[HN Gopher] Pre-seed, seed startups with employees in office hav...
___________________________________________________________________
Pre-seed, seed startups with employees in office have higher
revenue growth
Author : npalli
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-02-14 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (steveblank.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Should also note: "In Offices" includes "Associated with an
| office, but work from home; available as needed."
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| jdulay19 wrote:
| As others have said, the small sample size in this really quite
| silly.
|
| I would also add, companies raise more for in-office in the first
| place - most are in the Bay Area, more need to pay more to
| justify in-person to employees with options -> more funding
| needed, etc ..
| duxup wrote:
| I work at a small company, not a start up. I work from home 3 out
| of 5 days a week, but having said that:
|
| When I am in generally most of us sit around a conference table
| and work together when we are in the office. All but one of us is
| generally at the table when we're in the office.
|
| It works great, we can work fast and efficiently, I can overhear
| things other people have to say and so on. There's lots of things
| that happen fast and on time because we're all right there.
|
| Having said that this is all OPTIONAL. It works for all but one
| guy and I think that is part of what makes it work.
|
| Too many folks out there want a one size fits all deal and forget
| about the team part of team...
| shmatt wrote:
| This is too easy. Some forced office time means you have
| employees from a big tech hub working for you. Fully remote seed
| stage companies aren't paying anything close to paying rent in
| Sunnyvale or NYC.
|
| If you broke this down hiding the office situation, comparing
| startups from Kansas or Minnesota to seed stage startups in SV or
| Seattle, guess who would grow faster
| tarokun-io wrote:
| I've worked both 3-persons startups twice, once all sharing an
| apartment (with this exact reasoning: being together should make
| us more productive or increase motivation), one other time
| completely remotely.
|
| In both cases, no member of the team know anyone else before
| joining the team.
|
| Guess which one was more performant? The remote one. By an order
| of magnitude.
|
| Two examples are anecdotal data, but so are 37 IMO. It almost
| feels like the title of the article was written before the
| experiment was done.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Could it be that the specific seed companies that "[m]ost roles
| required to work a traditional in-office work week" were involved
| with business idea that had a better chance in succeeding,
| because of market conditions and product demand?
|
| That is, maybe the seed companies that did better with in-office
| had tangible products, versus no-office seed companies did not -
| and at this time the market wants tangible products?
|
| edit: i.e., are the all software development firms? Are they all
| widget making companies? All service companies?
|
| (why is it so hard today to express what I mean?)
| colinmorelli wrote:
| I think I can summarize this for you:
|
| The conclusion in the article might be true, but for
| innumerable reasons the study was flawed and its results
| shouldn't be taken seriously.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| "The survey sample size was 37 companies from the Reach Capital
| portfolio. That's large enough to see patterns"...[citation
| needed]. n=37 is skimpy.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Statistically speaking, n>=30 is indeed considered a "large"
| sample, but that is assuming the examples are iid (independent
| and identically distributed) which is definitely not the case
| here.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If the effect size is this large, then n=37 is perfectly
| sufficient to assert that the effect exists; however, the issue
| is about sample selection, as "n companies from the Reach
| Capital portfolio" can't be reasonably considered to be a
| representative sample of all startups, so it can't be assumed
| that the conclusions can be extrapolated beyond the niche of
| startups like these which Reach Capital selects to fund,
| perhaps it depends on location or domain or size or other
| characteristics which affect what Reach Capital funds.
| webjunkie wrote:
| > Working from home may offer more distractions by chores,
| family, network issues. Do those little things add up to
| meaningful productivity differences?
|
| When you say "more", you have to compare both sides. Working in
| an office "distracts" me with noise, questions by others,
| spontaneous meetings, socializing in general, as well as other
| interruptions. I find it always baffling that in such arguments,
| the office is per default fine, and it's always remote which is
| the culprit.
| baidifnaoxi wrote:
| This. Offices are hugely distracting. All sorts of things to
| take your attention away and add the hierarchy element and your
| are obligated to talk to higher ups if the "swing by"
| dexterdog wrote:
| Plus they don't mention the commute time which can be a good
| palette cleanser if if is just the right length, but also can
| be a massive waste of time and stress-inducer.
| [deleted]
| naravara wrote:
| Personally I think almost all of my distractions while working
| at home would go away if I could afford a maid or just had more
| spare time and energy for housework. So really the issue isn't
| "the home" so much as the fact that my home is in disarray
| because I have too much to do.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| You don't need a maid. Start small. The habit will build.
| naravara wrote:
| I'm a parent. I need a maid.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Just get a cleaner 2-3 times a week. As long as you can
| tidy first, they'll be able to clean stuff, and
| specifically get all the annoying stuff done (fllors,
| bathroom etc).
