In 2005, Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup that made early investments in successful ventures like Airbnb and Stripe.
On Saturday, Graham pondered why some company leaders have become disillusioned with remote work after embracing it previously.
“I’ve talked to multiple founders recently who have changed their minds about remote work and are trying to get people back to the office,” he tweeted. “I doubt things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back.”
Although he didn’t mention specific individuals or companies, similar cases are widespread.
In April, Lyft’s CEO implemented a return-to-office mandate shortly after laying off over a thousand employees. This contradicted the company’s previous claims of allowing staff to choose their work location. A comparable situation occurred at the insurance company Farmers Group, causing discontent among employees who had made significant life changes, such as relocating to a new city, based on the expectation of remote work.
Graham suggested on Saturday that the effectiveness of remote work diminishes over time, which could explain why some company leaders have gradually become less enthusiastic about it.
“Why were all these smart people fooled?” he wrote. “Partly I think because remote work does work initially, if you start with a system already healthy from in-person work…and partly because it seemed to solve recruiting, which is always a bottleneck.”
He is not the only prominent venture capitalist questioning remote work.
In an interview with The Logan Bartlett Show last month, Keith Rabois, a general partner at Founders Fund, stated that younger employees “learn by osmosis,” necessitating in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talents by observing them. He also mentioned that he and his firm would not invest in a startup centered around remote work.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who succeeded Graham as the head of Y Combinator, recently referred to remote work as a mistake.
“I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he said during a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. “I would say that the experiment on that is over.”
Meanwhile, companies are becoming stricter in enforcing return-to-office mandates. Google informed employees this week that their office attendance would be a factor in their performance evaluations if they failed to comply with the minimum requirement of three days in the office. A union criticized this move, stating that “professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations.”
At Amazon, employees staged a walkout this month in protest against the company’s return-to-office mandate, which stipulates that employees must be in the office at least three days a week. The company appeared unaffected by the protest and is maintaining the mandate.
“There’s more energy, collaboration, and connections happening,” a spokesperson told Fortune, “and we’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices.”
Graham acknowledged that “there will definitely continue to be remote-first companies.”
