Global Reach: DeHub Team Grows to 15 Strong

By DeHub Team — 2021-07-05

By Q3 2021 the team had grown to 15 people working across three time zones.

Fifteen is a specific size. It is the point where you can no longer keep the whole project in one conversation, and where the things that were obvious to everyone start needing to be written down.

Why three time zones

Partly deliberate, partly the consequence of hiring for the role instead of the postcode. We were competing for engineers against far better funded companies in 2021, and refusing to look outside one city would have meant losing every one of those competitions.

The coverage was a real benefit too. A platform with live streaming and an arcade does not stop having problems at 6pm in one country. Spread across three zones, most incidents have somebody awake and responsible without anyone being permanently on call.

What it cost

Distributed teams are usually described in terms of their benefits, which is not honest. The costs at this size:

• Everything is slower to decide. A question that would take ninety seconds in a room takes a day when the person who can answer it is asleep.
• Written communication stops being optional. Anything not written down is effectively private to whoever was in the call.
• Culture does not form on its own. In one office it happens by accident. Distributed, it only exists to the extent you deliberately build it.

We got the third one wrong for a while. The fix was not more meetings — it was fewer, better-recorded ones, and being far more explicit about ownership. Fifteen people can all agree something is important and every one of them assume somebody else has it.

The shape it gave the company

That structure is still recognisable in how DeHub works today. Distributed by default, written by default, small teams owning whole surfaces rather than a large team owning everything shallowly.

It is also why the co-founders were able to build a separate business alongside this one — the TikTok partner agency that later became the UK's largest — without the platform stalling. That only works if ownership is genuinely distributed rather than routed through two people.

What we would tell ourselves

Hire for the specific gap, not the general shortage. Almost every hiring mistake in this period was a good person brought in without a clearly owned problem, and almost every one that worked was somebody handed a surface and left to own it.

Fifteen was also the point where we stopped being able to run on enthusiasm. The processes that felt like bureaucracy at ten were the only reason twenty was survivable.

The real test came later

Whether ownership was genuinely distributed or merely described that way was not answered in 2021. It was answered in 2024, when the co-founders opened a TikTok agency that grew to 1,000 exclusively signed streamers and the UK's number one position inside two quarters.

In that same period DeHub shipped a full interface overhaul, a 200% backend improvement, DePIN Phase 1 and on-chain tradable subscriptions. A company where the founders are the critical path does not do that while the founders are building something else.

The structure decided here is why. It looked like an administrative detail at the time.