ChatGPT creator OpenAI is now valued at nearly $30 billion, reports Fortune — adding that CEO Sam Altman “still thinks startups are most effective when employees work together in an office.”
The idea of fully remote work becoming the norm has come and gone, he said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by the fintech company Stripe. “I think definitely one of the tech industry’s worst mistakes in a long time was that everybody could go full remote forever, and startups didn’t need to be together in person and, you know, there was going to be no loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say that the experiment on that is over, and the technology is not yet good enough that people can be full remote forever, particularly on startups.”
He isn’t alone in his assessment. Many CEOs have been demanding that remote employees spend more time in the office, among them Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, and Robert Thomson at News Corp. During the pandemic, remote work or a hybrid work schedule was the only option for many office workers — and many grew to prefer it to being in the office every workday.
“I do not believe in remote work for startups,” Keith Rabois, a general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, told The Logan Bartlett Show last week, adding that neither he nor his firm would invest in a venture based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in a way that requires in-person interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by watching them…
Altman said, “I feel pretty strongly that startups need a lot of in-person time, and the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need together in person.”
