Why We Built a “Virtual First” Company

Founding and scaling are two different things—processes must change during growth.

As seen in Inc. Magazine

The engineering company I founded in 2017, Chang Robotics, is a kind of 8-year-old startup. We entered 2025 with revenue up 70 percent and headcount up 50 percent from last year. We recently opened two of our four key physical locations in the U.S. We’ve navigated difficult waters as well, including a year post-pandemic when we weren’t sure we’d survive. Thankfully, we prevailed, and now we’re thriving.

Our company was built as a remote organization from the very beginning, and for the past 8 years, our virtual model has been a strong one. It has allowed us to leverage a more talented and diverse set of people and resources. We’ve hired the most robust team possible from a myriad of demographics, ranging from Gen Z to boomers, entry level to former university deans, and spanning multiple U.S. regions.

Advice from a transformation expert

At the start of 2025, we worked closely with business growth and transformation expert, Carl Gould. We’re still a virtual company, by design, and will leverage that model to every degree possible as we continue to grow. However, we’re necessarily adopting more elements of hybrid and traditional enterprise business as well. On that front, here are four things Carl said:

1. To maintain the model’s benefits as we add more hybrid and on-site elements, we need full buy-in on our mission and vision from every person on our team. 

This is increasingly more important as our company scales. We are involved in a progressively greater number of simultaneous projects, starting with feasibility studies and technological challenges from both enterprise companies and small to medium enterprises. Yes, we’ve managed through tools like Teams. But when dark times happen, “What holds a dispersed team together is that its members fully understand what the guiding principles are and they are fully bought in,” Carl said. “This is what will spur them to problem solve and take initiative during the times they don’t have full access to the rest of the team.” 

2. As a progressively more mature team, we’re “playing as if this is football.” 

In our earlier stages, we pioneered most every industry we entered, from healthcare to environmental remediation to factory automation. We’ve been consistently on the leading edge with few direct competitors. That has led to our swagger. However, in earlier stages of development, most companies are more aligned to the baseball strategy, Carl noted. Everyone wears the same uniform and plays on the same field. But in a virtual company, the individual players are siloed. If someone hits a ball to the right field, for example, the third baseman may not be involved.  

As we grow, our model must increasingly be like football. You develop a consistent process and assembly line for product creation that can be plugged into any style project. Each player has a defined role within a coordinated playbook. They don’t all touch the ball, but they know the plan and execute their part to move the team forward. This is vital to our ability to scale. 

3. Founders of early-stage companies that succeed have learned to be effective. To successfully scale, they need to be efficient, too. 

By my nature as a founder, I’ve played key roles in creating new solutions to big problems in manufacturing, sustainability, and supply chain. That made me (and the people who’ve innovated with me) effective. But to make the level of difference virtual and high-impact companies desire, it’s vital our members continually become more efficient as well. At every stage of growth, how do you codify the elements and process to produce the solutions at scale?  

“This is where you bring in the gray hairs (and no-hairs),” said Carl. “You use their experience as specialists to ensure that what the generalist invents makes it all the way to the finish line and successfully scales.” This is a principle we’ve taken to heart, and I can attest to its role in our successful scale as a national organization. 

4. Our company is in the “Go-Go” stage. And the business model we’ve chosen may require that we stay in this mode for most of the rest of our organizational life. 

Carl tuned us into the methodology of Ichak Adizes, PhD and the Adizes Institute. Ichak is famous for his writing on organizational life cycles. The stage that describes us is Go-Go, where we’ve grown fast and hard and are balancing the need to be innovative and cutting edge while also being sustainable and profitable. 

“The goal of a Go-Go company is to get to the state we call Prime,” Carl said. “Prime is the balance of effective and efficient, innovative and reliable, with a goal to become consistent and predictable.” Apple has done this, he noted. So has Google. But this is a difficult stage to stay in for long, he said, because the rules (tariffs, the economy, available workforce, etc.) are perpetually changing. 

The utopia, especially for a growing virtual-first company, is “to have just enough systems to be predictable, be consistent, and deliver quality at our standard every time, but to simultaneously leave room for innovation,” Carl said.  

For example, Virgin is a U.S. company that has been highly effective at this. As a brand, they’re known for irreverence, disruption, and consistently high customer service. They may go into airplanes, records, phone systems, or banking, but you can always tell a Virgin company as soon as you walk in, and the experience is consistent in every case. 

This is the outcome we’re aiming for—and you can, too. We invite you to join us in making your next stage of growth your most successful yet. 

As seen in Inc. Magazine

About Inc. Magazine:

Inc. Magazine is a premier business media brand dedicated to inspiring and informing entrepreneurs, business leaders, and innovators. Renowned for its focus on growth, leadership, and the stories behind successful companies, Inc. highlights transformative ideas and influential voices across industries. We’re excited to share that Chang Robotics’ founder, Matthew Chang, is now a contributing author, bringing insights on robotics, innovation, and purpose-driven leadership to their readership.