“What is an RTO?”
That was Together AI CEO Vipul Ved Prakash’s response when asked by Business Insider whether he had ever had to send a return-to-work (RTO) memo to push employees back to the office of the cloud compute startup.
“People generally like to come in,” said Prakash. “We’ve never enforced it.”
Prakash’s response illustrates a stark cultural difference between AI startups formed after the COVID lockdowns and long-established corporations, with people voluntarily coming to the office, sometimes on weekends.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, told Business Insider that the age demographics and personal stake many startup employees have in their companies created a work mode that is “almost entirely in-person” and “100% work focused.”
“For a single 23-year-old with equity worth $20 million, it makes sense to work in the office for 100 hours a week,” said Bloom. “They don’t work from home, they home from work.”
The tight-knit culture of AI startups
Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, an enterprise AI for productivity, said he “was not eager” to bring his team members back to the office because finding an office is a hassle, but everyone wanted to be in person and return to their original mode of working when the company first started right before the pandemic in 2019.
“We just simply didn’t know how to work from home because everybody was in this one small room,” said Jain of the early days of the pandemic lockdown. “We used to be sitting next to each other, brainstorming what to build, and so we found that very, very hard.”
Over time, said Jain, he learned to enjoy remote work and got to spend time with his family, but the team genuinely wanted to be together again.
“That’s the difference — there’s this startup spirit, and it’s only 10, 15 people, and we want to be with each other,” said Jain. “They love each other, they bond with each other, we used to play games together, and we have very fond pre-pandemic memories as a close-knit group.”
Jain said that as Glean grew more rapidly in recent years, it has since moved into a larger office space and dedicated Thursday as its work-from-home day.
Spiros Xanthos, 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 in-person work and has never had to ask anyone to be in the office.
“We have a fairly big office now, and we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” said Xanthos. “Most people have lunch in the office together with their colleagues, and many people stay to have dinner in the office.”
Xanthos said that since founding the company in early 2024, “cohesion and culture and friendship” among employees has been critical for the company, and that he often brings colleagues based in New York to the Bay Area for offsite retreats so the team could get to know each other better.
“People will actively avoid working remotely at this point,” Xanthos added. “Especially for some of the younger folks who didn’t have many years of experience, but maybe worked remotely before this, many of them tell me it’s day and night — the fact that they have so many friends at work now that they can trust.”
AI’s innovative nature demands in-person interactions
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, which may generate greater in-person demand.
“Innovators have to be close to end users because end users are a part of the innovation system,” said Florida, of why it’s easier to work in person 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 interaction with the end user, by interacting with your customers and clients,” Florida added.
Xanthos said the demand for in-person attendance ultimately boils down to the nature of an innovative industry.
“As a company, we’re solving very, very hard problems, and to solve these problems, you operate at the frontier,” said Xanthos. “And this means that you need to experiment a lot, try a lot of things that might fail.”
“That in turn requires a very high trust in an environment of psychological safety where people feel that they have the ability to innovate bottom up,” Xanthos added, “Where they don’t need to be told what to do, where there is communication velocity and bandwidth.”
So the next time you speak to an AI startup founder, don’t ask how their RTO is going — they’re probably too busy trying to squeeze everyone into the office.
