Don't Call It an Office

For the first 14 days, our small team worked side by side in DC, building what I envisioned as the city’s next great tech company. Then, when our CTO Chris moved to San Francisco, we established what would become one of our core principles: a company is remote if it has one remote employee.

This wasn’t merely a semantic distinction. The principle stemmed from our conviction that no team member should face disadvantages based on their location. Even as we built a predominantly DC-based team in the following years, we maintained our identity as a remote-first company. In the pre-COVID era, this stance raised eyebrows – the idea that having just one remote employee would define our entire operating model.

What we discovered, and what many companies would later learn during the pandemic, was that enabling remote work wasn’t the real challenge. The challenge was creating a culture compelling enough that people would choose to come together even when they didn’t have to. Being remote-first doesn’t mean rejecting physical spaces entirely – it means ensuring that any investment in physical space actively supports our mission without creating advantages or disadvantages based on location. This insight would eventually lead us to fundamentally reimagine how companies should think about physical space – not as infrastructure to be managed, but as strategic assets that must earn their keep while preserving the equality of our distributed culture.

Many companies now attempt to balance remote and in-person work through hybrid models. While well-intentioned, these approaches often highlight the challenge of bridging two distinct workplace cultures, and the result is the “worst of both worlds”, epitomized by employees who commute to an office only to join the same video call as everyone else. Furthermore, not only do colocated team members enjoy a significant reduction in friction for small requests, but their remote colleagues frequently pay a “small-talk tax” in the form of socially-enforced preambles to every conversation.

Leave a Comment