How to Grow a Virtual Company #drupalcon

At DrupalCon in Denver, Lullabot President and cofounder Matt Westgate shared lessons in running and growing a successful, sustainable virtual company.

In 2006, Matt Westgate and Jeff Robbins, Lullabot's CEO and cofounder, sent an email to Drupal founder Dries Buytaert announcing the launch of Lullabot. “Really we just wanted to hire our friends in the community and keep doing kick ass Drupal work,” Westgate explained in his Tuesday afternoon DrupalCon talk, "Growing a Virtual Company & Maintaining Team Moxie." Westgate admits that he didn't have a management background, so he learned as the company grew.

“Drupal is a social network,” Westgate says. He says distributed companies are also like social networks, and you have to create a lot of things that a physical company has, such as a water cooler-type of environment.
In his talk, Westgate addressed what he calls the Top 5 Virtual Company Myths:

• Not a real company
• Communication is inefficient
• No teamwork
• Lonely job
• There's no way it's sustainable

Look at Amazon versus Border Books, or Netflix versus Blockbuster, he says. “Never before has geographic location mattered less for the type of work that we do,” he adds. In fact, he expects to see a lot more virtual companies start popping up.

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