Remote vs Office

I will never forget seeing growth equity investors lecturing the CEO of Ookla that he needed to have a company office for his fully remote company.

This was in 2012. Ookla had a small team of around 12 people. They were bootstrapping, rapidly approaching 10m in revenue, with cash flow margins well north of 50%. They had a product, Speedtest.net, that had 100m’s of users.

I saw this multiple times - general partners at venerable growth equity firms lecture the CEO on the perils of operating as a remote company.

I didn’t have much personal experience on the question of remote vs office back then. But I made a mental note that perhaps, given the epic success of Ookla operating as a remote company, these super successful PE partners were totally clueless on this topic. A little later, in 2014, after two more years of torrid growth, Ookla had a successful exit. Remote worked out pretty well for them.

Fast forward 10 years and the pendulum has swung. Remote is no longer wildly contrarian. But, still, the debate continues. To be remote or to have an office?

Today, I had an early-stage startup CEO ask me for my thoughts on the question.

I don’t think it’s black and white. There are amazing companies that have an office and there are amazing ones that don’t. There are many more of the former than the latter. But the mix is shifting.

In the most successful remote cases, such as with Ookla or others like Gitlab, the CEO is very intentional about the approach. In other words, it’s fine to be a remote company, but make sure you are acting like one.  Of course, same goes for a company with an office or for a hybrid approach.

There are super talented people who want to work for a remote company. There are super talented people who want to work in an office. No need to try to cater to everyone - pick the lane that works for the founders and first employees, then go for it.