This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Claudio Fuentes, 31, who is the cofounder and COO of CompAI, which develops AI software for corporate compliance. Fuentes recently posted on X that his startup will no longer hire people who can’t work in-person five days a week at its New York office. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been in tech for the last 10 years. I spent the last four in Silicon Valley and relocated to New York in February. We started CompAI in January and launched a product in April. We’ve had a pretty explosive growth curve.
We initially started remote. My cofounder is based in the UK and is planning on relocating to New York. We have a sales guy in France, and we have someone running customer success in Illinois. Our goal has always been: How do we actually get people in the same office? You just work faster.
I’m getting absolutely roasted by most of the remote tech worker community for my post in favor of the office. It shouldn’t be controversial that a company decides to hire locally, but somehow it is.
In the four years I spent in the Bay Area, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a lot of companies that I saw grow from nothing to Series A, Series B, Series C — absolutely crush it. These are companies like Cursor and Bland. The culture in San Francisco is hire your best friends, get them in the same room, and let’s build great software.
Before moving to the Bay Area, I spent six years in New York. In 2016, I was working for WeWork. So, you can imagine, peak Adam Neumann — hyper growth. I look back very fondly on what he was able to create around culture.
The economics and business strategy aside, if you think about the workplace and employee loyalty and productivity that they were able to extract from their workforce, it was bigger than life. To whatever degree I can try to replicate an environment like that in the companies that I build, I absolutely will do so.
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‘Something not natural’
When COVID hit, I moved from New York to Miami because I grew up there. I spent a year remote in Miami and one year remote in the Bay Area before I went the full entrepreneurship route. I look back at those years as some of the most depressing of my life.
It’s really convenient to be able to make your own hours and be home. But, over time, the lack of human connection really begins to get to you. If you spend two years locked in a room, barely seeing sunlight, there’s something not natural about that experience.
At the end of the day, we’re not just building a workplace, we’re building a life that’s centered around our work. People used to actually meet their spouse at work. For many reasons, I think it makes sense for us to be in the office.
For our existing workers, some will relocate. With others, we’ll try to make it work, but we are definitely prioritizing that every hire from here on is in New York.
Unstructured riffing
Aside from all the extracurricular activities we do as a team that build trust and rapport, which then help productivity, one instance stands out. It was about 8:30 in the morning, and one of our guys showed up early to the office, walked up to my cofounder, and said, “What if we implement an AI agent for our customer support? Is there something you can hack together?”
About 20 minutes later, he had already spun up an automation in our Slack that auto-replies to customers when they ask a question by searching our knowledge base. That has cut down our customer-support requests by 95%.
That came through this very casual conversation, where the alternative is typically, “Oh, let’s hop on a call because it’s kind of hard to explain.” It’s not something you send in a single message. It’s like, let me riff with you on this in an unstructured way.
In a remote world, there are also things that don’t get said because of that friction that exists. Therefore, you prioritize the ideas that are more well-formed, as opposed to riffing.
That’s what innovation is: It’s ill-formed ideas that, through this organic communication, become fully formed and then flourish.
I completely get it if your job is working out of a cubicle, and it’s just depressing and you hate your life. Go remote. Workers get more value out of that.
We’re trying to build the opposite. We’re trying to make the statement that having everyone together is important right now. The in-person candidates that we do find tend to be the more committed ones. We probably will lose on some people who are maybe more qualified. I’m OK with that trade-off, because I think the net benefit is going to be worth it.
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