Creative hubs vs remote work
FOUR months ago, managers and employees at many companies went home and did something incredible: They got their work done, seemingly without missing a beat. Executives were amazed at how well their workers performed remotely, even while juggling childcare and the distractions of home. Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., among others, quickly said they would embrace remote work long term. Some companies even vowed to give up their physical office spaces entirely.
Now, as the work-from-home (WFH) experiment stretches on, some cracks are starting. Companies begin to think that remote work is not so great after all. Projects take longer, collaboration is harder, and training and integrating new employees is more complicated.
And I would like to share with you the negative side of remote work. There may be no richer creative hub story than this:
It was 2004, Mark Zuckerberg’s summer of craziness. At 20, he and five buddies had rented a Palo Alto home, where they partied and wrote code for Facebook. One day, as Zuckerberg and the guys were strolling the neighborhood, he saw a familiar face. It was Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster, the music sharing service. By coincidence, Parker, at loose ends and contemplating his next move, was staying at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, just up the street from the Facebook pad. The very next week, the big-thinking, smooth-talking Parker moved in with Zuckerberg and began introducing him around Silicon Valley. By the end of the summer, he had paved the way to Facebook’s first big investment—$500,000 from Peter Thiel.
Thiel met 23-year-old Ukrainian immigrant named Max Levchin a few years earlier. After a bit of chatting, Thiel asked why the young man was in town. “Probably gonna start a company,” Levchin said. “Oh, great,” Thiel replied, and suggested the two meet up the next day and talk more over smoothies. And the consequence?
In 2002, ebay paid $1.5 billion for the resulting startup—paypal, making the two men and several partners rich. Over the subsequent years, Paypal vets including Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman went on to found Youtube, Tesla, Spacex, Linkedin, Yelp, and Palantir.
Perhaps no phenomenon is more studied, marveled, and desired in the world of high tech and science than the mystery of serendipity. My Oxford Dictionary explains serendipity as, “The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.”
But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge—the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley’s leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work.
If engineers, designers, and venture capitalists are geographically disbanding, working via the cloud instead of walking Google’s halls, surfacing at Buck’s Restaurant, or the cafes on University Avenue, how will future serendipity happen?
If the founders, engineers, and designers in such startups are laboring entirely or largely from their own homes, and miss their moment, doesn’t Big Tech potentially lose its next big growth engine?
Entrepreneurs say that, at least currently, the answer is yes—the WFH mandate has probably put classic serendipity out of reach for Silicon Valley’s budding companies, and for companies in other tech centers/start-up villages.
No one knows exactly what such a new system might look like. If a demise of serendipity leads to Silicon Valley’s decline, the world is unlikely to get an equal substitute. We may simply lose our engine of technological advancement.
If the past is instructive, the pandemic will pass and many daily routines will return. Hordes of people will return to the office, but large numbers won’t. Some will pick up and move. At that point, today’s effort to digitalize serendipity will pick up more urgency. Videoconferencing and other software will get better, and some companies will claim their product fosters the unscripted moment in truly innovative ways, blind to demographics.
The message I am trying to get across with these examples is that in the Philippines we need to culture serendipity in our creative enclaves in Cebu, Makati, Pasig, Quezon City, Iloilo, Baguio, Cagayan de Oro, and a few more. We will have to find a smart balance between people working from home and people to “bump” into each other to discuss “crazy” ideas and developments. And we need to save the start-up ecosystem.
However, while we protect and preserve the opportunities for social interaction, being the key to group creativity and innovation, we wish to see government to find the right balance between public health and economic and social health.
Let me have your views on this; e-mail me at schumacher@ eitsc.com