If two and a half years of disrupted work patterns were not enough to signal where the future of working is heading, one of venture capital’s stalwarts just announced that it does not plan to hold a physical headquarters location going forward. Andreessen Horowitz is instead opting for headquarters in the cloud and an assembly of offices where the firm will be able to gather anywhere in the world very quickly.
The news came in a blog post composed by Ben Horowitz who described the firm as intentionally Silicon Valley-based since its inception in 2009. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the firm, like so many others, was forced to figure out how to operate remotely. “It turns out that running a technology company remotely works pretty darned well,” Horowitz stated in his blog post. “It’s not perfect, but mitigating the cultural issues associated with remote work turns out to be easier than mitigating the employee satisfaction issues associated with forcing everyone into the office 5 days/week. As a result, nearly every technology company has moved to a remote or hybrid approach to work and this change is profoundly weakening the Silicon Valley network effect.”
Horowitz concludes that this is in fact a very good thing for the country and the world mainly because it allows world-class talent to assemble from anywhere around the globe. Also, it does not cut off opportunities for people to contribute who are not physically located where their colleagues are.
“Remote work is opening up many new locations for entrepreneurs and technology workers. We embrace that by changing our own operating model,” Horowitz added, stating that the firm will now be virtual, but it can materialize physically on demand very quickly. To that end, the firm is adding three locations to its offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco. Andreessen Horowitz will now also have a presence in Miami Beach, New York and Santa Monica, and it will continue to create physical offices around the world where it can support its teams and partners.
