The Grand Experiment
What is the future of remote work?
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🍎 Quick bite of the Week: A one-billion-dollar email chain that shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom negotiating the eventual FB-IG acquisition.
👩🔬 The Grand Experiment in Remote Work
Every entrepreneur, at heart, is a mad scientist. We dream up wild experiments, predict how they will go, then beg the world to act as our test subjects. If you will just buy our self-cooling bed or download our hypnosis app, we promise, you can sleep better and be cured of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. All we need is adoption from you, the user, and your results will prove that we’re not crazy.
Normally, kickstarting user adoption from zero is a long slog. But every once in a while, the world changes— and you fast-forward ten years into the future overnight.
Before the pandemic, just 10% of American workers worked from home at least one day per week. In April 2020, that number jumped to 69%.
That kind of tectonic shift means that all prognostication about the future of remote work from before April 2020 can be delicately, respectfully, and deliberately thrown in the trash. The playing field has been leveled. We’re all discovering this new world together, and whoever can figure out precisely where we’ve landed will win.
🔙 Will we ever go back to our offices?
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
— Someone, but probably not Henry Ford
More than half of all current remote workers say that they would like to continue working remotely. But, as the real wisdom behind Henry Ford’s apocryphal quote suggests, expressed preferences and revealed preferences are two different things.
I expect that the vast majority of us will head back to our offices for one simple reason: FOMO. We won’t want to miss out.
Most folks will choose to stay in San Francisco than take a salary cut to move to a less expensive city, even if doing so would give them more spending power. (Why? Because it is easy to compare salary numbers, hard to compare spending power, and happiness is comparative.)
Going remote-only will lead to higher turnover — the cost of switching from one remote job to another is extremely low, both logistically (you just log into a different Slack tomorrow) and relationally (ties formed purely digitally are weaker than in-person ties).
If companies allow their employees to decide where they want to work, weird dynamics will arise between the in-office and remote contingents. The latter will complain as the former disproportionately get opportunities, promotions, perks, etc. (Ambitious folks will see that imbalance, and will choose to be part of the privileged in-person cohort.)
We’ll realize the long-term effects of the truism that purely digital interactions lack serendipity. This is the most pernicious problem with remote work: it is way harder for folks to build networks, find new opportunities, and break into existing social structures when all interactions are intentional.
For the above reasons and many more, I expect that remote working will soon end up like any other luxury perk: expected from the world’s best companies, but too costly for any mortal enterprise to execute effectively. (Stripe, for instance, nailed remote work — but they’re arguably the best company in the world, and therefore “exception,” not “rule.”)
🏴☠️ Remote Problems ↔ Remote Opportunities
Of course, one man’s list of complaints is another entrepreneur’s treasure. Although I don’t expect a grand shift to remote work across the economy, I do expect a number of billion-dollar companies to be born from the ashes.
Here are a few of the startups that make me excited about the future of remote work.
Around: magical video chat
Let’s be honest: Zoom stinks. It works fine as a way to get my face in front of your face, but it includes a whole variety of inconveniences that we assume are unavoidable: background noise; background visual distractions; echoes from multiple device connections; and so on.
Around fixed all of those inconveniences. Every single one. They’re equalizing the digital and analog worlds, and by doing so, they are breaking down potential weird remote/in-office dynamics. (They’re also getting us closer to an “always-on” video chat… which is spooky, dystopian, and not that far away.)
We always thought that what we wanted was a perfect replication of the physical world in the digital world — but perhaps next-gen digital meeting rooms will be their own, unique, better experiences.
Brain.fm: Music to enable deep work
If you’re in an office, you have to do two things: ignore distractions, and work all day. The first is obviously annoying, but the second may be a bigger tax on productivity.
I expect that many Silicon Valley companies will test our atypical workday setups in the post-pandemic world. (e.g., head into the office every morning, have some quick meetings, play video games and ping pong, eat lunch, and then leave to do deep work at home.)
The importance of shorter stints of deeper work is nothing revolutionary, but new tools are emerging that make it easier and more predictable to attain the zen-like flow state of high productivity that deep work aficionados crave — like Brain.fm, magical music that hacks your brain to make you more focused and productive.
Gather: a physical-like digital space for natural group interaction
Huge, company-wide Zoom meetings are fun, but they have one huge, obvious drawback: it’s only possible to hold one conversation at a time. We all know the real-world alternative of splitting up into smaller, ad hoc conversations, but before Gather, a “spatial video chat” app, that concept had no good digital analogue.
Basically, everyone in the Gather meeting controls an avatar. As two avatars get close, they can see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices; as they move apart, the video and audio dim. Gather makes it intuitive and trivially easy to generate multiple free-flowing conversations within big, digital groups — and therefore to replicate culture-building and serendipity previously only available in the real world.
(FWIW, it’s an easier app to use than to explain. Just try it out!)
🔮 Want to know how it all plays out? Me too!
If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that prognosticating is a fool’s errand. But if you’re trying to create the future, you have to predict where it’s headed!
If you’d like to stay up to date on the progress of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors in building the future of remote work, subscribe today to make sure you don’t miss out on the fun throughout 2021.
🧙♂️ Silicon Valley Lore
In Silicon Valley, everything is possible. Everything. Flying taxis? Life extension drugs? Rockets that fly to space and land back on Earth unscathed? Yes, yes, and yes. Silicon Valley assumes that everything physics allows will eventually be achieved by technologists. The entrepreneurial question, then, is timing: when is the right time to start a flying taxi startup, an immortality lab, or a reusable rocket company?
The easy, and incorrect, answer is “as soon as something thinks of it for the first time.” Being first to market may seem like most important thing, but you can be too early: Pets.com, for instance, was a too-early Chewy that busted along with the rest of the dot-coms in 2000.
SocialNet — the internet’s first social network — is the prototypical “too-early” Silicon Valley startup. Despite beating Facebook to market by seven years, it failed gloriously.
Luckily, SocialNet founder Reid Hoffman lived to tell the tale. He went on to be an critical early member of the PayPal team, the founder of LinkedIn, and an investor in Airbnb. Reid’s story is certainly Silicon Valley lore, and worth a listen:
(Click here for the cliffnotes on SocialNet’s failure if you’re pressed for time.)