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I've been WFH full-time for about a decade. When I'm at work,
| I'm at work[0]. I don't do chores during work hours. I have
| fewer network issues than the workers who work at the office
| do. Family doesn't distract because if they happen to be home
| there's another adult home too and they know not to disturb
| unless it's important (and they would be contacting me at the
| office for this same issue).
|
| Are these idiots saying the quiet part out loud - that _they
| 're_ completely distracted while working and don't have the
| discipline to fix it?
|
| [0] Except HN during brain breaks.
| foobarian wrote:
| I found that WFH and certain chores go really well together.
| The trick is to use the "get up and walk around" time you're
| supposed to allocate to push forward asynchronous tasks like
| dishwasher or laundry. You're like a human reactor thread
| :-). Then things like Pomodoro timers help as well.
| [deleted]
| alirob69 wrote:
| I read a study that ranked productivity as going: 1) Hybrid; 2)
| Remote; 3) In-office.
| destitude wrote:
| Since these were all education related would be helpful to know
| exactly what that means since that could also directly affect
| this result.
| helmsb wrote:
| Revenue of a startup is no where close to being a reliable
| measure for such a small sample size. Give me any variable and I
| can make a similar graph to prove anything you want. Correlation
| != causation.
| eweise wrote:
| Personally I could care less which is more productive. My life is
| much better working from home. I've optimized for founders wealth
| at my own expense for too much of my career. Stock options are a
| gimmick. 90 days to vest after leaving? "Unlimited" vacation.
| Tiny little desks squished together. No thanks.
| [deleted]
| crsv wrote:
| Did they control for industry? When looking at something like
| revenue you so much of your outcomes at early stages are
| functions of externalities as much as they are from how you
| organize and operate. Did they control for business model? This
| sample just seems super unrepresentative and cherry picked for an
| outcome.
| sithlord wrote:
| small sample, and a single VC portfolio? Could also be selection
| bias in who they want to fund.
| manimino wrote:
| "Average % Revenue growth in pre-seed companies" is a very noisy
| metric.
|
| Example:
|
| Suppose you had one company doing $10 in sales a year, now it's
| doing $100 per year. 900% growth!
|
| When you average 900% with the rest, it will skew the results
| wildly.
| ahelwer wrote:
| Yeah, it is even possible to do this sort of analysis in
| domains with exponentially-distributed outcomes?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yes, but it will be incredibly misleading. You'd want to look
| at the distribution of outcomes to get a sense of what's
| really happening. The startup I work for is remote first but
| has some offices so we wouldn't count as fully remote even
| though we mostly are.
| windex wrote:
| Trying really hard on the narrative to get people back to filling
| expensive real commercial real estate. A lot of firms are
| invested or locked into expensive real estate.
|
| As someone who realized the additional life benefits of working
| alone and away from the stupidity of mindless commutes, I am not
| buying this kool aid.
|
| Saving a ton of money on rent as well.
| cmdialog wrote:
| I wonder how long this conversation is going to continue. In-
| office vs. Remote. Seems like the In-office folks are pining for
| a bygone era, as if we will ever go back to the way things used
| to be. Personally, I will never go back to the office again
| except for special occasions. And I will never work for a company
| who would force their staff to be in-office.
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| As long as there are powerful people in a position to lose
| money on their office real estate investments, we'll keep
| hearing this dreck, and people will keep naively believing it's
| just an organic news cycle.
| sublimefire wrote:
| Who is responsible for the revenue growth in the very early
| stages? Think about that person who's job is to pull cash from
| someone. Well, that person probably has a background in sales,
| and I would argue, is fairly extroverted. IMHO it might be to do
| with the ability to attract talented extroverted people and ask
| them to work remotely.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Aside from the tiny sample size, there's a lot of potential
| correlation/causation confusion here.
|
| A pre-seed startup where the founders meet f2f every day is
| probably much more serious than one where the founders are just
| on Zoom. But that doesn't mean you can't be a serious remote
| team.
| methyl wrote:
| It doesn't surprise me. There is a huge advantage, in the first
| years of a startup, to be able to sit around with all the co-
| founders and early employees and exchange ideas as they come.
