Don't Call It an Office

Prefect has been a remote company since day 15.

For the first 14 days, our small team worked side by side in DC, building what I envisioned as the city’s next great tech company. Then, when our CTO Chris moved to San Francisco, we established what would become one of our core principles: a company is remote if it has one remote employee.

This wasn’t merely a semantic distinction. The principle stemmed from our conviction that no team member should face disadvantages based on their location. Even as we built a predominantly DC-based team in the following years, we maintained our identity as a remote-first company. In the pre-COVID era, this stance raised eyebrows – the idea that having just one remote employee would define our entire operating model.

What we discovered, and what many companies would later learn during the pandemic, was that enabling remote work wasn’t the real challenge. The challenge was creating a culture compelling enough that people would choose to come together even when they didn’t have to. Being remote-first doesn’t mean rejecting physical spaces entirely – it means ensuring that any investment in physical space actively supports our mission without creating advantages or disadvantages based on location. This insight would eventually lead us to fundamentally reimagine how companies should think about physical space – not as infrastructure to be managed, but as strategic assets that must earn their keep while preserving the equality of our distributed culture.

Beyond Hybrid

Many companies now attempt to balance remote and in-person work through hybrid models. While well-intentioned, these approaches often highlight the challenge of bridging two distinct workplace cultures, and the result is the “worst of both worlds”, epitomized by employees who commute to an office only to join the same video call as everyone else. Furthermore, not only do colocated team members enjoy a significant reduction in friction for small requests, but their remote colleagues frequently pay a “small-talk tax” in the form of socially-enforced preambles to every conversation.

When COVID forced companies to go remote, we had an advantage – we’d already been thinking deliberately about how to balance a remote workforce with a strong in-person contingent. We focused intently on building a remote culture that even our DC-based team, who explicitly preferred being in-person, would want to actively participate in. This approach was so successful that we opted to step through a “one-way door” and begin hiring primarily outside of DC. We knew that once we made that decision, we could never go back to being predominantly office-based. But being remote-first didn’t mean abandoning physical spaces entirely – it meant being more thoughtful about how and why we used them.

The Chicago Experiment

Perhaps surprisingly, that philosophy led us to establish an office in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Unlike traditional real estate expansions driven by headcount projections or market presence requirements, this was a deliberate experiment in creating purpose-driven space. Something unexpected happened: “The 505” emerged as more than just another workplace – it became our blueprint for focused collaboration. Its location – no more than three and a half hours from any Prefect team member – proved to be an unexpected advantage, eliminating the logistical complexity and expense of traditional offsites. Teams of any size could drop in for a few days of productive work, following a proven playbook that balanced focused collaboration with team bonding. The space’s natural gravity even attracted some of our younger team members to relocate there, creating an organic hub that enhanced rather than replaced our remote culture.

What made the Chicago space different wasn’t just its location – it was that it emerged with an organic purpose. Unlike traditional corporate real estate that companies acquire simply to have a presence, The 505 had proven its value through measurable impact on our team dynamics and culture. It became our first case study in what happens when you let space earn its role rather than prescribing it.

After our most recent all-hands gathering in Chicago, which was an extraordinary success by any measure, Brad, our SVP of People, pulled me aside. “I think it’s time for us to figure out how to capture this feeling more frequently,” he said.

That conversation sparked a fundamental shift in how we think about physical space. Brad’s insight was profound: what if we treated physical spaces with the same strategic rigor as executive hires? Just as each senior leader joins with clear objectives and accountability for outcomes, each space could have specific KPIs and a falsifiable hypothesis about its value. This wasn’t just about real estate – it was about creating strategic assets that would either prove their worth or be retired, just like any other investment. Moreover, it required us to approach each new space with the same level of intentionality as recruiting a new executive.

Based on the lessons from Chicago, we developed a framework that would transform our approach to evaluating spaces. We began looking beyond traditional metrics like square footage and cost per desk, focusing instead on each location’s potential to catalyze specific types of collaboration and community. Most importantly, each space would need an ambassador – a leader responsible for delivering on its mission and accountable for its success metrics. Just as we wouldn’t hire a senior leader without a clear mandate and performance expectations, we wouldn’t lease space without a defined mission and success criteria.

