The startup experience - To office or not to office?

There seem to be endless articles out there on the shrinking office footprint of large companies. But as a new company, there is an even more fundamental question – “should we have an office at all?” Whenever I get together with other “startup” leaders, this topic always comes up. To the extent it might be helpful to others out there, I figured I’d share our Truveta experience and the decisions we’ve made.

We just renewed our lease on Truveta HQ through March 2026. We have budgeted ~$1.9M/year for the “office” (inclusive of snacks, toilet paper, and security).

When Satya became Microsoft CEO, I recall his focus on culture and his often citing of Peter Drucker’s “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” wisdom. As we build Truveta, we’ve tried to always keep this wisdom front and center. And this question of “Should we have an office? If so, what kind of office?” is right at the center of it. Looking back at one of our first team meetings in 2020, I used this slide:

Since then, our customers and partnerships have steadily grown, and our team has grown with it:

We’ve been recruiting the most talented team we can find, regardless of where they live. We have an incredible leader working out of his mother-in-law’s attic in Maine, another great leader splitting her time between LA and Poland, others amazing leaders in Austin, Portland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Jose, and New York – but our biggest group is in the Seattle area due to the fact we were founded here, and the first people to join all knew the founders, who then recruited the people they knew, etc. This does mean that almost every meeting needs to be hybrid – whether we are in an office or not (note to potential founders out there pursuing similar strategies – the endless paperwork per state that you have employees within is silly).

We were born during the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, when everyone was afraid to breathe near anyone else. How strange to go back now and look at our virtual Halloween party of 2020:

So, when the vaccines became available, we leapt at the opportunity to see each other. We considered renting spaces for all of these rendezvous, but we felt like we needed a home we could call our own. This was the big decision and ultimately what guided our renewal this week.

First, we tried a shared space, but that was hard to have a team identity within. It felt like we were living in our parents’ basement after college. We needed our starter home… but how big should that be? Pretty quickly we realized there isn’t that much flexibility in commercial real estate. Everything we considered was 30k square ft, give or take. This statistic meant nothing to us at first, but our brokers educated us that back in the ancient era of 2019, that used to fit 200 people. We found a very nice space that wasn’t sitting in the middle of Amazon or Microsoft’s Seattle real estate sprawl, that was willing to give a startup a 2-year lease. So, we went for it.

Since then, I would summarize our learnings:

• Team surveys show that, on average, we don’t feel less productive working at home or more productive in the office. Here locally, we have Microsoft and Amazon both announcing 3 days/week office policies “unless manager approval” – and we hear of endless informal manager approvals being the norm. I find myself using the office 2-3 days/week, but rarely for a full day. Taking inspiration from Netflix’s “Avoid rules” cultural principal, we decided not to create a policy which we expect everyone (including the CEO) to seek exception from - so we are not requiring people to come into the office regularly.
• 42% of our local teammates (26% of the company) use the space on Tuesdays when we have a sponsored food truck, and 23% on Fridays (15% of the company). Our office utilization ranges from 20-24% each day and is trending up. We just recently decided to sponsor a food truck on Thursdays as well – I’m looking forward to seeing what impact random street food has on our attendance.

• It was great to host our largest customer for a few days of meetings at Truveta. We plan to host more customers over the next few months. We believe that having this Truveta home to host customers, ironically with key teammates also flying to meet the customer here, helps make Truveta real to the customer – and will support our business growth with them.
• We had assumed our younger teammates would love to have an office to congregate – as the office was such a big part of how we met people years ago… but in fact, our youngest teammates are the least frequent users of the office. Lucky for them, they will never learn to appreciate the joys of a bad commute.
• We rely upon Microsoft Teams for all of our collaboration – so with great hope we invested ~$10K in our largest conference room to become a “Teams Room” to facilitate hybrid meetings. Unfortunately, this stuff is still too early. That being said, the shared whiteboard tech does get used consistently (with associated consistent hope and disappointment).

So net, it’s hard to frame what role the office is playing in our culture. It is being used by some of the team some of the time. From the beginning, this has been very confusing. I do worry that our pragmatic approach loses the opportunity to create regular, spontaneous interactions which seemed to have inspired “the transformer” and Steve Jobs’ design of the Pixar building . I’m just not sure how to facilitate those interactions in this new distributed hybrid world. It seems obvious to us that the ship has sailed on having your whole team in the office consistently every day. But it is proving useful in business development – so we are sticking with it.

Throughout this whole office journey, we continue to search for ways to build human connections. We kick off our team meeting with “3 truths and a lie” about our teammates and have hosted various hybrid events such as cooking classes for Truvetans in any location to cook together. But the one thing that seems to work well, is when we bring our full team together in person 2x/year at the office. This is a required meeting for every Truvetan. We budget ~$700K/year for these Planning Weeks. It’s hard not to smile when I look at all of these amazing people gathering in person after so much time staring at each other on a screen. I love this week. It’s so fun and special to be in-person with the team. We count on these weeks to build the relationship capital to fuel us through the year.

And now the team asks… what do we do when we don’t all fit in the 200-person office during Planning Week? We’re working on that plan now…

-Terry

P.S. Thanks to our brokers David Gurry and Billy Poll for helping us navigate the wild and woolly world of Puget Sound real estate!