Jun 25, 2019 · 29m · saastr
Engineering Your Own "Luck": The 3 Key Rules of Building Globally Distributed Teams with Eventbrite
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Pat Poels, former VP of Engineering at Eventbrite, debunks the Silicon Valley myth of centralized engineering by presenting a practical three-rule framework for building high-performing, globally distributed teams. Drawing from Eventbrite's expansion into Mendoza, Nashville, and Madrid, he illustrates how cultural adaptation, leadership delegation, and core architectural ownership drive sustainable global scale.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 0.0 Guest teaching 0.0 Guest disagreement 1.0 Jason pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 22:00 Pushing back on delegating 'junior varsity' work to remote teams
Poels criticizes common industry playbooks where companies treat remote offices as second-class teams tasked only with bug fixing or static landing pages.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 0:06 No host pushback (Solo presentation)The episode is a solo conference talk by Pat Poels without an active host conducting an interview or providing counterarguments.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:50 Schooling on language assumptions in global hiringPoels educates the audience on why filtering international candidates strictly on native English proficiency is a major mistake that eliminates world-class engineering talent.
Jason holds their own ▶ 0:06 No host participation (Solo presentation)There is no host dialogue present in this recorded conference keynote.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Challenging the Silicon Valley Myth and Embracing Distributed Teams | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | Pat Poels delivers a solo keynote presentation introducing Eventbrite's journey to distributed teams and gently challenging the Silicon Valley orthodoxy that talent only exists in the Bay Area. Since this is a solo stage presentation with no host speaking, all host interaction scores are zero. | |
| Scaling Pains and Hiring Bottlenecks in San Francisco | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | Poels breaks down the mathematics of hiring in San Francisco, detailing competition against tech giants and 15 percent annual turnover. The delivery is educational and narrative without host involvement. | |
| Serendipitous Expansion into Mendoza and Nashville Tech Hubs | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Poels shares the serendipitous stories of discovering top-tier Rails engineering talent in Mendoza, Argentina, and expanding developer presence in Nashville, Tennessee. The tone is reflective and storytelling-driven. | |
| Rule One: Observing and Adapting to Local Development Centers | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | Poels lays out Rule One: observing and adapting to local centers, openly admitting his own colossal mistake of requiring fluent English upfront before investing in language training and learning Spanish himself. | |
| Rule Two: Empowering Trusted Leaders and Removing Bottlenecks | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Poels outlines Rule Two regarding hiring trusted local leaders and getting out of their way, describing how his personal involvement in every interview created severe operational bottlenecks. | |
| Rule Three: Delegating Critical Missions and Fostering Autonomy | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | Poels explains Rule Three, rejecting the conventional practice of giving remote hubs low-tier bug fixes and instead delegating core missions like payment infrastructure and major on-sale launches to distributed teams. |
Statements from this episode (11)
Poels: Building engineering teams outside San Francisco beats centralizing
“What I'm here to tell you today is that it's not only possible to build world class, great development teams in places outside of San Francisco, but in actuality, it's better.”
Eventbrite retained 21 of 40 engineers over seven years in San Francisco
“I'm proud to say that when I started at Eventbrite with 40 engineers in the company at that .21 of those engineers are still there. I've been there seven years and two months and we still have 21 out of 40, which is terrific for San Francisco, but we still had…”
Eventbrite found a top-ten Rails contributor in a Mendoza startup
“The engineer that I met was, he was one of the top 10 contributors to the rails project lifetime. And he actually hadn't done any contributing for more than a year, but I look up the list of people who contributed to rails and he was like number nine lifetime.”
Poels: Mendoza engineering salaries are roughly 30% of San Francisco levels
“First off, the salaries in Mendoza are roughly 30% what they are in San Francisco.”
Annual engineering turnover in Eventbrite's Mendoza and Nashville hubs is under 5%
“If I look at Mendoza and Nashville together over the course of the time we've had these two offices, the total turnover we've had in these two offices combined has been less than five percent a year across these two.”
Eventbrite's Mendoza engineering office saw zero turnover for its first four years
“In this office where we've experienced this great growth of going from five people to a 110 on the engineering and design side, we didn't lose our first person until. A full four years after we started building the team.”
Rejecting international engineers for lacking English fluency was a colossal mistake
“Over the course of the first two years doing hiring in Mendoza, we let, we did not hire probably three, maybe even four great engineers purely because they didn't speak English very well. And this was a colossal mistake.”
Removing himself from local interviews vastly accelerated Eventbrite's Mendoza hiring
“And when I figured that out, that's when I got out of his way and start letting him hire just without me in the process. And that accelerated our ability to hire and grow really, really fast.”
Assigning minor tasks to remote engineering hubs destroys morale and recruiting
“The outcome of giving your distributed teams work that's less important is you will not have distributed teams who are excited to come to work. You won't be able to have them attract other great engineers in market.”
Eventbrite would never have IPO'd without its Nashville engineering hub
“Without the work happening in Nashville, IPO never happens for us. Just full stop. We never have an IPO if we didn't get ourselves to a place where our books could close regularly and consistently.”
Eventbrite achieved Google-level hiring advantages by empowering its regional hubs
“The reward for giving them that trust and autonomy has been, we are the place to work for engineers in both Mendoza and Nashville full stop. We are the best place to work and it's known by everybody that advantage that Google used to have over us. In San Franc…”