Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Welcome to Founder Fridays - a Notion founder series - where we sit down with builders who’ve been in the trenches to talk shop - product, design, and the real lessons no one puts on a slide deck.

Marcelo Lebre, Co-founder & President of Remote, joins Kathleen Kiang, Notion’s Head of Business Recruiting, to unpack what it really takes to build and scale a global, distributed company. From turning “boring” HR infrastructure into a category-defining platform, to hiring people who genuinely care, to using documentation as the ultimate anti-silo mechanism, Marcelo shares the hard-won lessons behind Remote’s growth to 2,000+ employees worldwide.

To learn more about how Notion is supporting startups, please visit: https://ntn.so/founderfridays

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:06 Building Remote’s Foundation
03:22 Scaling Comes Early
04:21 Hiring for Ownership
07:41 Flipping the Interview
10:05 From CTO to COO
11:08 Preventing Remote Silos
12:58 The Tool Stack
14:34 Advice Block
17:18 Face What You Dread
19:57 It’s Supposed to Hurt