Tech startups have fallen in love with sending employees on fantastic international trips.
For instance, hot San Francisco startup Prezi, the company responsible for all those cool "Prezi" presentations used by Ted Talk speakers, promptly sends every new employee on a trip to Budapest, Hungary.
Prezi was founded by three Hungarian founders, Peter Arvai, Szabolcs Somlai-Fischer and Peter Halacsy, as part of an incubation program called Kitchen Budapest.
"As part of onboarding, everyone goes to Budapest to experience what it's like where we started from," Arvai, Prezi's CEO, told Business Insider.
Plus, the whole company meets up in Budapest twice a year. They call it "Power Week," and they spend the time strategizing about the future.
That's no small task. Prezi has 170 employees, Arvai says, most of them in San Francisco. It still has a Budapest office, home to about about 25 workers.
Other startups offer their employees international travel as a perk, too. For instance:
- At Automattic, the company responsible for the blogging platform WordPress, employees work from home and have meetups in any exotic location they want, like Greece, Kauai, Amsterdam.
- Maptia, a tiny startup moved all five of its employees to Morocco to live in a picturesque surfing town called Taghazout, ten feet from the Atlantic Ocean.
- San Francisco-based Expensify took its programmers to Istanbul for a month to write one of its apps. When the time came to write another app, the staff went to the Philippines.