Bring It On is a fully remote mobile gaming studio. Leo Frankel and his team build skill-based, real-money games like Big Cash Bingo, and they have been distributed since the company started. It is Leo's third startup, and going remote wasn't a pandemic workaround. It was a deliberate choice.
"This is my third startup. My two co-founders live quite far away, and before Bring It On they used to spend more than an hour commuting each direction. It became clear there was no comfortable place to set up an office we could all reach. So we knew we had to build the company remotely, and we saw real benefits in it. I eat lunch with my kids whenever they come back from school, which is something not many people get to do."
The catch with remote is the one everyone knows. The moment you need a colleague, you send a message and wait.
"In remote work, communication is the most important part, and coordinating between people is a waste of time. Every minute someone spends waiting for a reply before they can jump on a call is a minute they're not working."
When Leo planned a fully remote company, he mapped the tools he would need: one for task management, one for product mock-ups, one for chat, and one more, a place to meet. In 2022, that last one was the hard part.
"Back then in 2022 this wasn't very common. There were a few options, and Cosmos stood out in several of the aspects we reviewed. It has served us well in getting the team in place."
What sold him wasn't novelty. It was that walking up to a desk removed the wait entirely, and the day-to-day details held up.
"Being able to walk up to someone's desk and instantly be in a video conversation is far more comfortable than sending a Slack message and waiting for them to come online. Cosmos has also put emphasis on the things that matter: the annotation tools when someone's presenting are much better than Zoom or Google Meet, there are recording options, and the support is great. Whenever we reach out, the Cosmos team is there."
Leo has pitched Cosmos to enough founders to know the objection by heart. Won't letting anyone walk up to anyone create noise? His answer reframes it.
"When you set up a company remotely, the honest trade-off is that the most productive way for people to work is everyone in the same room, and it's hard to get the most productive people to sit in one room. That's the advantage of remote: you tap into a much wider talent pool. But enabling communication is not a downside, it's an upside. In a real office, people walk up to each other all the time, and that's part of how creativity gets generated."
Bring It On runs on a shared four-hour window rather than tracked hours. The team is in the Cosmos office from 11am to 3pm, the stretch where almost everyone is online, starting with a daily meeting plus a few weekly regulars.
"It was there from day one and it evolved. We define it as 11am to 3pm. People often come in earlier or stay much longer, but that's the window of highest productivity where almost everyone is online. We have a daily meeting, and then a few weekly recurrences: R&D priorities, roll-over discussions, happy hour. Beyond that, people schedule meetings or just walk up to each other."
Outside that window, the rule is freedom.
"We use trust as our guardrail. We chose to forego any surveillance or tracking of hours, and we give people as much freedom as possible. Workations are common: someone might spend months in Thailand. We don't measure hours. If you need a couple of hours for the dentist, just go, come back, and work whenever you're comfortable. We've built a lot of trust with our team, and in return they're very productive and feel genuinely meaningful to our success."
The clearest sign it works shows up in interviews. Candidates arrive wary of "fully remote", then they see the office.
"When we tell candidates the company is remote, they have a few concerns. But when they come to an interview and see the place, it's quite gamified, these little avatars walking around and talking to each other, and something clicks. It adds a bit of magic to the experience."
Leo is honest about the limits. Relationships aren't identical to an in-person office. But the model holds at a scale that would have been hard to picture otherwise: a team grown past twenty, people he has worked with for over a year without meeting in person, investors who have backed the company more than once without a single face-to-face.
Encouraging an environment where everyone's camera is on keeps that human touch in place. It makes the connection stronger, and it makes things a bit less distant and lonely for a remote team.
Leo Frankel
Founder & CEO - Bring It On
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