Last edited: April 2024
Explo was founded right when COVID started to hit the United States (and general western world) pretty hard. There are a lot of interesting stories about starting a company during the beginning of a pandemic — any of us founders would be happy to dive deeper into the nitty gritty details of these stories, just ask us!
As a result of COVID and quarantining, our small team mostly worked remotely. We even started hiring globally, because of the new remote world paradigm that started to set across the tech world. Based on the cards we were dealt, our initial team was built out remotely. We have Colocations from time to time so we can collaborate in person, develop strong bonds, and be surprised by how tall people are behind Zoom.
Now that the world has shifted back to pre-COVID times, it made sense for the business to also adapt some of our working standards back. As a company, we’ve always valued collaborating and building in person — it’s one of the many reasons why colocations are so important to us.
Given this, Explo has built out two office hubs. One in SF and the other in NYC. These two locations have historically been the largest tech hubs in the US and where we have the largest centers of gravity today. See section In-Person Office Expectations for context around office expectations.
With COVID, many of us have appreciated the norms of working from home and, admittedly, there are some great personal conveniences that have come with this. We acknowledge that some of these conveniences will go away as we shift towards our hub model, but we believe that the pros will outweigh them. In reality, if it turns out they aren’t outweighing for you, please call that out — let’s work together to fix it.
To be 100% clear, Explo will continue to fully support remote work for our existing employees. The Level Playing Field section outlines standards that will be enforced to ensure everyone will have an equal footing, regardless of where you are based. Remote employees will also have access to “office” benefits as outlined here: Remote Employee “Offices”.
More office hubs will be inevitably built out in the future. Transparently, it’s not yet clear when that will be or even where. Some critical factors that would influence this decision would be recruiting and business development reasons. If you think another hub should exist, please flag to any of the founders.
There is no expectation around the people on your team needing to be based out of the same office. Teams can and will have members across hubs and remotely.