Remote’s Job van der Voort says AI companies now pay PhDs to label data

Remote chief executive Job van der Voort wants his staff to be 10 times more effective a year from now, because their AI tools will be 10 times more effective too. The company runs payroll and hires staff in other countries for its customers. Rather than replace people with AI, he wants to train the ones it has, he told TNW.

Van der Voort, who is Dutch, studied neuroscience and left his PhD to start a company with a friend. It ran out of money fast, he said. He then joined GitLab, where staff worked remotely all over the world, and hiring and paying them across countries proved a constant struggle. He left GitLab in January 2019 and started Remote a week later. He runs it with co-founder Marcelo Lebre.

He spoke to Cristian Dina at HumanX in Amsterdam on 24 September. It is the latest episode of the TNW Podcast, after Boomi’s Steve Lucas, Daytona’s Ivan Burazin and Glean’s Arvind Jain. The full conversation is in the video below.

Getting more from the team Remote has

Remote has about 2,000 employees and keeps growing. Van der Voort does not plan to grow the workforce much, or to shrink it, he said.

When a team gets busier, the first thing people ask for is another hire. They make good arguments, which is what makes it tricky. Remote told staff to try solving the problem with AI first.

“It works as a good forcing function to say, well, you cannot hire more people, right? Because then people have to look for solutions.” Job van der Voort, Remote chief executive

A mandatory AI course

Some people at Remote took to AI quickly. A large group did not, he said. So Remote built an AI course and made it compulsory. It has since made the course free for anyone as AI for Actual Work.

Some payroll teams thought tools like these could not work for them, because they had done the job the same way for 20 years. Remote still fights that, he said. His answer is not to fire them and hire people who already use AI.

“The people that I hire, I want to take care of them and I want them to get better.” Job van der Voort

No big swing in hiring

Most of Remote’s customers are startups that employ knowledge workers. Van der Voort said Remote has not seen them hire faster or slower. AI companies are the exception: they are growing “like crazy,” he said. The last big shift was the wave of layoffs in 2022, when venture funding started to fall. Since then the market has been stable.

No customer has told Remote it is replacing an employee with an AI agent, he said, though Remote does not always know why someone leaves. Companies are trying to make their people more effective, and most are “not on the AI bandwagon yet,” he said.

PhDs labelling data

The change he does see is between employees and contractors. Demand for independent contractors has gone up “massively,” he said, because AI companies need people to label data and give feedback to their models. It began with simple labelling. Now many are PhDs who do the work alongside their research. He expects that market to keep growing for the next few years.

“What’s going to happen beyond that I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.” Job van der Voort

Profitable, and staying private

Remote is profitable and cash flow positive, he said. Its last funding round was a Series C in 2022, and it has raised no private capital since, because it has no need to. It has no plans to go public or to sell.

Its customers run from Burger King to Anthropic, he said, and number in the tens of thousands. Its own staff are in 90 countries, with the largest group, about 20%, in the US.

Remote can be accessed through an MCP server, so authorised agents like Claude or ChatGPT can work with it within the user’s permissions. Remote is building agents that automate payroll tasks across countries, such as chasing staff to submit expenses on time.

Remote does come up against Deel, Oyster and Rippling in some deals, he said. But its main rivals are local payroll firms that have done the same work for two decades, and sometimes an office of accountants.

Europe’s rules

Labour law differs in every European country, and the challenge grows as Remote gets bigger, he said. He is not optimistic.

“I think it’s bad for Europe that we have so much complicated rules around hiring and employing people and setting up businesses.” Job van der Voort

His next company could be in robotics, because he thinks software is “sort of getting solved,” he said. He thinks about it every day. For now, he plans to keep growing Remote. His advice to graduates is to join a startup, fail a lot and keep going, because “the way to win is basically to just stick around.”