Andy Dunn@dunn
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.
