BELLEVUE, Wash. — At precisely 2 p.m. Pacific time on a recent Monday afternoon, employees of the technology startup Statsig were alerted to their regular standup meeting not by a notification on their screens, or a buzzing of their devices, but by the sound of engineering lead Marcos Arribas tapping the taut surface of one of several musical instruments specially designated for the purpose.
This is the drumbeat of daily work in a place where workers are in the office every day. The fact that it’s a novelty shows just how much our world has changed.
At a time when hybrid and remote work have become common — allowing tech workers to split their time between home and office, or work entirely from home — Statsig is one of a very small number of tech startups where employees are working at their desks, in the office, five days a week.
Statsig’s policy dates back to the founding of the company three years ago by Vijaye Raji, the startup’s CEO, who previously led Facebook’s Seattle engineering office. Starting around the onset of the pandemic, Statsig used powerful air filtration devices. The team wore masks, and put 10 feet of space between desks.
Their thinking at the time: the stakes were too high to work remotely.
“We’re a super high-risk startup,” Raji said recently, recalling the decision to work in person. “We could live or die based on some of the small decisions we make.”
The initial plan was to be fully in-person for the first year and then open up to a hybrid model after that. However, Statsig found the in-person environment was working so well that they decided to continue.
As the leader of a company that specializes in technology for A/B testing, Raji said he wishes he could run an experiment to test his hypothesis about the benefits of in-person work. But he said the anecdotal evidence indicates that the company is better as a result of the approach.
- It allows for more spontaneous in-person discussions and meetings without needing to schedule time, speeding up decision making and making the company more nimble.
- Having employees in the same location encourages real-time collaboration on whiteboards and other tools, as well as building social bonds through shared activities during and after work.
- The in-person environment tends to be favored by people earlier in their careers who value and benefit from building relationships face to face at the office each day, rather than remotely.
Raji said he believes the benefits are worth the trade-offs, which include the cost of office space and time spent commuting to the office, in addition to limiting Statsig’s pool of potential employees to those who live or can move to the Seattle area, and are willing to work in the office.
“It’s a hard trade-off,” Raji said. “There’s a lot of people, very good people, that I’m unable to hire from outside of the region,” he said. “Sometimes people agree to it, and then over time, they realize, this commute is pretty hard. It’s a hard-line policy. If you can’t do it, it doesn’t work out.”
For employees, this arrangement has its perks, including catered lunch and dinner five days a week. Statsig’s kitchen is also well stocked with options for breakfast. The idea is to provide convenient food options so employees don’t have to leave the office or spend time thinking about meals.
Statsig also offers special accommodations including flexible hours and the ability to work from home when family or personal circumstances arise. It also has about 10 salespeople who work remotely from various time zones.
However, the default expectation for most of the company’s 72 employees is to work from the office, every day.
There’s a particular focus on the core hours around the daily afternoon standup, where some of the traditions would be difficult or impossible to replicate remotely. Employees applaud when a completed task is taken off the whiteboard, for example, and give a single clap for more incremental progress toward specific tasks and goals.
Good luck doing that on a Zoom call.
Bucking the broader trend
Statsig’s approach isn’t the norm.
Hybrid work has become the standard, applying to about 50% of the “remote-capable employees” in a Gallup workplace survey of 18,000 people across various U.S. industries, released in October 2023. About 30% of those employees were working exclusively remotely, while just 20% were fully on-site.
“The future of the office has arrived … and it is hybrid,” the Gallup researchers wrote in their summary of the results, adding: “Based on our findings, it’s unlikely that everyone will return to the office five days a week in the foreseeable future. It’s also unlikely that fully remote work will become the new normal.”
Of course, there are exceptions to the norm on both ends of the spectrum, and some companies are finding success with a fully remote approach.
For example, Common Room, the Startup of the Year in the 2022 GeekWire Awards, had an office in Seattle in its early days before going fully remote.
Part of the inspiration for the change came from a top engineer on the team who asked if they really wanted her spending almost two hours a day commuting, rather than building great products.
“There were clear productivity gains that we felt could be had just by not forcing folks to sit in traffic, said Linda Lian, the Common Room CEO and co-founder, also citing significant savings from real estate costs. In addition, the flexibility of remote work often appeals to parents and others with more experience in their fields.
At times, Lian said, she misses the sense of togetherness from working in the office and the level of energy and knowledge sharing that comes from spontaneous interactions. But she believes it’s possible to replicate the effect with regular in-person gatherings such as one held by Common Room last month.
“If you build a cadence to do this on a regular basis, the goodness of those in-person experiences can carry you forward for weeks and months,” Lian said.
Common Room aggregates customer signals into a unified view to help companies engage effectively with their key communities at the right time. Its users include go-to-market teams at companies like MongoDB and Notion.
The startup currently has around 55 employees. As the company grows, Lian said, it’s possible that one day it may discover that the fully remote approach doesn’t work, but she said that remains to be seen.
“There’s really just no one ‘right’ model, and situations change,” she said.
A survey of global CEOs by the KPMG consulting firm last year also suggested that the issue isn’t entirely settled. The survey found many corporate leaders “steadfast in signaling their support of pre-pandemic ways of working, with a majority (64 percent) anticipating a full return to office is only three years away.”
