Keith Rabois says Founders Fund won't back remote startups because in-person work is how junior talent learns and gets promoted. He points to Roloff Botha, hired as a junior finance person at PayPal and made CFO at 29, as proof that osmosis and proximity matter.
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Roloff Botha
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In person. You've been very vocal about remote work versus hybrid work. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So we have a view at Founders Fund that we will not fund a company that doesn't work in person. And this has been my experience, having built companies, let's say 13 years before I became a VC and try to do it again, that there's no way to build a company successfully without in person. And I'll walk you through why. So actually interesting enough, last year at the KB Summit, by accident, I was sitting next to Joe Gebbia from Airbnb at lunch. It was the same week that Airbnb announced this remote everything policy. I said to Joe, if you were starting Airbnb again, would you ever do this? He said, no. I said, qed, I'm done. No argument, but the reasons why or if you're going to build a company on undiscovered talent to stitch this all together. If you're going to build a company based upon undiscovered talent, these people are early in their career, they're learning their craft. The way you learn a craft is by osmosis. It's true in venture osmosis. And unstructured learning does not work remotely. So you either then have a choice. You either have to hire very experienced people and have a linear roadmap that you can predict so you know what kind of talent you need with experience. But that's pretty rare in most companies that really succeed. That's not true of. So we just realized that if there's one exception every 10 years, we should just have a policy that we're just not going to fund people that aren't going to build a company. And I will distinguish between distributed offices where everybody works in person but they're in different offices, versus remote. And we just won't fund it because we've never seen it really work. And having run a lot of companies, I actually wouldn't even know who to promote. So if you're running a company with a lot of undiscovered talent, these people are ambitious and you want to take advantage of the people that are very ambitious. So for example, at PayPal we had this 29 year old finance guy who's a little annoying sometimes but very talented. And Peter made him CFO at 29 years old and said he's going to be CFO. We're a public company, I don't care. All these other CFOs are stupid. His name Roloff Botha. There's no way he would have got promoted at a remote company because the signals that led to Peter concluding that this would actually work are these little soft interactive signals that you watch with your eyes. So my probably number two person at Open Store was hired as the most junior person in the company. There was two people that were hired as the most junior people. He's been promoted five, going on six times. There is no chance he's now 29. He will be a fabulous CEO, whether my company or some other CEO, definitely in his career. There's no chance he could have gone on this promotion ladder without me being able to watch how he interacts with other people and see how people trust him and go to him to solve problems. And so his whole career trajectory is completely different because he joined an in person company. I agree.
