I’ve been a remote worker for 24 years. While I have an office in Boulder, I’m physically in my office for a small amount of time.
For many years, this was a function of travel. My investments have always been geographically distributed across the US and I spent the majority of my time between Monday and Friday on the road.
I learned how to work in hotel rooms, in other people’s offices, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and in houses (mine and friends.) In 1995, at the dawn of the age of the commercial Internet, this involved landlines, answering machines, pagers, and fax machines. Today, my bet is that most 25-year-olds have never used one of these things.
In the past few years, there have been several high profile examples of scaled companies that have a completely distributed workforce. Automattic (WordPress) is my favorite, as it’s been organized that way by design from inception. Zapier is another one that has gotten a lot of press lately around its distributed workforce approach. In a moment of delicious self-reference, Zapier put up a blog post titled 25+ Fully Remote Companies That Let You Work From Anywhere.
Many companies in our portfolio have multiple locations and increasingly distributed workforces. There’s a profound difference between “two locations” and “distributed”, but they are part of a similar phenomenon where the constraint of the physical is lowered.
As I reflect on my own work patterns, they are less and less connected to any particular physical space. This doesn’t mean that physical spaces are eliminated from my life, but that my work isn’t actually dependent on any of them. As I type of my laptop, in a room at my house in Longmont, with Amy sitting next to me, it’s easy to see how my day is going to unroll with a shower, followed by a video conference, and then an in-person meeting with someone coming to spend some time with me.
When I look at my schedule next week, I’m in my office on Monday for my partner meeting, but there’s literally no other reason I need to be in my office next week. I have some in-person meetings, but if the weather is nice, they will be walks outside. Any of them could be video conferences instead of face to face meetings.
In the past five years, as I’ve limited my travel, I’ve gained back a lot of time not spent moving from point A to point B. When I’ve chosen to travel as I did recently on a multi-day trip to Seattle, I’ve been able to be deliberate about where I was and who I spent time with, and none of it required me having a physical space.
I continue to strongly believe that place matters for the development of sustainable startup communities. But, this is different than physical office spaces. I’m going to explore this more over the next year as I continue to embrace the lack of constraints around physical space in my world.
If you have good or bad experiences with distributed work, I’d love to hear them. I know there is an increasing number of technologies in use for helping manage organizations that are distributed – I’m interested in real stories of what works, vs. marketing hype. And, given that humans are intensely social creatures, I’d love to hear stories about how you maintain the appropriate level of physical interaction in a distributed workforce.
The post The Future Of Work Is Distributed appeared first on Feld Thoughts.
I’ve been a remote worker for 24 years. While I have an office in Boulder, I’m physically in my office for a small amount of time. For many years, this was a function of travel. My investments have always been geographically distributed across the US and I spent the majority of my time between Monday and Friday on the road. I learned how to work in hotel rooms, in other people’s offices, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and in houses (mine and friends.) In 1995, at the dawn of the age of the commercial Internet, this involved landlines, answering machines, pagers, and fax machines. Today, my bet is that most 25-year-olds have never used one of these things. In...
The post The Future Of Work Is Distributed appeared first on Feld Thoughts.
by: Brad Feld via https://www.AiUpNow.com/
