Do startups grow a job at home?

Response from Anne K. Halsall, CPO and Co-Founder, Winnie, on Quora:

There are several thousand funded startups, and with no public data on the composition of their team and the life of their office, it's hard to tell if there is a trend in one way or from another. However, here are some things that are trends:

• The SF Bay region is the heart of venture capital.
• It's very expensive to live here.
• It is very expensive to have offices here.
• Traffic at SF, East Bay and the Peninsula gets worse, while public transit is overloaded and underfunded.
• The financing climate is tightening and the founders will have to do a lot more with less.
• The area is full of unicorns that have consolidated all venture capital funds and can afford to pay disproportionate wages.

I like to think that a responsible founder, considering all these points, would absolutely consider remote workers and would strengthen support for teams distributed in their processes and culture.

In Winnie we had anticipated this from the beginning because we knew we would find extraordinary contributors outside the Bay Area and we wanted to be able to hire them. We also knew that this same culture would benefit team members with care responsibilities, such as children, sick partners, elderly parents or very needy pets. (I'm joking about this last Sorta.) It seemed like a good thing to do for a number of reasons.

No founder today will do it without being very economical and very creative. So yes, it makes sense to spend the least amount of your financing on rent (either through employee or office salaries) and use it instead to build better products and value for your customers .

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