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by mangoman
2253 days ago
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I've worked remotely for the past 3.5 years. As one of two employees at a small statup, at a startup that started remote friendly and then revoked it, and now at a startup that is moving towards being remote equal (25% and rising). Not that long compared to others here, but long enough to have seen things that work and seen things that don't work, and with sufficiently varied approaches. I think there's reasons why this will work, but I also wonder if they would have screened the startups slightly differently if they knew they were going to do the whole batch remotely. Working in an all remote environment require different communication skills than working in an office. I also wonder how easy it'll be for founders to put in 16+ hour days while working from home. It's easy to 'stay late at the office', but I think it is harder to contain myself in my office while doing that. Maybe that's just a me thing, but I think it can be a real issue... I wonder if founders will simply hole up in the same living space somehow during quarantine; I could see that working, that's basically I've seen friends who've been in YC do anyway. It just might be harder to do in this environment. |
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Yeah, I think that's just a personal preference thing. I've always found offices to be much more distracting, and actually I tend to put less time in overall when there's an office involved. Mostly that's because commuting (even if it's a relatively easy commute, like a 15 minute walk) takes extra time, effort, and planning - and because there are more auditory and visual distractions to tune out in an office, which makes me fatigue more quickly.
I also felt just emotionally on edge from going to the office every day. For example, I would feel very resentful when I was phoned outside of work hours, because I felt that my limited time to enjoy myself and re-coup my energy with my family was being threatened. Now that I've been working primarily remotely now for about 3 years, I don't feel bothered when I need to step up and do extra work outside of normal hours. I'm less grouchy in general because I control the environment I work in and don't have the overhead of a commute looming over me.
I think most of the YC Founders will be able to do fine, since learning to work effectively remotely is a skill like any other. From my experience too, remote working is 10x better when every person involved is remote. The worst-case scenario is to have a split group of people (part remote, part in-office), because it leads to the in-person group having side convos that leave out the remote people, which harms the remote people's ability to bond with the in-person group and generates resentment when the remote workers inevitably get left out of a conversation that matters.