| Later on it matters less, as the advantage of synchronous
| communication diminishes once you have more employees than one
| office room can fit, which seems to be reflected in the research
| results.
| waynenilsen wrote:
| There is a very clear statistical standard here "difference of
| means" test at the very least. Very very small dataset. Lots of
| options all of which would most likely conclude no statistical
| difference and low power.
| esskay wrote:
| Honestly this is a pretty weak argument. The number of companies
| taking part in the survey is pitifully inadequate to gain any
| real useful insight.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I'd love to see a study that investigates the benefits or
| drawbacks of remote work + 4 hours of joint rowing and having a
| beer afterwards per week.
|
| My experience is in academia, which certainly doesn't translate
| to business 1-1, but I suspect that most benefits of in-person
| office work come from social aspects of team-building such as
| personal bonding, meeting for a coffee, chatting in the hallway,
| and so on, and not from working in an office itself, especially
| not when the office space consist of large, shared offices.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| As a rower... Joint rowing?
| dasil003 wrote:
| I'm extremely skeptical that this kind of study can tell us
| anything about the relative value of remote vs in-office work.
|
| When it comes to early stage startups, success is going to hinge
| on the founders and early hires ability to focus and execute on
| the right things. What those "right things" are is nebulous
| (hence the challenge of startups!), but I'm quite sure that
| remote vs in-office is not one of those inflection points (unless
| it is! in a specific case!). I'd further postulate that VCs who
| use remote vs in-office as a meaningful investment signal will do
| nothing but water down their ability to find the outliers in
| their non-preferred segment.
|
| At this point it's pretty clear that remote vs in-office has a
| huge list of pros and cons on both sides, many of which could be
| showstoppers for specific individuals or businesses, but none of
| which are universal. It's a tradeoff. As with all tradeoffs you
| should make it with your specific context in mind. A founder who
| is keying off a study like this because they think data > gut
| feelings does not have what it takes to be a successful founder.
| gct wrote:
| Begun the RTO wars have
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Pre seed and seed companies are very small and very young, right?
|
| This seems to be plausible: when you don't yet know what you're
| doing, your machine isn't even built let alone well-oiled, you
| need very low latency, high quality communication.
|
| I'm doubtful that this translates into the future much, beyond,
| perhaps, that companies that start well are more likely to do
| well.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's also unclear whether it's a causal relation or not - it's
| also plausible that the startups who happen to be "more mature"
| from the very beginning are both growing faster, and also able
| to afford an office faster; perhaps that early office doesn't
| influence anything but is simply a consequence or side-effect
| of 'better startups'.
|
| This kind of observation simply can't distinguish between
| correlation and causation.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| It's not even clear there is a relationship.
|
| What are the p-values?
|
| Was there a study protocol BEFORE the data was collected?
|
| How many other hypotheses were tested against the data? Were
| the p-values adjusted accordingly?
| cowmix wrote:
| FWIW, the company I work for went hiring crazy as soon as we
| committed 100% to full remote a few years before COVID.
| asoneth wrote:
| I recall a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work paper (possibly
| this one? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005) that
| identified different levels of collaboration including working
| together in the same room ("radically colocated" in CSCW jargon),
| working near others on the same floor, working on different
| floors or parts of the building, and working remotely or from
| different offices. They claimed that radical colocation was
| significantly more productive compared to the others, and
| collaborating across different floors was no better than being in
| different parts of the world.
|
| Based on my experience since then I am less skeptical about those
| claims than when I first read the paper. I've been on skunkworks
| projects where a half-dozen people worked out of the same
| conference room for a couple months, offices where my teammates'
| desks were clustered together around a meeting space, open-plan
| offices with my team spread across the building, and working
| remote during Covid.
|
| For well-established projects any of them were fine. But for new
| projects I felt like we gained a tremendous advantage by being in
| the same room. Maybe that won't always be true, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if it still holds today.
| gt565k wrote:
| Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient. Startups gain
| from the small tight knit team being able to do impromptu brain
| storming and discussions on the fly. Can't do that when everyone
| is behind a monitor.
|
| I am a firm believer that 100% remote work is actually a net
| negative for collaboration.
|
| Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when
| people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom call.
|
| There's definitely a balance between in-office and WFH. WFH is
| great for corporate jobs cuz half your day is filled with boring
| meetings, but for start-ups, it's the opposite.
