Some people kept getting paid in 2020 because their jobs could come home with them. The founder of a company that profited from that exact shift now likens working from home to “white collar fraud (1).”
Flexport founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ryan Petersen said that on the Twenty Minute VC podcast in June — which is strange when you look at his numbers. Flexport’s revenue went from $670 million before the pandemic to $3.3 billion in 2021 (2), the year the country shopped from home and sent freight surging through logistics firms like his, although it’s gone down since then.
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Regarding remote work, he says, “I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. The idea that I could do any work at my house is like a total fantasy,” he said (1). “Like, come on. You’re kidding.” And if it doesn’t work in his house, he figures it works nowhere: “I have a bigger house than most employees do … there’s no work getting done at that house when the children are around (1).”
But the part that really affects paychecks isn’t about kids. It’s about who he thinks remote work should be for instead.
Who Petersen thinks remote work is for
Petersen said going remote during the pandemic was a mistake. “I made the mistake during COVID of going remote and letting it stay remote for way too long and I think our culture suffered as a result,” he said. Flexport now brings people in five days a week (3), and he suggested workers who wouldn’t come back were let go (1).
Even with all the return-to-office headlines, not everyone is back. In May, about 26% of U.S. paid workdays were still done from home (4), down from a 2020 peak near 62% but still far above the roughly 7% from 2019, according to a survey from WFH Research, the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (5).
Petersen also talked about pay. Petersen said remote work mostly makes sense for highly skilled workers in developing countries who can use it to earn more than their local market pays. For everyone else, he said, (1)”the idea that work from home is going to benefit highly paid employees is sort of a total fantasy (1).”
Not everyone took it well. “As someone who has raised an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old, the precious time you get to see them while you’re working from home will be worth more than anything you could do with your company or the dollars that you can make,” Ryan Carson, CEO of legal-software company Untangle, wrote on X (6).
