Distributed teams after AI: hiring, paying, and measuring what's left
A closed evening for founders rebuilding 20+ person distributed teams now that AI has changed the math.
Invite-only. £50 to hold your seat. Goes toward food, drinks and venue on the night.
Why this evening
Most playbooks for distributed teams were written between 2020 and 2023. They assumed you'd keep hiring, that headcount equalled capacity, and that performance reviews still measured what mattered.
Then AI arrived in the workflow.
Now founders are sitting with the same awkward questions in private, and not finding answers in public. Do we still hire that role overseas, or not at all? Is our 35-person team actually doing 35 people of work, or 22? What do KPIs even mean when half the output runs through Claude or Cursor before a human sees it?
This evening is for founders carrying those questions.
Andrew Browning, hotsourced. Places overseas talent for UK founders, watching dozens of distributed teams a year. The pattern he keeps seeing: teams hold together on shared energy up to 25-30 people, then quietly start to fall apart. He'll show what breaks at that threshold, and the minimal set of rituals that separates teams that break through from teams that stall.
David Wain-Heapy, Prodigi. A decade placing remote talent for UK founders. He'll challenge an assumption most founders are still building their 2026 hiring plan on: that core digital roles need to be full-time at all. Which ones flipped to on-demand first, and the burn most companies are still leaking by hiring the old way.
Egor Gurev, Stape. Sees payroll data from 600+ distributed companies in real time. An unusual angle: most analysts work from indirect signals, Egor reads the actual ledger. He'll show which role categories quietly disappeared from payroll over the last 18 months, which held, and which grew. Numbers you won't find in public reports.
Alin Sneha, HR consultant. 500+ deep 1-on-1s with senior staff in distributed teams over the last two years. Hears what they actually say about KPIs and AI tooling in private, and don't say to founders directly. She'll lay out the unwritten rules senior employees are playing by in 2026, and why founders measuring with old metrics tend to be the last to know.
What you'll leave with
A clearer view of which roles still make sense to hire, and which ones AI has structurally changed.
Real numbers from 600+ distributed companies on team size vs output.
Three live cases from the room, worked through with the panel.
A practical framework for performance and KPIs that survives AI-assisted work.
30+ founders solving the same problems, in one room, for one evening.
Format
18:00 to 18:40, panel discussion with the four speakers
18:40 to 19:10, open Q&A
19:10 to 19:20, break
19:20 to 20:00, mastermind session. Small groups, one real challenge per table, professionally moderated, no pitching, no awkward networking
20:00 onwards, drinks, food, and unstructured time
Who it's for
Founders and senior operators running distributed teams of roughly 20 people or more. Hybrid, fully remote, multi-country, all welcome.
The room is built for people making real headcount and performance decisions right now, not for general curiosity about remote work.
Event partner: The Stape, global payroll for distributed teams.