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| Yeah I think the balance should be hiring people local to your
| office who are willing to go in (ideally WANT to go in) but
| also give them the option to decide for themselves when they
| want to be in office vs at home. As much as I love working from
| home, if most of my team was together in an office that's a
| reasonable commute from my home, I'd definitely not want to be
| left out/behind by staying home everyday - personally.
| jossclimb wrote:
| That might work if you're working on a very popular stack,
| doing something like web development on react etc, but
| anything more specialised then that (unless you're in the
| valley or somewhere with a big tech community), is going to
| be a challenge to hire in. If you can hire globally the
| talent pool becomes much more fruitful.
| macNchz wrote:
| Having worked on a number of early stage startups and projects,
| in varied remote/in-person settings, and currently fully
| remote, the only thing I genuinely miss from an office is
| having a huge whiteboard to gather around.
|
| In my experience, whatever gains come from increased
| communications bandwidth in-person are kind of a wash with
| losses to focused work being in a distracting environment.
| rybosworld wrote:
| The problem with statement's like yours is that there is no
| evidence to support the things you are saying.
|
| - "I am a firm believer that 100% remote work as actually a net
| negative for collaboration."
|
| You're entitled to your beliefs, but they are just that. I'd
| hate to see companies making decisions based on "feelings" they
| have in regards to one format being more effective than
| another.
|
| - "Workshops, ideation, brainstorming, all of these thrive when
| people are engaged in the moment, not on a scheduled zoom
| call."
|
| I'll counter your anecdote with my own: I've observed no
| difference.
| danielrpa wrote:
| And I'll add my own anecdote: the top performers on the 100+
| software engineer org I work in are either fully remote or
| mostly remote. Losing our fully remote people would be
| catastrophic to the team. Collaboration with them is
| extremely easy, even from different time zones.
|
| On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people
| wearing headphones to be able to focus. Team lunches are
| nice, but we never talk about work. As I've already developed
| personal connections with my coworkers, I could go months
| without seeing them in person (as a matter of fact, that's
| what happens with my coworkers who live across the country).
|
| The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born" can
| be easily done remotely, or in one off events in the office
| if people who believe in office work insist. I found shared
| docs and basic digital whiteboards allowing me to draw
| rectangles, arrows and labels as efficient than physical
| chalk/marker boards. Why? Because the hard work is on the
| ideas and conversations, not the drawing.
|
| Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never
| observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a
| particularly interesting idea. I generally hear sports,
| weather chat and complaints about the food by the
| watercooler. Oh, have you seen that? I'll counter that with
| the dozens of non-watercooler conversations that led to
| interesting ideas.
| macNchz wrote:
| > On the days I go to my office, all I observe is people
| wearing headphones to be able to focus.
|
| It's funny to hear all this hand wringing about the loss of
| spontaneous collaboration in offices, because in 10 years
| of working in tech offices in NYC, this was by far the
| dominant pattern: dozens of people sitting in a big open
| room wearing noise canceling headphones, talking to each
| other on Slack.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I always laugh when I hear the importance of "watercooler
| conversation" in birthing new ideas.
| slotrans wrote:
| > Also anecdotally, in 10+ years of office work, I've never
| observed a single "watercooler conversation" leading to a
| particularly interesting idea.
|
| I have. Happens all the time.
|
| > The famous "whiteboarding sessions where ideas are born"
| can be easily done remotely
|
| Really? How? All the tools are garbage and none have the
| tactility of a marker.
| MAGZine wrote:
| "there's no evidence to support the things you are saying,
| but they're wrong."
|
| Is it really hard to believe that activities that rely on
| communication thrive in environments that support high-
| bandwidth communication? nb: lack of evidence does not
| substantiate the absence of something, it may mean nobody has
| bothered to collect the evidence (or that the evidence is
| difficult to capture).
| rybosworld wrote:
| Why did you append "but they're wrong" to my quote? That's
| not different than lying.
| MAGZine wrote:
| It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to
| me. It was extremely dismissive. A simple 'but could you
| provide evidence?' would be fine. But no--it was more
| akin to "there is no evidence, your argument is invalid."
|
| Maybe you didn't use the word 'wrong', but you did
| dismiss their opinion without consideration, and then
| proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a
| point. So not only was your comment dismissive, but it
| was devoid of content or constructive conversation.
| Actually, the inclusion of the counter example actually
| made it the opposite of constructive imo.
|
| Why participate in the same rhetoric you're throwing out,
| even for example, when what you're saying is already
| quite clear?
