Why I'm Building a Remote Team to Empower Remote Teams

I started Spinach to help distributed teams be more effective. Here are 6 reasons behind my bet on remote work

At my previous startup, Drippler, team members who had a long commute to the office could work from home one day a week. That single day per week for some of our team members wasn't an easy decision for us to make, and if you had asked me back then about completely switching over to remote work I would have completely ruled it out over communication, collaboration and productivity concerns. Fast forward a few years and I'm writing this from Tel-Aviv while continuing to work with my team that’s spread across Atlanta, Nashville, Seattle and Portland. Even though we're far apart, every day that goes by we're improving our beta product, adding users to our waitlist and executing on our plan. 

16 months after the pandemic sent millions of tech employees home to work, the economy is gradually "going back to normal" and companies are rethinking their work policies. Beyond optimizing for cost and workforce productivity, employers have to balance employee preferences and work life balance to keep recruiting and retaining top talent in this heated job market.

After seeing recent trends and interviewing people at both big companies and small, I'm betting that in a few years most of the tech industry will be working remotely. Here's why:

1. Return-to-office backlash
   Millions plan to quit their jobs as return-to-office plans take effect and tech giants like Apple and Google are experiencing public pushback from employees on hybrid policies. On the other end of the spectrum, companies Spotify, Shopify, Twitter and Square have announced permanent work from home policies and have since been tapping into diverse global talent without requiring candidates to relocate. With everything else being equal, whose job offer would you take? 

2. The next wave of distributed teams
   Widespread and cheap broadband, video conferencing apps and cloud enterprise tools made working from home possible. But until the pandemic, most considered remote work a less productive niche. Now that the entire tech sector has experienced working remotely, there is a wave of products being built by distributed teams. GitLab, Zapier and Postscript are some examples of successful fully remote companies, and many have recently started to follow their footsteps - I’ve been hearing from investors that many in their portfolios  are ditching their offices and going fully remote.

3. The great decoupling of employment and physical location
   Employees who previously had to choose between staying at their current job, relocating to take a new job or limiting themselves to employers based within a decent commute radius now have a very appealing fourth option: finding a remote job in one of countless companies without being constrained by physical proximity or having to relocate. The rate of Americans leaving employers for new opportunities is the highest it has been in more than two decades and I expect that trend will continue as the world opens back up.

4. Work-life balance
   For many, having more control over their work schedule and the ability to move around have become priceless perks from which there's no going back. Here are some examples that would have been hard to imagine just two years ago and have now become a reality for many:

   • Picking up your kids up from school on a work day

   • Taking a meeting while taking a walk at nearby park

   • Spending time with your family as soon as you're done working for the day

   • Putting your place on AirBnB and moving to a different city or country every few months

   • Taking a cross country RV trip without having to take weeks off work

   • Staying near your parents for a few months after your maternity leave ends

   The long term effects of better mental health and well-being on productivity have yet to be seen or measured, but my sense is that happier employees = more productive employees.

5. Remote work ≠ no face-to-face collaboration
   One of the most common arguments against remote work is that you can't replace the magic of physical, face-to-face teamwork - brainstorming sessions, design sprints and planning discussions are definitely more fun, engaging and effective in person. Does being a distributed team mean you miss out on that? Absolutely not! With no office lease, electricity and water bills, cleaning services, parking spaces, coffee, toilet paper etc. companies can afford to spend on getting their distributed team together as needed. We'll see organizations adopt team off-sites, local meetups, co-working space hubs and various new and creative approaches to balancing remote work with that in-person magic. Salesforce's Marc Benioff has some ideas.

6. Remote 2.0 - powered by a new breed of productivity tools
   Enterprise productivity tools that have seen massive growth over the past few years were built to replace old office technologies and behaviors, yet at the same time also established the foundations for remote work. A few examples: Zoom set out to replace archaic conference call technologies yet enables teams to completely ditch the meeting room. Slack was the ultimate email-killer though it's now the new water-cooler / shoulder tap. Jira replaced post-its on the board but now enables remote teams to effectively manage their work. The next wave of productivity tools are now being built by young start-ups, many of which were born out of the pandemic and founded by teams who experienced the challenges and pain points of remote work first hand. These products are designed for the remote use case which, for the first time ever, represents a huge market that allows raising and building venture scale businesses. In the new "virtual office for remote teams" category alone you can find Gather, Tandem, Loopteam, Teamflow, Nooks and Playspace, all venture backed. We're in the very early days and it will be a while before we find out who the big winners in the remote productivity category will be, but one thing is clear - rather than just enabling remote work, they’ll take distributed team efficiency and productivity to the next level!

We're a fast moving team of builders backed by awesome investors, on a mission to empower remote teams. Shoot me a note and come build the future with us!