The Rise of “Remote Working”

From the moment I picked up Jason Fried’s book ReWork I was hooked. Much like reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper, I felt like I was peering into the future and immediately understood the possibilities of the revolution we are about to experience. I saw not just the potential for my own startup to embrace it as a means to hire world-class people we would otherwise have had no chance of attracting, but more generally as a chance for the future of work to be infinitely better than the soul-destroying, happiness-draining, time-consuming monster that office work has become.

Working in an office is a remnant of the industrial revolution that understands none of the technological trends that have driven the rise of our current reality.

It is no longer necessary, massively wasteful from almost every standpoint and environmentally contributes to unimaginable pollution.

Slack, Zoom and similar tools (Tandem, Lattice, etc.) are dramatically reducing the barrier to creating remote-first businesses, helping companies transition or experiment easier than they ever could have before. Their impact in enabling the rise of the future of work is understated, but already we are seeing them free the next generation of leaders to imagine new possibilities for establishing the best remote working cultures and experience possible.

Anyone Job Could be Done Remotely

Once upon a time, only a very small number of jobs could be done remotely. The technology to enable workers to link into the systems they needed did not exist so they were tethered to the offices where the servers for the business were. The internet changed this dramatically, and though it has taken a long time for reliable cloud infrastructure to emerge, super-fast fiber broadband effectively means that any of the 255m desk jobs globally could be a remote role. This means that companies are now in a position, if they choose, to give any worker the choice of whether they want to do their job remotely or stick to an office. Some companies have taken to quickly, offering workers the chance at a higher quality of life in lower-cost regions, others haven’t — yet.

This was first drive by world-class operators who understood the influence had. Their refusal to be stuck in a city they…