How founders and execs feel right now

I was at the Collision tech conference last week in Toronto moderating two panels on hybrid work and the war for talent. I also had the chance to talk, mingle and brush shoulders IRL for the first time in a long time with hundreds of founders, tech execs and VCs. I asked them how they’re feeling about remote work, the state of the economy and what it means for their businesses, as well as the biggest challenges they’re facing right now from a talent and workplace front. Here’s what they told me:

Hybrid and remote work is here to stay, but there are still cost and collaboration elements to figure out.

• Most tech execs agree there is a limit to how far away employees can be physically from a productivity standpoint. Pitch co-founder and Chief People Officer Vanessa Stock caps it at a five-hour time overlap of working hours; any more can be a collaboration killer.
• GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke agrees that creative, in-person brainstorming is the biggest missing piece right now, but he feels that the benefits of remote work far outweigh the loss. “You don’t get constantly distracted by people walking by your desk and asking you questions,” he told me, and the time gained from cutting a commute and getting ready for work is worth it. The whiteboard piece, in his mind, can be solved by individual teams meeting in person once a quarter or every six months.
• The consensus is shifting on how to pay people in different geographies. It used to be that lower-tier markets received lower pay, but the competition for talent has changed that. To stay competitive while keeping costs down, Loom issues geo-neutral pay within the same country, but for hires outside of the U.S. where the cost of living is considerably lower, they’ll apply “geo-dips” to reduce costs. “We’re entering a market that rewards capital efficiency,” Loom co-founder and CTO Vinay Hiremath told me. Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader said his company has a similar compensation philosophy around stateside mobility and country-specific base comp, equity and bonuses.
• As more companies hire remotely, they’ll have to start making decisions around when it makes sense to invest in real estate. For Smartsheet, the threshold for investing in office space is when a geography has about 150 or more employees, Mader told me.

There’s a growing debate in tech over whether or not companies should take a stand on social issues.

• This started when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote a controversial blog post on the subject — that he reiterated recently on “The Good Time Show” — saying that employees who are passionate about external issues are typically devoting more time to them, thereby marking themselves as underperformers who are “easy to eliminate.” Kraken CEO Jesse Powell made a similar statement recently. "Most people don't care and just want to work," Powell tweeted as part of a long thread, "but they can't be productive while triggered people keep dragging them in to debates and therapy sessions."
• I asked Dohmke about how he and others at GitHub approach the subject, and he said while he won’t be commenting on “every socio-political issue around the world,” GitHub does make statements on topics “if they directly affect us,” which include issues like climate change and diversity and inclusion, as well as racism.
• Ceridian co-CEO Leagh Turner told me she believes that CEOs who don’t connect to the things that matter to their employees, like DEI and social issues, are “shirking responsibility.” Benevity CEO Kelly Schmitt, who I interviewed on the same panel, concurred. “I don’t think it’s acceptable to stand for nothing anymore. People will vote with their feet,” she said.

We’re headed toward a recession, but they’re not worried (at least not for their own businesses).

• World Fund founding partner Danijel Višević told me this moment in time is essentially separating the wheat from the chaff from a startup investment and growth perspective: “When you see that there's a crisis, that’s when you recognize whether or not a solution is really solving a problem.”
• Dohmke told me that, other than seasonal slowdowns, GitHub is not seeing a slowdown in its own hiring (even though parent company Microsoft has slowed hiring in certain divisions). “Nothing to announce on layoffs or anything like that, and it’s not on my mind, but you know, ‘Never say never.’ A recession is looming,” he told me.
• Schmitt told me she regretted pausing hiring at the start of the pandemic “to see what would happen in the world,” since it subsequently took Benevity two years to catch up on hiring. She said the corporate giving platform is in a similar situation today, and it has to be “careful not to whipsaw and do something that would put [it] behind in certain core parts of the business.”