Are we returning to the office? Or is the future remote?
Work during COVID has underscored how distributed teams working remotely can be effective and accelerated the shift from the way we worked in the industrial age to optimizing how we work for the information age. While the tech for working in remote and distributed teams was here before COVID, the pandemic was the impetus and accelerator for moving to a new way of working at scale.
However, while it’s clear that our work models changed in the past 18 months, it’s less clear what the long-term model (or models) for working will be — or what will be the most effective and competitive. We have heard plenty of speculation on the subject, but in reality, only 29% of workplaces were back to the office in May 2021, and we are still in the early stages of workplace experiments with hybrid and remote-first models.
At a16z, as at many other companies, we view the changes the pandemic brought about as an opportunity to rethink how we work and what’s best for our team today and in the future. As part of this exercise, we also surveyed 226 CEOs in our portfolio — representing early and late stage startups across bio, consumer, crypto, enterprise, and fintech — about their future location and remote work plans.