Three New Spaces

Today we’re putting this framework into action. After months of careful evaluation, we’re launching three new spaces, each “hired” with a distinct strategic purpose and clear success metrics. We deliberately avoid calling them “offices” – that term suggests nothing more than “a place to do work,” which misses the point entirely. If there’s anything a remote company doesn’t lack, it’s places to work! Instead, these spaces are strategic assets with specific missions, more akin to specialized facilities than traditional offices. Each one has been carefully designed to catalyze particular types of collaboration and drive specific outcomes that are impossible to achieve remotely.

The Embassy (Washington, DC)

The Embassy’s mission is to strengthen Prefect’s roots in the DC tech ecosystem. Located in one of the city’s newest and most eco-friendly buildings, it overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue just blocks from the White House. The Embassy features multiple private offices for focused or collaborative work, as well as indoor and outdoor space to host over 100 people for community events and substantive discussions. As its ambassador, I’ll use this as my permanent base to engage with customers, government representatives, investors, and the broader tech community — not to mention Prefect’s own team! Success will be measured not just in utilization metrics, but in concrete outcomes: new partnerships formed, policy initiatives advanced, and meaningful connections established that demonstrably advance Prefect’s presence in the national tech conversation.

The Bridge (New York City)

Led by our VP of Product Adam Azzam, the Bridge establishes our presence in the center of one of the world’s most dynamic centers of data innovation. Its mission goes beyond traditional product development – it’s about creating a living laboratory for product evolution. When practitioners from healthcare, finance, gaming, and AI gather to discuss product direction, the cross-pollination of ideas and immediate feedback loops are invaluable. Success here will be measured in the speed and quality of product iterations, the depth of customer insights gathered, and the tangible impact on our product roadmap.

The Lab (Half Moon Bay)

Our most unconventional experiment, the Lab, isn’t a traditional workplace at all. Led by Chris (bringing our story full circle to California), it’s a self-sustaining farm turned high-tech workspace on the coast. The setting combines modern collaborative facilities with farm-to-table dining, walking trails, and a beautiful setting to create an environment that encourages both focused technical work and creative thinking. Engineering teams will use this space for intensive development sessions, with success measured in breakthrough features developed, architectural decisions made, and the acceleration of our technical roadmap. Like any experimental initiative, its continued existence will depend on its ability to demonstrate concrete value to our engineering velocity and innovation.

Measuring Success

These spaces are carefully designed experiments with clear hypotheses and measurable outcomes. Each has been conceived with the same rigor we’d apply to any strategic hire or major initiative. Just as we regularly evaluate the performance and impact of our senior leaders, we’ll continuously assess these spaces against their defined objectives. This isn’t about creating permanent monuments to our company; it’s about launching strategic initiatives that must continuously prove their value.

Crucially, none of these spaces create a “second-class” remote workforce. We’re not hybrid, with some employees tethered to desks while others work from home. We’re not remote-only, rejecting the value of physical collaboration entirely. We’re remote-first: our company functions completely asynchronously, but we strategically invest in spaces that catalyze specific kinds of valuable in-person interactions – as long as participation in those interactions remains entirely optional and never becomes a prerequisite for success at Prefect.

This approach represents a fundamental shift in how companies think about physical space in a remote-first world. Rather than treating real estate as necessary infrastructure or compromising with half-measures like hot-desking, we’re approaching physical spaces as strategic investments with the same scrutiny, expectations, and accountability we apply to our most senior hires. Each space must continuously prove its value proposition while preserving our distributed culture – a standard that few traditional workplaces could meet.

The principle that guided us on day 15 still holds: when a company has one remote employee, the entire company is remote. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be intentional about creating physical spaces that enhance our ability to collaborate, innovate, and build community. The key is ensuring these spaces serve a purpose beyond just existing – each needs an ambassador and a mission, transforming them from simple real estate into strategic assets that help us achieve specific goals.

As we launch these experiments, we’re excited to learn what works and what doesn’t. Some spaces may exceed our expectations; others may need to be reimagined or retired – just like any other strategic investment. What we know for certain is that we’re not going back to traditional models. Instead, we’re moving forward with a new framework for physical space – one that prioritizes purpose over presence, mission over location, and pull over push.

Just don’t call them offices.