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what if it's a category error to compare companies that have PMF, revenue or profitability with ones that don't. if you have PMF, remote is easy because it's p

what if it's a category error to compare companies that have PMF, revenue or profitability with ones that don't. if you have PMF, remote is easy because it's pretty clear what makes things grow, and there are clear signals about whether something works. if you don't have it (as a company or dept.), then you need a way to secure your next round of either investment, funding, or budget, all while searching for market fit, and without an external feedback loop from a customer. this is a musical chairs game that requires players to attrit as a way to show progress. I would argue RTO policies mean your firm doesn't have market fit. A great counter-intuitive example of this is musk's twitter acqisition where he made people go back to the office, and where actually, twitter didn't have market fit anymore because it was mostly bots, served mainly state interests, and its major advertisers were only paying for brand protection from popular sentiment turning against them, and this was the business model of the safety team. It has users, but it is still looking for real, profitable market fit. All his companies have customers and huge investment, but arguably they are still in early stages looking for PMF. This is why he needs RTO, whereas it literally doesn't matter if FAANG companies do it because they have PMF and their massive growth phase is behind them. FAANGs should do remote because all their current upside comes from solving optimization problems on their existing revenue streams, where companies with steep growth still in front of them should RTO- with a huge caveat. The direction of causality matters, where RTO doesn't create growth, but it's what you have to do when you don't have it yet. Remote is suboptimal if you still have your massive growth in front of you, but hyper-efficient if you are in the optimization phase of a company.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
Agreed with that and I’d add that it’s about the complexity of the problem you’re solving & thus how easy to communicate the focus areas you want the team moving in among the whole solution space. Post PMF, there’s just way less context to transmit to get people working effectively. But there are also certain companies where there’s less you need to talk about. For example companies or orgs doing fast follows. Once “What we do here” is well defined, let people WFH & work remote, they’ll be able to work it out.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago

Agreed with that and I’d add that it’s about the complexity of the problem you’re solving & thus how easy to communicate the focus areas you want the team moving in among the whole solution space. Post PMF, there’s just way less context to transmit to get people working effectively. But there are also certain companies where there’s less you need to talk about. For example companies or orgs doing fast follows. Once “What we do here” is well defined, let people WFH & work remote, they’ll be able to work it out.