Being location-independent
Clearview was built out of a desire to be location-independent and travel. For 15 years, we have been a network of travelers working from anywhere we want. We never wanted to work in an office. We've always been much more interested in keeping expenses light and overhead low — to give us the most flexibility with pricing and with project flow — and that grew into a desire to design every part of the working space of Clearview to accommodate the best work environment that each of its inhabitants chooses for themselves.
We don't want to limit ourselves to be able to work with people in the same town, because we think that's short-sighted.
Talent is distributed all over the globe, and we want the best talent.
Our founder
Brett Kistler was born in the Cleveland suburbs and started the business there when he was 18.
He had an office because — well — he had free access to his best friend's dad's office (though he never really needed to be in there; mostly, Brett and his brother just played World of Warcraft in there). They didn't get any work done in the office because it felt like an office, and offices are places where Brett doesn't feel creative.
The trip to Mexico
One day, teenage Brett went to Mexico for his brother's wedding.
He realized he could live right there, on the beach, and still be servicing his clients back home. He didn't need to find new clients in Playa del Carmen to try to make his living in Playa del Carmen, and he certainly didn't need to pay for an office.
When he left Mexico, he didn't "go home." He kept going.
Brett decided to live overseas and explore the world while the work kept happening — like most people in that ilk, as a one-human show.
He learned to BASE jump and circled the world doing that for a while. He wanted to be able to be who he wanted to be, first, which was an explorer, and he wanted to make his work fit that, not himself fit the work.
It wasn't too long after that — around 2008 — that Brett started finding other people to work alongside him in that context.
He never hired a full-time employee to go to an office at a particular location. He only hired people who also wanted to be remote. That meant that he was able to find people based on their skills, their philosophy, and their culture rather than their location.
It wasn't easy. There was a lot of early friction with clients. They'd want to have in-person meet-ups: some wanted him to drive for hours to sit across a table for 20 minutes. Plenty of them constantly called him.
Over time, he trained the clients whom he wanted to keep to communicate asynchronously.
While this is business as usual now, at the time it wasn't. Brett had an intuition all along that being in the same place in the meetings was, more often than not, redundant (and often just political posturing or wild brainstorming).
The collaboration
In reality, if people are doing creative work — which is what engineering is — sometimes they want to collaborate.
They need to be accountable. There needs to be communication. But when people are getting the bulk of the work done, they need to be in their own space. They need to be in their controlled environment, and controlled means whatever it is for them. It means different things to different people.
Some of our people want to go to a co-working space where it feels officey and businesslike. Sometimes they even want to dress up a little bit, business casual, just because dressing up feels nice. Other people want to hang out in their bed and code until they pass out at 3 a.m., dream about the code they just wrote, consolidate it, and then wake up and change all the bugs they discovered in their sleep.
The Clearview philosophy
…has developed in a decade-and-a-half, and is just about allowing for the fact that everybody works differently.
For a company to expect everybody to conform to a particular style, location, and form of work-related contact and collaboration is really to some extent shoehorning everybody into some kind of cultural average in an office. By expanding back out to remote work, there is an opportunity to allow the company as a whole to more flexibly fit an individual's work/life balance, work schedules, and work environments.
Now more than ever we have the tools to bridge the communication gap as needed, to bring in all the best of working in an office with people without it having to require the office (and the commute).
So that's what we do, and that's where we're at. Thanks, Brett.
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