Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) and Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) are the co-founders and general partners at the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz
Also joined on Clubhouse, Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi), former President of Microsoft Windows
Marc, Ben, and Steven discuss listener-selected questions on their live Clubhouse show with an emphasis on the future of remote work and post-covid workplace dynamics
Andressen Horowitz surveyed their portfolio companies on back to work strategies
25% fully remote
67% hybrid:
38% – require 1 to 2 days a week in office
28% – occasional travel to off-site office
89% of companies plan to continue to hire remote workers
86% will prefer a hybrid or remote model for board meetings
63% believe they can be as creative/innovative in a hybrid/remote world
10% believe they can be even more creative in the hybrid/remote world
Check out the rest of the survey results
Some companies are completely pivoting from 5-day in-office weeks to fully remote, never falling back into their old ways
Remote communication tools are much more effective than once thought
Forced creative companies to be even more creative
What is the right model of hybrid remote and in-office work?
How do you know your employees don’t have multiple jobs?
How does remote work promote effective career progression and the ability to be more visibly noticed?
What is the substitute for “management by walking around”?
They discuss the value of management being in-office giving them more awareness of overall office sentiment which can lead to better leadership and the ability to identify problems quicker
Remote work is just more efficient than in-person work but comes with drawbacks
Creativity and tough conflict resolution are less successful in remote work
Off-sites could be more effective now, this might become a more intentional opportunity to connect with your work and colleagues in a different way
Feedback to off-sites is always that the free time to connect socially is the most valuable
“Water cooler talk” doesn’t actually make connections. It is too time limited in a restricted environment and can often give a false sense of relationships
How do you handle compensation when considering the local cost of living versus the opportunity of remote work?
Solution 1: Adjusted pay based on working remotely or working locally
Solution 2: Same work, same pay
Depends on the company’s angle of incentive, want the best talent or want the local workforce benefits
The market supply and demand of the workforce will eventually stabilize this issue
“You can’t outrun the market on this issue” – Ben Horowitz
Could result in a massive reshuffling of workforce geography
Silicon Valley most likely won’t be as concentrated of a tech hub as it has been historically
Hours in-office is a very unreliable stand-alone metric for ensuring productivity
This is the ultimate shortcut for management quantifying productivity
In the early days of IBM, they put a metric on producing 10 lines of code per day to measure the scale of potential productivity. But this ignores context
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory – A book and theory by David Graeber that the capitalistic system is creating fake jobs purely for the purpose of keeping people occupied to stall the effort towards any sort of social/political revolution
“at work network” – research done by Buzzfeed that the general workforce spends an enormous amount of time on the internet consuming non-work related information, potentially 40%-50% of their time
Most companies are probably scared to look at this metric
New companies in the remote revolution will end up eliminating some jobs that fall into this statistic
Surveys predict high levels of turnover in the upcoming “back to normal” months
People re-evaluated their lives and purpose during the pandemic
Burnout
Remote work diluted the in-office beneficial symbiotic relationship with colleagues and their work
Might change jobs to try and find this again
When everyone in a crypto company is an engineer, rather than in typical business functions (Marketing, Sales, etc.), they tend to be more decentralized in nature
Is this the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley as we know it?
The podcast hopes so
Better if “silicon valley” exists in the cloud rather than a geographical center
Opportunity in tech has not been geographically distributed appropriately to maximize innovation
Resembles a monopoly – emphasizes power rather than innovation