In this episode, we interviewed Fred Perrotta. He is the Co-Founder & Remote CEO of Tortuga Backpacks. The company that creates amazing carry-on-size backpacks, specially designed for long-term urban trips. Tortuga Backpacks is a fully remote team, with nine employees working from home. Most of them are based in the US, one in Canada, and one in China.

In this episode we talked to Fred about, their decision to go 100% remote, establishing trust, autonomy, the benefits of working remotely, challenges of an e-commerce remote business, communication, lack of standardization, Instilling culture, and their preferred tools.

For Fred, trust plays a big part when hiring new people. He believes that trust is built by doing the actual work. Fred doesn’t see the employees sitting for 10 hours working on something, he only sees the results. There are three “remote” challenges that Fred is always working on: physical product development, flow of information, lack of standardization.