|
| This isn't debate club. It's a conversation.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "It's not lying, that's how your comment came across to
| me" - altering a quotation in order to change it's
| meaning _is_ lying. The fact that you interpreted what I
| said in your own way does not change that.
|
| The OP's argument _is_ invalid because there is no
| evidence. It seems silly to discuss that point further.
|
| "proceeded to commit the same fallacy so as to prove a
| point" - what fallacy is that? I never made any broad
| assertions and stated them as fact. I even stated that I
| was providing my own anecdote. The OP did the opposite.
| That is, they stated their anecdotal experience as fact.
| How any of this could be misinterpreted is beyond
| understanding, and is a _you_ problem.
|
| In my opinion, it seems like you are having a reading
| comprehension issue here.
| MAGZine wrote:
| You've fundamentally missed the point that I was making
| in order to take more 'technically correct' potshots.
|
| Perhaps you should try to internalize the whole of my
| comment (i.e. comprehend it) before trying to reply
| again. Sniping individual pieces by being needlessly
| pedantic is--again--not productive to conversation.
|
| Anyhow, I won't be replying again unless if you have
| something constructive to add to the conversation; I'm
| not interested in debate club with you. Perhaps ChatGPT
| is though!
| lordnacho wrote:
| He's just saying "your word is as good as mine".
|
| Neither side is bringing any evidence.
|
| You can throw in all sorts of argumentation, eg remote
| people have more time, you can get better people casting a
| wider net, and so on.
|
| But until someone does a proper study you don't know what
| arguments are backed up by data.
| Delphiza wrote:
| "Net negative"? So you're saying that remote workers are
| uncollaborative? If that were true, all remote companies would
| have people that un-talked to each other, which is hardly the
| case. Maybe less efficient, but certainly not negatively. It is
| the small difference in collaborative efficiency that allows
| different types of people and organisations to function.
| version_five wrote:
| Agreed. This is common sense, and is historically one of the
| main reasons why business travel exists. A caveat might be that
| "pure" software development jobs where the role is mostly to
| just sit and code probably have a smaller benefit. But for most
| early startups, such a job shouldn't really exist because
| there's so much more to do. I'd be interested to see the
| analysis done differently, comparing how people actually spend
| their time vs just where they spend it.
| jossclimb wrote:
| A quick look at projects as huge as the Linux Kernel and its
| distributions (debian, arch, fedora), platforms such as
| kubernetes, apache, entire languages such as rust, python etc,
| databases (postgres, etc) shows this is nonsense.
|
| Most of the internet is run on software built by geographically
| dispersed engineering teams working asynchronously. Software so
| well developed and innovative that companies as large and
| office based as Microsoft eventually had to back down and hop
| on the ride.
| throwawaycopter wrote:
| > Face to face collaboration is a lot more efficient.
|
| That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused when
| I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a
| universal truth. Perhaps depends on your role?
|
| Honestly, for all the companies I worked in the past decade,
| the ones where I had better quality communication were the ones
| where I worked remotely.
|
| Then again, I'm a software developer. Developers tend to be
| good at communicating through pull requests, documentation,
| screen sharing and text-based chat where you can send snippets.
| slotrans wrote:
| > That's really not my experience. I'm always very confused
| when I see this statement being thrown around as if it was a
| universal truth.
|
| Because it's obviously true.
|
| Communicating through pull requests is shockingly
| inefficient. It can take days or even weeks to accomplish
| what face-to-face communication would accomplish in SECONDS.
| throwaway5Am1k wrote:
| I don't pay attention to these studies any more. It's all endless
| shilling, scheming, and hidden agendas to strip workers of their
| recent pandemic wins (WFH). I encourage all workers to push back
| on this. Ignore the studies, there's big money behind it. Call
| out this bullshit, and call out anyone pushing this as a shill
| with an agenda. There is no objectivity here. The capitalists
| have had productivity wins for the last 50 years, time to give
| some time back to the worker.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [dead]
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Title should be: _For Pre-Seed /Seed_ round startups...
|
| There's virtually no difference for Series A and beyond.
|
| This makes sense to me. Pre-seed/seed is all about finding
| product/market fit. Which means high iteration, fast
| collaboration and that definitely happens best if everyone is in
| the same room.
|
| Series A and beyond is largely about scaling, which lends itself
| to more asynchronous tasks.
