Is there a remote work unicorn out there? A lot of people need to know, and fast.
In promoting our updated version of The Long-Distance Leader, I have done over 50 podcast interviews and I’m getting a lot of questions about what the future holds. Is remote work dead? Is hybrid work just another word for in-office with a little flexibility? With Amazon and other companies demanding full in-office attendance, was it all just a phase / fad / fever / dream?
Remote work zealots are in full panic right now, and I don’t think they need to be. While it looks like people favoring a more flexible work life are swimming against the tide, there are two things I know:
- The Amazon and other companies, and more people than ever are seeking the flexibility and advantages of remote and (truly) hybrid work. It will never disappear completely.
- It’s easier to follow the example of large companies than to blaze your own trail. This is important because businesses and the people who run them are inherently (small c) conservative. There aren’t enough widely recognized companies that work remote-first or truly hybrid for people to emulate.
What people need is a remote work unicorn they can emulate.
In business terms, a unicorn is defined as “a startup company valued at over US $1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market.” Why does that matter?
People want role models. If I’m starting a business, I want to know the best practices, systems and philosophies of successful predecessors so I am not groping blindly into the future. There are a lot of companies who have become successful with an office-first model. Until a unicorn is discovered that has a remote-first approach, many entrepreneurs will be tentative about how they structure their workforce.
We may be getting close to discovering a remote unicorn or two. There are two very hot companies that are remote-first that may serve as examples for future startups.
One of the most admired, and fastest growing, companies today is NVIDIA. They are based in Silicon Valley and have some snazzy offices there. The majority of their staff, though, works flexibly or fully remote. CEO Jensen Huang is fully supportive of those efforts, as long as work gets done. There are no strict mandates about attendance or days spent in an onsite location.
The second potential unicorn, and its early days, is Bluesky. This upstart competitor to Twitter/X started as an invitation-only social media experiment started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Since the US Election, it has grown by a million users a week.
What makes it worth watching is that it currently only has twenty employees, and they all work remotely. Rapid growth may challenge this (at some point you need to be a grownup company) yet it’s rare to have a company scale with no past systems to follow. At the moment, all staff are focused on the technical aspects of the platform. Let’s see what happens over the next few months.
To determine if a remote-first approach is possible for growing companies, customers must be satisfied, goals met, and outputs achieved. The more companies who can grow successfully in this way, the more companies will emulate them.
Remote work isn’t dead. It’s looking for a way forward. And a unicorn may lead them.
