What David Natroshvili Learned About Managing SPRIBE’s Global Workforce
Building a technology company with employees across multiple time zones teaches lessons that business school curricula rarely cover. David Natroshvili, the founder and chief executive of gaming software developer SPRIBE, has accumulated such lessons over seven years of leading a genuinely distributed organization.
SPRIBE began with a small team in Tbilisi, Georgia, developing what would become Aviator, a game that redefined the crash game genre. As the company grew to serve millions of monthly active users, it expanded to offices across Eastern Europe and beyond. That expansion forced Natroshvili to confront questions about how organizations maintain coherence when their people never share physical space.
Information Islands and Their Consequences
Distributed teams don’t suffer from lack of communication. They suffer from uneven communication that creates pockets of knowledge isolated within particular offices or functions. An insight generated in one location may never reach colleagues who could act on it. Decisions made in headquarters may reach some offices clearly and others as garbled summaries.
Natroshvili describes this phenomenon as “information islands.” Someone mentions a client issue in one office, the conversation generates valuable insight, but that insight remains trapped within a single location. Without intentional systems to bridge these islands, organizations develop internal information economies where some teams operate with current intelligence and others work from outdated or incomplete pictures.
The SPRIBE founder’s approach to this challenge involves deliberate redundancy in communication. Important messages travel through multiple channels: meetings, documentation, emails, team discussions, and project-specific forums. What might appear wasteful in a co-located office becomes necessary infrastructure for distributed operations.
Listening Across Distances
Communication flows must work in both directions. David Natroshvili creates regular opportunities for employees to voice concerns and propose ideas through individual conversations. When people feel heard, they engage more fully and perform at higher levels.
The challenge lies in ensuring feedback channels reach all offices equally. Leaders in distributed organizations cannot pick up team sentiment through hallway conversations or reading the room during meetings. They must build structured mechanisms that actively solicit input from every location.
SPRIBE implements anonymous feedback channels alongside regular individual meetings. Deliberate effort ensures that employees in smaller offices receive the same attention as those in larger locations. This infrastructure enables the company’s partnerships with organizations like UFC and WWE to execute smoothly across distributed teams.
Documentation as Organizational Memory
David Natroshvili emphasizes documentation as infrastructure rather than bureaucracy. Written records of major decisions, strategic discussions, and project updates create a shared reference that all employees can access regardless of time zone or office location.
Documentation also enforces precision. Verbal explanations can remain vague and still seem adequate in the moment. Writing demands clarity. If a strategy cannot be articulated precisely enough to document, it probably requires additional thinking.
For SPRIBE, documentation enables continuity. New employees can understand historical context. Decisions don’t require re-explaining when team composition changes. The organization develops institutional memory that persists beyond any individual’s tenure.
