ChatGPT creator OpenAI is now valued at nearly $30 billion, Fortune reports – adding that CEO Sam Altman “still believes startups are most effective when people work together in an office.” The idea of fully remote working becoming the norm has come and gone, he said this week at a fireside chat in San Francisco organized by fintech firm Stripe. “I think definitely one of the worst mistakes the tech industry has made in a long time was that everybody could go completely remote forever and startups didn’t have to be together in person and, you know, there wouldn’t be a loss of creativity,” he told attendees. “I would say the experiment is over and the technology isn’t good enough for people to be completely remote forever, especially in startups.”
He is not alone in his assessment. Many CEOs have called for remote workers to spend more time in the office, including 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 preferred to be in the office every workday.
“I don’t believe in remote work for startups,” Keith Rabois, 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 company based on it. Younger workers, he noted, “learn by osmosis” in ways that require face-to-face interaction, and supervisors discover hidden talent by observing them…
Altman said, “I’m a pretty strong believer that startups need a lot of personal time, and the more fragile and nuanced and uncertain a set of ideas are, the more time you need in person.”