Recently we moved at our company to 5 days a week in-person, all day every day for everyone. We had to 100% change out personnel on a small team. Everyone leaving had an offer to move and 90 days of severance if they didn't want to. With nothing but gratitude to the people that got us here, we ended up with a full re-build. It's changed everything. Not because the quality of the team has increased -- it was sky high in both eras -- but because the nature of the day-to-day motion at the startup has completely changed. - everyone who works at the company (5 people) says they love their job; this includes me - we're moving 2-3x faster in terms of rate of iteration, which according to at least one friend is one of the top two drivers of startup success along with outlier levels of resistance and grit (rate of iteration credit: Ellie Bharmasel; outlier resilience by several standard deviations credit: @sama). Personally speaking:th rough the remote and remote/hybrid era, I now look back as being like a wooly mammoth -- frozen in amber. I was frozen. Stuck. Not even aware that I wasn't professionally full alive. Now: the spontaneity, socializing, team lunches, feedback, long 1:1's, white-boarding, cross-functional banter, camaraderie... it's like black and white has moved to color. The wooly mammoth is dancing again. I don't think this would have been possible if we hadn't been re-building a very small team from the ground-up. I do think there is work life balance magic in remote and remote/hybrid, particularly for people juggling work and family. That said -- for our young people -- which now comprises the majority of our work force at pie (<30), this is the experience of mentorship that they deserve, just as anyone >30 already had as the foundational stage of our careers. To be clear: I also respect the sh-t out of entrepreneurs who have made remote hybrid or fully remote work -- like Erik Allebest at Chess.com -- who has done it for 16 years. That said, now that I am having this experience, I am deeply skeptical of the cohort of overvalued startups that were launched between 2020-2022. I have no idea how you find product-market fit and a revenue drivetrain, let alone build a retentive and talent-dense high performing culture, without being in-person. Maybe depends on the kind of company. I just want to be a counterpoint on remote. And a counterpoint that going all-in on return to office is all bad. I do recognize that at some companies and startups this would be a full revolt. And that it would require human stresses and costs of restructuring. I do also want to recognize that the answer is very different for cultures that were already formed pre-pandemic. But if you're building a startup, and it started during the pandemic, and you are remote or remote-hybrid, I want to share that at least at one little company in Chicago, we are having the time of our lives. Full love and support to everyone out there, however you're doing it. Let's build.
@dunn Disappointed to see this, inflexible working affects women disproportionately forbes.com/sites/forbesbu…, a lot of the positives you list are possible in a hybrid workplace. Hybrid also transformed my career opportunities, as someone with a chronic illness
Love learning from you. We onboarded three new teammates today who all have kids under 5 and said remote flexibility was the #1 priority in their search. Aligning skills and mission without geographic constraints feels like an unfair advantage, which only grows as more return to office pressure increases. I think the key is to go all-in on office or sincerely embrace remote. The worst experiences that are consistently cited are the teams that mandate hybrid policies that end up being loosely enforced (less so the further up the org chart you go), resulting in half the team navigating a frustrating commute to sit on Zoom calls with the people who aren’t in that day. I’m also bullish and hopeful that remote work will be radically improved by technology. It feels remarkably similar to March 2020 (Zoom, Slack, Email) which just cannot be the future.
Thanks for sharing Andy! I feel this part in my bones: “this is the experience of mentorship that they deserve”. As the Databricks employee who held the record for post-pandemic in HQ days worked, I can say that I was asked all sorts of good, random “water cooler” questions, especially by mid level and junior employees, that I wasn’t asked — not once — on slack or zoom. Make of that what you will. But I feel strongly that the people cheated by hybrid work are those that can benefit most from mentorship.
@dunn Being together works. So does not being together and big respect for those who pull off fully distributed teams. But for my nickel, especially for a early days startups, together works. And it’s more fun to boot.
Working with a 100% in person team now. It's accelerated their brand exponentially and while their was a lot of noise out of around 200 they actually only lost 4 folks. I go to their offices about three days a week and it is INSANE how good they are together. It's a real thing. FWIW, I was one of those leaders who saw productivity spike during the first phase of work from home and I got duped by it. Then it declined month over month. Who knew hanging with you co-workers and then friends could be more productive?
@dunn I do envy you. I miss IRL work with coworkers. My personal life got much poorer after we switched to WFH. But people love it and it works fine. So there is no way back for us.
@dunn We're fully distributed at Gainsight in US/Europe (offices in India) and our culture is very strong. But I agree with you Andy: 1. All models can work 2. For early stage, my gut is you're right 3. For early career folks, ditto Like all culture things, the key is having a POV.
@dunn Thank you for this post. Resonates a lot with the changes I am seeing in smaller teams.