Remote companies, five years after everyone tried it

I keep having the same conversation with founders who are calling their teams back to the office. It usually happens over a coffee down here in Marbella, typically with someone who has just announced a strict Tuesday-to-Thursday attendance policy. They tell me company culture is dying. They say productivity is slipping. They complain that people are treating their jobs like a side hustle. Their conclusion is always the same: remote work failed, and we need to get everyone back under one roof. I usually nod, drink my coffee, and suggest that remote work didn't fail. Their management did.

Mandating three days in the office is the coward's way out. It gives the illusion of control without the commitment of building a proper culture, either remote or local. When Fredrik Bage and I were building Mediapilot back in Stockholm, we had a traditional office. We grew the company over roughly seven years and created more than a hundred jobs. I saw everyone, every day. It was incredibly easy to look across the room and assume things were going well simply because there was noise and furious typing. When you are paying for desks, physical attendance feels like a return on investment. Remote work strips away that comfort blanket. You can no longer manage by walking around. You actually have to read what people produce, measure their output, and hold them to it.

The rent money goes to aeroplanes

One of the biggest lies we told ourselves a few years ago was that remote meant never seeing each other. I moved my family from Sweden to Spain in 2018. We meant to stay two years, and we are still here. Today, I work on Substrat and Anchor from a desk by the Mediterranean, collaborating with people spread across various time zones. Building AI tools for alienated fathers, or laying down infrastructure for developers, means leaning heavily on asynchronous work. But you cannot build deep trust purely over a screen. The companies that are actually succeeding at distributed work do something very specific. They take the money they would have spent on a prime office lease and they blow it on flying everyone to the same physical location a few times a year.

You do not bring people together to sit in silence and write code. You bring them together to eat, argue, and remember that the avatar on their screen belongs to a real person.

When you do this, it has to be expensive and deliberate. You do not bring people together to sit in silence and write code. You bring them together to eat, argue, and remember that the avatar on their screen belongs to a real person. At Happeo, I spent a lot of time on the commercial side of employee experience software. I saw firsthand how much internal tools matter for keeping an organisation aligned, but software cannot replace sharing a bad meal in a foreign city to figure out how someone actually thinks. Those in-person weeks are exhausting, and they cost a small fortune, but they are completely non-negotiable if you want a distributed team to survive the rest of the year. It is not an extra expense; it is the core operating budget of a remote business.

Firing for opacity

The second piece of making this work is much harder to swallow. Let me explain. In a physical office, you can tolerate a brilliant but secretive employee. If a developer or a salesperson is quietly working on something and refusing to share updates, you can ambush them in the kitchen to find out what they are doing. It took me a long time to realise that in a remote company, opacity is fatal. If someone is doing great work but refuses to write it down, document their decisions, or share their progress until it is perfectly finished, they are actively damaging the company.

I got this wrong for years. I started my career in sales at a PR agency, working on commission only, entirely against the advice of everyone around me. Fredrik was working there too, and he was the one who told me I would be good at sales. In those days, being a lone wolf who just brought in the numbers was tolerated, even celebrated. I carried that mentality into management, thinking that raw talent was enough to excuse bad communication. It isn't. In a distributed team, a culture of secrecy creates massive bottlenecks. If someone hides their work, you have to let them go, even if their individual output is high. A remote culture is a written culture. If a decision is not in writing, it never happened.

I'll be honest with you, I haven't got this entirely figured out. Managing distributed teams is genuinely difficult. It requires a level of strict, boring discipline that I completely lack on a Tuesday morning when I would rather just go play tennis, badly, than write a detailed project update. I keep a written life plan that I update every year, rating my health, finances, family time, and work out of ten. I have done this since around 2010, and my scores for work discipline still fluctuate wildly. I know exactly how hard it is to stay aligned when you are sitting alone in a room. But blaming the concept of remote work for a lack of clear management is lazy. We are years past the grand experiment now. The companies struggling right now are not the ones who went remote. They are the ones who refused to change how they manage.