everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company
That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).
I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.
it's possible that remote meetings are effective for those investors because they have a narrow band of requirements from such meetings (gathering information and analysis etc), but effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example).
effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example)
You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.
FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.
> had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present
i'm not saying that just because one is physically present that this would occur - i'm saying that for this to occur, physical proximity is a necessary (but insufficient) condition.
Making this process of osmosis more formal just defeats the purpose - after all, these huddles and idea meetings and "demo days" already happen in a remote setting (at least, if your company's management decides its worth the time to replicate it remotely).
That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).
I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.