| blagie wrote:
| I think there is also a question of organizational size. A
| 4-person team in one room can be a hyper-efficient cohesive
| unit, a lot like a family or a group of friends.
|
| A 100-person organization requires very different processes,
| with planned meetings, emails, records, etc. All of that works
| fine (and likely even better) when people are remote.
| JamesMcMinn wrote:
| Articles With Headlines that Exaggerate the Story Get 300 Times
| More Views
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Beyond the insignificant sample sizes, this study also fails to
| respect selection bias.
| importantbrian wrote:
| This is very likely just selection bias. Companies who's founders
| choose to be remote first are going to vary philosophically from
| in office companies in more than just one way. In my experience,
| remote first companies tend to be less focused on growth at all
| costs and less wrapped up in hustle culture. That probably does
| mean sacrificing growing revenue at the fastest possible rate,
| but in order to draw the broader conclusions from this that
| people are trying to ascribe to it you would need to have both a
| much higher powered study, and have a study where companies are
| randomly assigned to in office or remote so that you can control
| for all the possible confounders.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| There is a big bias that older founders are more pro-RTO and have
| more network and experience. Also 37 samples from a single fund
| is not enough.
|
| That's Statistics 101 : decent p-values and control your
| variables before making bold statements like this.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| People who cannot tell correlation and causation apart appear
| 31/2 times stupider when talking in public.
| mmikeff wrote:
| There are plenty of us who'd like this to be untrue. Myself
| included.
|
| Can't deny that it's a reasonable theory, especially for certain
| types of companies at certain stages.
| ntkachov wrote:
| They had 16 companies in this survey that were remote, 2 that
| were "office", And the rest were some form of hybrid. They
| considered anything other than full remote "some office". This
| could easily get skewed if one of these office companies had
| 10x'd their revenue.
|
| And even though they grew faster, the attrition for Office was
| higher.
| sjducb wrote:
| In other words: "Study" was not statistically significant, all
| results should be ignored.
| colpabar wrote:
| All the experts agree!
| teeray wrote:
| Expert tested, landlord approved.
| Zurrrrr wrote:
| Or at the least 7 out of 10 dentists agree
| ekianjo wrote:
| more cherry picked than anything else, seeing the minuscule
| sample size and the obvious categorical bias
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| In other words, as the article says, the study is "suggestive
| and not conclusive" and others should also be doing similar
| research.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| >>> others should also be doing similar research.
|
| >> BTW, Nick Bloom at Stanford and others have done
| extensive research with thousands of people on remote and
| hybrid work here, and here...
|
| ^ from the article
|
| > Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which
| about 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer
| breaks and sick-days) and 4% from more calls per minute
| (attributed to a quieter working environment). Home workers
| also reported improved work satisfaction and experienced
| less turnover, but their promotion rate conditional on
| performance fell.
|
| ^ from the linked paper.
|
| ...but hey, go the statistically irrelevant one to share
| with people if you want a cool link to prove whatever point
| you want to make with it.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Yup a classic case of correlation != Causation
|
| And too small a data set.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I co-founded a remote-first organization over a decade ago, and
| we beat the odds of how most businesses fail in the first few
| years - we're still in business today, and growing.
|
| We were remote from the beginning, but we got together in-person
| more frequently at the start. It was helpful to brainstorm and
| get other ideas generated in-person.
|
| Along with the other comments here, it seems the advice is to get
| together in-person more often at the start of a business. I
| highly agree.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| In addition to the tiny sample size point of a sibling commenter,
| this seems telling:
|
| > almost 90% of the responses from pre-seed/seed startups said
| team culture was influenced
|
| Building a good work culture is hard, it's understandable that
| it'll take time to identify and distill patterns that work well
| in a remote first setting, and then more time for the industry to
| adopt them. That doesn't mean remote work is bad for employers,
| it just means it's different. The companies that adapt will very
| likely have a strategic advantage in the future.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| > In addition to the tiny sample size point of a sibling
| commenter, this seems telling:
|
| I don't understand HN comments. We don't need to read a sibling
| commenter to know that it was a small sample size. The article
| repeatedly mentions that.
|
| All the other comments are also of the same ilk, making
| comments about reasons why the study's result may not hold, as
| if they are new insights and rebuttals to the article, but
| almost all these caveats are mentioned in the article itself.
|
| One sees this in nearly every other thread as well. It's almost
| as if no one even reads what they're commenting about.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > It's almost as if no one even reads what they're commenting
| about.
