[foobar241431]

Collaborating IRL is more effective IMHO (and my experience working with remote offices). Plus, having an office can be a great perk: with a small commute (~20 min) and 3 meals a day, I save a lot of time/energy just on the food.

[jedberg]

> Collaborating IRL is more effective IMHO

I've done a lot of both, and what I've found is that in person works better if the company isn't "remote first". Being one or a few remote people sucks, lots of stuff happens in the office without you. But having the right tools for remote work makes it in some cases better.

But even in the case of an office, when everyone goes remote, suddenly it's not so bad.

At reddit, since when I was there everyone else was just out of college, we always worked the last two weeks of the year from home because we had "winter break". So for those few weeks, we were a 100% remote company, and it worked out ok. BUT, we didn't make any big decisions or do any deep collaboration because even though everyone was remote we waited till we got back to the office, not because it was better but because we weren't set up to do it remotely.

It's really all about having good processes for remote work -- ie. as much async as possible. And once you do that, even if you go to an office later, you've get better systems set up for tracking what happened and seeing history for new employees.

The worst thing for a new employee is having to get up to speed when all the meetings were in person and not recorded.

[agibsonccc]

We are "remote first". Major decisions happen over conference call and most communication happens over text and real time chat. I will likely never build a non remote company again. There are too many benefits. One is being able to hire anywhere, another is employee flexibility for people with kids. We work across 5 time zones and have made it work great. We have different complexities than other startups (subsidiaries,language barrier,async communication for some things,..) Those weren't blockers for us and it's made quality of life for most involved a lot higher. I have access to more engineering talent than most as well.

We have 2 "offices" 1 in SF and 1 in tokyo. It's completely optional whether you come in or not. Most people work from home. Our office in SF and Tokyo is mainly for entertaining customers and meetings.