The Policy That Gets People Mad
Founders Fund has a hard rule. No remote companies. Period. Keith Rabois doesn't care if this makes you angry. He's built enough companies to know what works.
He even tested the idea on Airbnb's Joe Gebbia. The week Airbnb announced remote-for-all, Rabois asked: would you start Airbnb this way? Gebbia said no.
We have a view at Founders Fund that we will not fund a company that doesn't work in person.
The Osmosis Problem
If you build on undiscovered talent, those people are young. They're learning their craft. And how do you learn a craft? By watching. By absorbing. By osmosis.
Osmosis doesn't happen through Slack messages. It happens in hallways. At whiteboards. Over lunch. Kill that and you kill the learning.
The way you learn a craft is by osmosis. Osmosis and unstructured learning does not work remotely.
The Promotion Problem
Rabois tells a PayPal story. Peter Thiel made a 29-year-old finance guy CFO. Everyone thought he was crazy. But Thiel saw something in how this person moved through the office. How people responded to him.
Those soft signals don't exist on Zoom. You can't watch someone earn trust through a screen.
There's no way he would have got promoted in a remote company.
The Career Trajectory Test
Rabois shares a current example. His number-two person at OpenStore was hired as the most junior employee. Five promotions later, he's 29 and on track to be a CEO.
None of that happens in a remote company. Not the promotions. Not the trust-building. Not the career trajectory.
His whole career trajectory is completely different because he joined an in-person company.