This article, adapted from a presentation by Alexandra Erman, People Partner at BforeAI, offers a unique perspective on building a company without geographic boundaries. Founded by executives across multiple continents who never intended to relocate, BforeAI has developed innovative approaches to management, communication, and culture-building that challenge traditional workplace norms. 

From their dual management system to their "low context" communication style, their strategies address the real challenges of globally distributed teams while embracing the diversity and flexibility this model enables. 

Our origins: the why

It all started at a conference. An Italian gentleman who lives in France met an Argentinian gentleman who lives in Argentina. They were discussing a brilliant idea, and there was an immediate synergy. After a few months of talking about solutions, product-market fit, and whatnot, they formed a venture – a company, eventually – and brought in another Argentinian who lives in Buenos Aires.

None of these people wanted to move. It was about working together, but never about setting up shop somewhere specific. So that's how it started, and we've never operated on the remote model. There's a legal headquarters, but it's never been about the "where" – there's no mothership per se. We've always been fully distributed, and that's how it started, that's how it grew, and that's the model.

We never had this issue of "return to work" versus "not return to work." This isn't what we're dealing with today.

The foundational philosophy

One of the major things I want to emphasize is that these founders met with really strong opinions – very strong opinions that there's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to work. They were adamant about this. The freedom this philosophy provided made it possible for this company to see the light of day.

They were always in agreement that we have different brain types. Are we introverts or not? Do we need other people? Do we need synergy? Do we need to be just in our home? Do we need to work in the morning? Do we need to work at night? They wanted to break the mold and say, "Wherever you are, however you need to work, as long as we have a common goal and we're doing the work, it doesn't matter to us."

So our first policy was the "work from anywhere" policy. And it works, though it has its constraints. For example, today when we want to build a sales team for the North American market, we specifically require that people live in that region – that's a necessity. But other than that, we really have a work-from-anywhere policy.

Circadian rhythm, personality – all this was taken into account. But we also recognized that for niche companies like ours, we need to find the best talents, so our approach was opportunistic.

In the beginning, our CEO was always traveling, always going to the next conference or symposium, meeting people who are really into predictive cybersecurity and trying to solve the problems of this criminal world. Some people are very specialized – it doesn't matter where they are, they need to come work for us. That was a business necessity at our level of operation.

There was also an altruistic mindset – they were thinking about giving opportunities to people who live in countries where these kinds of companies don't exist but who really want to do this job. How do we make this happen without requiring them to uproot their lives? Not everybody wants to be an immigrant. Not everybody can be an immigrant. We all have other constraints.

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Scaling the distributed model

This is what started our model – one that the founders truly believe in. It needs to work not only when you're 20 people (which seems easy) but also when you're suddenly 30, 50, 80, and beyond. So, how do we build this culture and operation in a distributed world?

Rafaela (one of our people partners) had a really interesting question: "As an HR operations team, how do you remain agile when your water cooler is virtual?" Your team isn't spread across continents so much as it's like little pieces – one dot here, one there, one there.