Several Rally portfolio companies have built remote setups that are working really well and reflect some genuinely creative thinking about what distributed work can look like. We thought the details were worth sharing. Some of the approaches are fairly unique, so we got into the specifics of how they actually work and how teams have responded (including what we’re doing at Rally). For these companies, getting remote right hasn’t just been a culture win. It’s been a meaningful part of how they’ve grown.
Incept AI
When Umut Isik founded Incept AI (voice ordering AI for restaurants), he made a deliberate choice to build a fully remote team, not as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic one. Going distributed meant hiring the best people regardless of where they lived, without competing for talent in expensive hub cities. It also meant reclaiming the hours lost to commuting. But it came with a real challenge: how do you keep the frequency of communication and urgency of a small in-person team? Large companies can accept having some people who aren’t all-in, who move on over time. At a startup there’s no such cushion. Every person needs to be fully present, and everyone needs to be able to see that their teammates are too.
The centerpiece of Umut’s solution is what he calls an “Office Simulator”: an always-on Google Meet video call running throughout the workday, sound muted, so teammates can see each other at their desks. It replicates the natural awareness you get in a physical office. Alongside it, the team uses Discord’s audio channels for drop-in conversation, so pulling a colleague into a quick chat is as easy as tapping them on the shoulder. Scheduled meetings become largely unnecessary.
For the system to work, everyone needs to join from somewhere distraction-free. For team members with busy households, the company pays to rent them a nearby office space, and everyone gets a dedicated 24-inch iMac solely for communication. Umut is upfront about all of this from the very first interview, so anyone who joins knows exactly what they’re signing up for.
The response from the team has been overwhelmingly positive, and even self-described introverts have come around. The setup has delivered on its core promise: a team that can work from anywhere, stay closely connected and move with the kind of speed and trust that startups depend on. It’s a model that Umut plans to scale with custom software as the company grows.
Oxide Computer Company
Oxide Computer Company builds rack-scale hardware with a distributed team, a setup that creates obvious logistical challenges when your product is a seven-foot server rack that requires industrial-grade power and can’t exactly be shipped to someone’s spare bedroom. Rather than treat remote work as a problem to be solved, Oxide has built a culture designed to make it thrive.
A cornerstone of that culture is Demo Friday, a weekly company-wide session where anyone can show what they’ve been working on, regardless of scope. No demo is considered too small. Co-founder and CTO Bryan Cantrill describes the energy it creates as tapping into one of the most powerful motivators for engineers: the esteem of their peers. For a distributed team that spans both hardware and software, it also serves as a practical way to stay curious about parts of the work you don’t normally touch.
Oxide is also deeply writing-intensive, relying on a rich internal culture of documentation and written communication to keep everyone aligned. But they balance that with spoken collaboration, and they record every meeting so nothing gets lost. The team rejects traditional managerial constructs like siloed organizational structures and formal performance review processes, choosing instead to emphasize teamwork in service to customers.
Perhaps most unusually, everyone at Oxide earns the same salary. Bryan argues that this has been one of the most powerful tools for building the kind of mutual trust that distributed teams depend on. When pay is taken off the table, feedback becomes more honest, hiring becomes more deliberate and people are freed to focus on doing the right thing rather than managing their own career optics.
JustiFi
JustiFi is a payments infrastructure company based in St. Paul, with most of the team in the Twin Cities, working a mix of in-office and from home, and several employees based in Brazil. From the start, CTO Nick Halm made a deliberate decision to fully integrate the Brazilian team rather than treat them as a separate offshore resource. They’re included in everything: the same meetings, the same communications and the same standing as anyone else on the team.
The decision to hire in Brazil came organically. An early contractor there was doing exceptional work, and Nick, who has built remote teams across the Dominican Republic, India and elsewhere, kept expanding in that direction. Brazil’s time zone alignment with the US, the relatively smooth language transition from Portuguese to English and a deep pool of highly educated talent all made it a natural fit. The one logistical wrinkle is that São Paulo is so sprawling that team members on opposite sides of the city can be hours apart. This makes in-person gatherings among the Brazilian team just as tricky as flying them to Minnesota.
On the question of whether someone is cut out for remote work, Ashlie Knight, who leads JustiFi’s risk and credit team and manages her own team in Brazil, has a clear philosophy: it’s a manager’s job to figure that out, not the employee’s. She looks for behavioral signals early, like responsiveness, whether work is getting done and how someone engages with the team. Ashlie has learned to move quickly when something feels off, but she’s equally clear that accountability runs both ways. Working with an international team means bringing patience and cultural awareness to the relationship. Her team members are highly skilled, but they’re navigating US-specific financial norms that aren’t intuitive if you haven’t grown up in that system.
The result has been a stable and committed team. In five years of operation, JustiFi has had virtually no turnover on their Brazilian team, something both Nick and Ashlie attribute to hiring carefully, giving people real ownership of their work and treating everyone like they belong.
Rally Ventures
At Rally, we operate as a distributed team across the US, with partners and staff working from home and in the office depending on where we’re based. Like many of the companies in our portfolio, we’ve had to be intentional about how we keep a geographically spread team informed and aligned.
A big part of our answer has been AI. Venture Partner Ben Fried, who served as CIO of Google for over a decade, has built a series of internal systems designed to reduce the information overhead that comes with managing a large portfolio. One system automatically pulls together quarterly financials, board reports and meeting notes across portfolio companies, distills them and drops a concise summary into Notion for the broader team. Another lets anyone on the team forward information about a prospective company to a dedicated email address, which then automatically creates a structured entry in Notion. The goal in both cases is the same: making sure the right information is accessible to the right people without anyone having to chase it down.
We’re also using AI to better organize the knowledge and expertise sitting within our own extended team. Our Tech Partners, a group of senior operators who work closely with portfolio companies, have a wide range of backgrounds and specializations. New systems are being built to better categorize that expertise, so when a portfolio company needs help in a specific area, we can quickly identify who is best positioned to assist.
Epoch
Not every remote work challenge is about internal culture or team structure. Sometimes it’s about having the right tools. Epoch is built around helping companies create the kind of consistent, intentional programming that keeps distributed employees connected, whether that’s learning sessions, team socials or company-wide all-hands. Their platform is used by people teams at companies like Reddit, Salesforce, Asana, Toast and Instacart.
At Salesforce, that meant replacing a fragmented mix of spreadsheets, legacy tools and Slack with a single place to organize, discover and track events across more than 50 offices. At Toast, it’s given employees across ten global hubs a single place to discover what’s happening, replacing the scattered emails and calendar invites that made it easy to feel out of the loop.