Another relevant tidbit from the KPMG report: “87 percent of CEOs say they are likely to reward employees who make an effort to come into the office with favorable assignments, raises or promotions.”
For now, at least, it’s extremely rare for tech startups to bring employees into the office five days a week when their jobs would otherwise be suitable for a remote or hybrid approach. But with help from our LinkedIn followers and GeekWire Podcast listeners, we were able to identify a few others.
A common thread: All of the companies we identified have founders who believe strongly in the benefits of in-person work, and adopted the five-days-a-week policy from the beginning, or early in their evolution — avoiding the potentially difficult scenario of bringing hybrid or remote workers back to the office full-time.
‘A deep level of connection’
Vaibhav Gupta and Aaron Villalpando, the co-founders of Boundary, a Seattle-based machine learning toolchain startup, recently signed a lease for a space in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Boundary took part in Y Combinator last year, and it’s sharing the space with another graduate of the accelerator program, Uberduck.
For the first year, at least, Boundary plans to work in the office full-time by default, and the co-founders are making this policy clear to prospective hires.
Gupta has worked in remote and hybrid roles for companies including Google and D.E. Shaw. But before that, he saw the value of working in-person as a Microsoft Hololens software engineer. He remains close with many former colleagues from that team, several of whom joined him recently to celebrate his 30th birthday.
He attributes these strong friendships to their time working together in-person, and he wants the Boundary team to have the same opportunity.
“It was a deep level of connection,” Gupta said. “And I told Aaron this, too, when we started. I don’t care if our startup works or not. If we hate each other, it’s a loss.”
Another benefit of having an in-person office space is the ability to host technical meetups, guest speakers, and community gatherings, which Boundary plans to do in its new office, and Statsig has been doing, as well.
Efficiency gains from in-person work have also been critical for another company, Seattle-based Electric Era, a battery technology company that makes the PowerNode EV fast-charging stations. After starting in mid-2020, the Electric Era team worked from different locations for about five months, before deciding it wasn’t working.
“I remember, at the time thinking like this company is going to die,” said CEO and co-founder Quincy Lee, who previously worked at SpaceX in the Seattle region, most recently as manager of Starlink gateways.
He explained, “We’re trying to do such a hard thing. We’re trying to make advancements in power electronics and software control systems, and go-to-market motions. How are we going to do that if we have these compartmentalized calls, and we’re not in communication and solving problems on a day-to-day on a moment-to-moment basis?”
That changed when the company moved into its first space, which was the equivalent of a two-car garage in an ActivSpace complex in the Fremont/Ballard area of Seattle.
“We committed to an in-person workstyle,” Lee said. “And in my opinion, it definitely saved the company. We were able to make such fast progress and really make it through the hiccups of the funding crisis of 2020, all because we were able to share ideas quickly and rapidly.”
Electric Era has since moved to two locations, in Seattle’s Interbay and SoDo neighborhoods. It announced $11.5 million in new funding in August, bringing its total investment raised to $19 million. Recent milestones include a trio of Washington state Department of Commerce grants to bring charging stations to rural and tribal communities.
The company employs 21 people in positions ranging from hardware manufacturing and engineering to sales/marketing and software development. Some of those roles could be completed remotely, but apart from the efficiency gains, Lee said working full-time in the office is an issue of equity and fairness.
“I believe it creates a harmonious bond across the company,” he said.
The startup ‘clock speed’
The issue has been less harmonious inside larger companies.
Some employees at Amazon staged a walkout last year in protest of the company’s move from remote to hybrid work, with the expectation to be in the office three days a week, citing issues of equity and fairness, as well.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been a vocal advocate of the benefits of in-person work, including the spontaneous interactions that happen after meetings. But after the backlash to the three-days-a-week policy last year, the company was steadfast in squashing rumors that it might have employees return to the office five days a week.
TikTok, which has an engineering center in the Seattle region, is also reportedly requiring some of its engineering teams to return to the office five days a week.
Could companies get the same benefit from two or three days in the office?
Raji, the Statsig CEO, doesn’t think so. A hybrid approach would be a slippery slope, introducing ambiguity. Once you work from home some days, it becomes unclear what work should happen during in-office vs remote days. There may also be a bias to prioritize decisions that happen during in-person days.
Statsig raised $43 million in 2022 from Sequoia Capital, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. The company’s total funding to date is $53 million.
Raji said customer traction has been strong, with revenue increasing more than three-fold in the last year, helping to reduce the startup’s burn rate and significantly increasing its cash runway. Statsig recently launched a massive outdoor advertising campaign in San Francisco to further boost its profile.
He believes the company’s “clock speed” is considerably faster due to its reliable in-office approach, referring to Andreessen Horowitz general partner Sriram Krishnan’s observations about how quickly companies work.
Raji explained, “When I say, ‘OK, let’s take care of it offline,’ does that mean instantly? Does that mean one hour from now? Does that mean one week from now? Does that mean a month from now? In a daily environment, the most you can go without seeing that person and actually making a decision is one day or one night.”
