Verified
Filmhubbers come from diverse backgrounds with varied personal and professional experiences, having worked at companies with different structures, roles, and methods—some effective, some not. Each company had its own culture, shaping how teams accomplished their missions. We draw on these experiences to build Filmhub's unique culture, which is documented throughout this Handbook. A strong culture is essential in achieving our company mission: To create unlimited opportunity for producers.
Remote-first
We are obsessive about quality—the quality of our catalog, our clients, our service, and, most importantly, our team. We are remote-first because it allows us to pursue the highest-quality talent wherever they are.
Remote-first has a bunch of advantages:
- We can hire amazing people from a global talent pool.
- Being remote encourages a deeper level of personal thought and writing things down.
- It allows for uninterrupted work.
- It naturally leads to a more diverse, worldly team.
- It makes results clearer, which helps us hold people accountable for outcomes rather than who they schmoozed in the office.
Radically transparent
As a team committed to transparency in an opaque industry, we believe in being as open as possible. We're proud to be the only film distribution company that publicly shares its handbook—possibly the only one with a handbook at all.
Nearly everything we do, including this Handbook, is open for team members to edit or suggest changes. Anyone can give direct feedback, improving our responsiveness and feedback loops. If you want to change something, there's no need for corporate hierarchy—just suggest it, and the owner will review it.
We write things down
We're a remote-first company, allowing our team to work from almost anywhere. With members across many countries, clear communication is vital for staying connected and working efficiently.
- It promotes clear, deep thinking.
- It ensures quality by defining clear processes.
- It maintains consistency in client interactions for top-notch service.
- It's often clearer than verbal conversations, keeping everyone aligned.
- It speeds up onboarding and learning by providing a written reference.
We prioritize asynchronous communication and transparency using Notion, Linear, Slack, and Loom. Writing things down clarifies our ideas and enables better feedback, which has been crucial to our growth.
Planning…go slow to go fast
At Filmhub, we're tackling a complex challenge: merging the best of the film industry with cutting-edge technology. We serve thousands of clients, process hundreds of channel reports, deliver over 10,000 titles monthly, and pay out millions to producers—all on time. This requires careful upfront planning. A small change in our systems can cause major issues later, so we must understand the context and think through downstream effects. Starting small is fine, but planning upfront ensures smoother, faster progress with less frustration.
Focus on building community & trust
Being remote doesn’t have to mean you’re lonely; you just have to be intentional about building community and, in turn, trust.
Here are a few things we do to build trust within our team:
- We start video meetings with 5 minutes of personal sharing. It’s amazing how far this goes.
- We get individual teams in person once a quarter in an awesome city
- We host monthly book and movie clubs to improve ourselves as infinite learners and celebrate the amazing films we work with
We believe in open conflict and direct feedback
Conflict is a healthy part of growth. We're direct about the quality of our work, but not everything needs to be perfectly polished—it depends on the task's speed and impact.
Everyone should help raise each other's game. After completing a task, fatigue sets in, making it easier for others to offer critique and feedback.
Without feedback, we can't identify areas for improvement. To emphasize its importance, we have all team members read Connect by Carole Robin and David Bradford, renowned Stanford GSB professors. Carole even occasionally leads workshops for our team!
Fewer meetings = more focused work
We're big believers in the importance of the maker's schedule. If we have meetings at all (which we try to avoid, see "We write everything down" above), we'll cluster them so our day doesn't get split up. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we don't have internal meetings at all. We encourage saying no to meetings if they're not productive or if you're not needed (assuming you provide feedback why).
We work with dedication and efficiency
Filmhub is not for the faint of heart. We need dedicated, focused individuals who are fully committed to changing the industry. If you prefer to "phone it in" or need constant supervision, this isn't the place for you.
We value infinite learning and a strong bias for action, but we don’t believe in 80-hour work weeks. We prioritize focused work and live for the satisfaction of achieving meaningful results.
We focus on contributions rather than titles
Our management approach is simple—we avoid hierarchy and fancy titles, which can discourage people from making changes, especially if they're not in a 'senior' role. More on our views on titles here.
We have team leads to ensure alignment and prevent chaos. These leads may not be the most senior, but they are the best at keeping the team on track, likely excelling as coaches rather than individual contributors. We don’t believe top individual contributors are necessarily the best team leads, it’s a fully different skillset that must be learned.