How the Future Works

Introduction: The 9-To-5 Just Doesn’t Work for Us Anymore (And Maybe Never Did)

When Slack, the enterprise messaging platform, was founded, co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield lived in Vancouver, and the company's other founders were located in New York and San Francisco. Together they built a product that enables distributed work among distributed teams, but even still the company's primary headquarters was established in San Francisco. Because, of course it was. “If you want to do inter-bank finance, you have to go to London. If you want to start a giant media company, you have to be in New York. If you want to do movie production, you have to be in Los Angeles,” Butterfield told an interviewer way back in 2018.¹ If you want to start a tech company, you have to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, or so the thinking went at the time, at Slack and so many other companies. Indeed, it wasn't long before Butterfield moved to San Francisco himself, so he could be closer to the heart of both the company and the entire tech world.

Despite the fact that the Slack product was designed to allow people to work collaboratively in a virtual forum, at the end of 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the vast majority of the company's engineering staff—79%—were located in the San Francisco Bay area, with only 2% working remotely. The organization wasn't against flexible work per se. There were those high-performers who, once they'd applied, were granted permission to work that way, ...