“What is RTO?”
That’s what Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash told Business Insider when asked if he’s ever had to send a return-to-work (RTO) memo to bring an employee back to the office at his cloud computing startup.
“People generally like coming in,” Prakash said. “We never forced it.”
Prakash’s response illustrates the clear cultural differences between AI startups founded after the coronavirus lockdown and established companies where people voluntarily come to the office (sometimes on weekends).
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, told Business Insider that the age range of many startup employees and their personal stake in the company creates a work pattern that is “almost entirely in-person” and “100% focused on work.”
“For a single 23-year-old with $20 million worth of assets, it makes sense to work 100 hours a week in an office,” Bloom said. “They come home from work instead of working from home.”
Close-knit culture of AI startups
Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, an enterprise AI for productivity, said he was “reluctant” to bring his team members back to the office because finding one was a pain, but everyone wanted to meet in person and return to the original working mode the company was in when it first launched just before the 2019 pandemic.
“We simply didn’t know how to work from home because we were all in this little room,” Jain said of the early days of the pandemic lockdown. “We were always sitting next to each other and brainstorming what to build, but we found it very difficult.”
Over time, Jain said, they learned to enjoy working remotely and being able to spend time with their families, but the team really wanted to be together again.
“That’s the difference. We have a start-up mentality, we’re only 10 or 15 members, but we want to work with each other,” Jain said. “They loved each other and bonded and often played games together and have very fond memories of being a very close-knit group pre-pandemic.”
Jain said that as Glean has grown rapidly in recent years, it has moved into a larger office space and has designated Thursdays as a work-from-home day.
Spiros Xantos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, an enterprise technology startup that builds multi-agent AI systems, said the company has a “very strong culture” of working in-person and didn’t have to ask anyone to be in the office.
“We have a pretty big office now and we have breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Zantos said. “Most people eat lunch with their colleagues at the office, and many people stay in the office for dinner.”
Xanthos said that since he founded the company in early 2024, “cohesion, culture and camaraderie” among employees has been crucial to the company, and that he frequently brings his New York-based colleagues to the Bay Area for off-site training camps so the team can get to know each other better.
“At this point, people will actively avoid working remotely,” Zantos added. “Especially for younger people who don’t have many years of experience but may have worked remotely in the past, many of them tell me it’s night and day, and that’s the fact that they now have a lot of friends at work that they can trust.”
The innovative nature of AI requires face-to-face interaction
Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist and professor at the University of Toronto, said the AI wave has unique characteristics compared to other startup booms that could create greater in-person demand.
“Innovators have to be close to the end users because they are part of the innovation system,” Florida said about why it is easy to work directly in the AI industry.
“If you’re an AI company, the technology itself is interesting and you can invent it, but what you really learn is by talking to end users, talking to customers and clients,” Florida added.
Zantos said the demand for in-person attendance ultimately comes down to the innovative nature of the industry.
“As a company, we are solving very difficult problems, and you will be on the front lines of solving these problems,” Zantos said. “This means you have to experiment a lot and try a lot of things that might fail.”
“This requires a very high level of trust in an environment of psychological safety, where people feel like they have the ability to innovate from the bottom up, where they don’t need to be told what to do and where they have the speed and bandwidth to communicate,” Zantos added.
So the next time you talk to an AI startup founder, don’t ask them what their RTO looks like. They’re probably too busy trying to squeeze everyone into the office.