|
| For the record, I did read it entirely, but I'm tired of low
| effort/quality crap like this article trying to *splain why
| RTO is better and I'm making counter points not made in the
| source article to the article's claims.
|
| Irregardless of my intent:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that".
| quartz wrote:
| YC probably has some really interesting data on this for pre-seed
| companies since moving from a required relocation to fully
| remote.
|
| For new founders the value of being in person around other
| founders in the epicenter of your industry can be pretty huge.
| It's the questions you don't know to ask that are often the most
| valuable-- the overheard conversations, unexpected connections,
| and coffee chats that often make the difference between survival
| and death in the early days.
|
| IIRC early data during the pandemic indicated that while remote
| work didn't impact productivity for established employees it was
| harder for new hires to find personal traction within the
| company.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| pre-seed startups from a single VC and they don't release the raw
| data. A single company doing well could be completely skewing the
| data. the fact they lump all forms of hybrid remote with fully
| in-office is also dumb.
|
| This seems like a VC twisting their data to push a narrative
| against remote work. I will say that hybrid seems the worst of
| both worlds, you get most of the bad parts of remote work and
| also lose most of the benefits like being able to recruit talent
| anywhere, people being happier due to shorter commute, etc.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Is it causation or just correlation? It would make sense if those
| who were growing fast were the ones most likely to be able to
| afford office space.
| Ambolia wrote:
| Could it be that early Startups that are doing well are more
| likely to be able to afford an office? If all the graphs pointed
| to better performance in office I'd be more convinced, but only
| one does.
| tarotuser wrote:
| Grew their office size?
|
| Grew their square footage of their office?
|
| Grew their costs?
|
| Grew their profits?
|
| > Data shows that pre-seed and seed startups with employees
| showing up in a physical office have 31/2 times higher revenue
| growth than those that are solely remote.
|
| Revenue.. So how does that index to costs? Evidently
| profitability isn't changed.. or is even lowered, else it too
| would have been used as an anti-remote wedge.
|
| > James Kim at Reach Capital, an early-stage tech ed investor,
| surveyed their portfolio of 37 companies
|
| 37? That's it?
| aliqot wrote:
| why are news outlets so wishful for RTO?
| ahelwer wrote:
| They're predominantly owned by real estate interests, which is
| also why they bang on the crime & homelessness issue so
| relentlessly.
| esskay wrote:
| Probably some backwards thought that it means people will buy
| their newspapers on their pointless commute that didn't need to
| happen.
| malermeister wrote:
| People bored on commutes read news to pass the time?
| horns4lyfe wrote:
| They're bought and paid for by commercial real estate
| interests.
| ilyt wrote:
| No wonder, they have money to afford one!
| throwaway8j3 wrote:
| And I'm 3.5 time happier working from home.
| hgsgm wrote:
| What are these Seed and Pre-Seed companies that have revenue at
| all? Isn't landing 1 customer a huge revenue boost for many early
| companies?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I would have described "Static Hybrid" and "Synchronized Hybrid"
| as the opposite of the way they appear in the image table.
|
| https://i0.wp.com/steveblank.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/...
| renewiltord wrote:
| The reactions to these are just like the "marijuana causes/cures
| cancer" articles. If it cures, it is evidence of the Man keeping
| it down. If it causes, the methodology is flawed.
|
| The reactions describe the community more than they describe the
| article.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| claudiulodro wrote:
| It wouldn't be an HN comment about a survey without noting that
| correlation != causation. :)
|
| Assuming their statistics are sound, could it simply be that
| companies with good product-market fit can afford offices? Going
| full-remote seems to be a popular cost-cutting measure at some of
| the companies doing layoffs these days (e.g. GitHub), and
| especially pre-revenue it may not make sense to spend thousands
| of dollars a month on office space.
|
| Additionally: For startups that start in a garage, like Apple
| originally, is that in office or remote?
| ironlake wrote:
| So employees of seed startups should have higher equity if they
| work in the office even once, since apparently walking through
| the doors of a leased cube farm leads to much better results for
| the management class.
|
| From my perspective, as a not-seed investor, my expected rate of
| return (salary) remains exactly the same if I work from home or
| at the office.
|
| Seed investors have stacked the terms so early employees get as
| little of the exit as possible, even in the rare instance where
| there is a profitable exit, why do I care about higher revenue
| growth?
| dboreham wrote:
| Pre-seed startups have offices, and revenue?
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