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Working at Nextcloud Published Jun 25 2018 via RSS

jospoortvlie t KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud editor Home

I've been around in communities like KDE, openSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva and others... and various open source and closed companies. Seen some do a good job. Seen others be mismanaged. This one: the most fun. Serious.

Working at Nextcloud is special. For one, we're a distributed company. Is it hard? Well, yes and no. Working from home is great with such a motivated team with very little management overhead and good communication. Our company is entirely built on it, that is why it works.

As an example, while our head of sales lives in Hannover, the rest of the sales people is spread over Berlin, Switzerland, Stuttgart... Engineers can be found in Germany, Netherlands, Spain, even Croatia and as far as Cape Verde. I'm sure I forgot some countries. Our biggest office in Stuttgart has less people than we have in Berlin!

But we connect in person: roughly every second month, at a company-wide meeting in a single place, usually Stuttgart, for a full week of coding and having a great time. And once a year we go to Berlin for our conference, happening the last week of August! All those meetings are open, with often lots of community members participating in the whole process of designing and deciding around our software.

And yes, the sales people join there, too. I have NEVER worked in a company where the sales people, the marketing team and the engineers were so good with each other. Respect between these three departments is extremely rare, as I'm sure every one of my readers knows from experience.

Me handing the mic to the guys that started it all back in 2010

What else is crazy about Nextcloud? Here's another one: where lots of companies struggle to find good engineers, that is literally the LEAST of our problems. We drown in amazingly good CV's and have a big pool of enthusiastic, qualified engineers who contribute to Nextcloud and already know the code. I wish we could hire them all but growing more than 50-80% per year isn't really health for a company culture...

Also special: other companies struggle to get sales leads and pay lots of (advertising) money for them. We, we drown in leads... Even without marketing automation. Our biggest challenge, instead, is answering all the requests from companies that want to buy our product - we need more sales people!

Yes, we're a pretty unique company in how we approach open source business and we're successfully taking on much bigger companies. Yes, it works! Just check how we're doing on Google Trends. Love that!

If you want to work for us, especially in sales, or know somebody who should, tell me ;-)

Or first learn about us by meeting us - you're welcome at our conference! Or at one of our meetups, there's a monthly one in Berlin for example.

Berlin #nextcloud meetup had to spread out as we didn't fit at one table... https://t.co/hx9h1OMGKd pic.twitter.com/4TXoS89a87

— Jos Poortvliet (@jospoortvliet) June 20, 2018