Lindy.ai’s CEO Explains His 180-Degree Change on Remote Work

Lindy CEO Flo Crivello has penned a blog post lamenting his decision to do a 180-degree on remote work.

Crivello spoke positively about the benefits of remote work, especially in the context of people’s lifestyles.

Remote is more comfortable from a lifestyle standpoint. You save on commute, have your own office, can work from anywhere, and get more flexibility on your schedule (especially important for folks with families).

Nonetheless, despite the benefits, Crivello says the challenges of remote work are simply too big to overcome. Specifically, the CEO says remote work “raises coordination costs.”

• It’s harder to get a hold of each other, as we’re not online at the same time. “I’ll talk about it when I see him tomorrow” — these delays compound in a huge way.
• So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks.
• Even sync chats aren’t as good. People can’t interrupt each other or have sidebars, and there are bugs with video, audio, screenshare, etc… These frictions compound too.
• This causes us to be less aligned. We’re only a few engineers right now, and yet people feel out of the loop on who’s building what.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this misalignment. We in tech are building pure thought-stuff — the things we build are like icebergs, 99% invisible. The quality of our work is a function of the alignment of our mental models about the stuff below that water line. And remote makes it harder to reach that alignment.

Crivello goes to quote Marc Andreessen’s 2007 blog in which he extols the benefits of people living and working in the center of their industry. Interestingly, however, Crivello fails to quote Andreessen’s more recent comments in which he says remote work could be a societal turning point.

“It’s potentially an earthquake,” Andreessen said in mid-2022. “It’s potentially one of those things that in a hundred years, people could look back and say, ‘That was a real turning point for how society developed.’”