CEO of AI startup ends WFH: ‘more comfortable, but…’

Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Lindy, is sounding the death knell for remote work in his AI startup. Earlier an advocate of remote work, Crivello is now moving his team to San Francisco, USA.

In a memo sent to Lindy employees last month, Crivello acknowledged the many benefits of working from home but emphasised on the varied problems it has created as he asked employees to “colocate” or work from the same location.

“Pains me to say this, but even I have changed my stance on remote,” the CEO of Lindy wrote on Twitter as he shared the memo with the world at large. “We tried hard, developed the best tooling allowed by the tech — and still, remote falls very short of colocation, especially for startups that are still pre-product market fit.”

In the memo, he said that working remotely, with a team that is split across timezones, has made it harder for members to get a hold of each other as not everyone is online at the same time.

“So most interactions are async, leading to lower bandwidth, more context switching, and more things falling through the cracks,” he noted, acknowledging that working remotely is more comfortable from a lifestyle standpoint as employees save on commute and have more flexibility.
Crivello further said that even when synced, chats aren’t as good as people can’t interrupt each other or have sidebars. Moreover, bugs with audio, video and screenshares are rampant and tend to add up, making coordination more difficult.