality of work. That doesn't always mean work needs to be completely polished, as it depends on the speed and impact of a task. Being great at giving and receiving feedback is a key part of our culture.

Bias for impact

If given a choice, go live. If you can't go live, reduce the task size so you can.

• We are small, and can only win based on speed and agility.

• Going live forces a level of completion, on which you can build.

Default to not asking for permission to do something if you are acting in the best interests of Telepath. It is ok to ask for more context though.

Have fewer meetings

We're big believers in the importance of the maker's schedule. If we have meetings at all (which we try to avoid, we'll cluster them around any standups so our day doesn't get split up. Occasionally an external meeting will slip in on those days such as interviews, but we try to keep those to an absolute minimum.

Structured for speed and autonomy

One of the benefits of hiring high-performing, self-sufficient, empowered team members is that we don't need to put in place some of the typical corporate structures and processes that can slow teams down.

We have optimized for this by introducing Small Teams, which prioritize speed by delegating decision-making autonomy as much as possible.