I’ve been watching something play out in slow motion this year, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
On one side of the screen, you’ve got Amazon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Dell, all marching employees back to the office five days a week, mandatory, no exceptions. The memos went out, the mandates landed, and the reaction was about as warm as Accounts Payable team chasing your last dollar.
When Amazon pushed its RTO policy, 91% of its employees reported being dissatisfied with it, just 91%, ha! 48% started applying for other jobs. Not quietly updating their LinkedIn. Actually applying, hell yeah!
On the other side of that screen, the founders I talk to every week on Startups Decoded are doing the exact opposite. They’re hiring engineers in Lisbon, designers in Buenos Aires, product managers in Singapore. They’re building companies that look nothing like the ones making headlines for forcing people back into open-plan offices in midtown Manhattan.
These two stories are happening simultaneously in 2026. They couldn’t look more different. And if you’re a founder paying attention, the gap between them is the opportunity.
Presented by Deel. If you’re making your first or fiftieth hire, and doing it across borders, Deel is worth knowing. They’re supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.
I keep a pile of notes from conversations that stick with me.
One that keeps surfacing is from a founder I spoke with early this year. She’s running a 14-person team across six countries. No office. Never had one. When I asked her what her hiring advantage was, she didn’t say culture or mission or equity. She said geography. “I can hire anyone,” she told me. “So many of my competitors are limited to whoever will commute to their office.”
That’s not a small thing. That’s a structural advantage that compounds over time, and most early-stage founders are still underselling it.
Remote hiring delivers a 340% larger candidate pool. 16% faster time-to-hire. 13% higher offer acceptance rates. Those aren’t soft numbers. That’s operational leverage, and it’s available to a 10-person startup in exactly the same way it’s available to a 10,000-person enterprise, except the startup will actually use it.
What actually changed since the pandemic.
I want to be honest about something. Remote work in 2020 was a disaster response. Laptops on kitchen tables, kids in the background, everyone pretending Zoom was a reasonable substitute for being in a room together. It wasn’t a model. It was survival, and rightly so…shit got very serious!
What’s happened since then is different. The founders who are winning in 2026 didn’t just keep remote, they rebuilt their entire operating model around it. Async-first communication. Documentation as a default, not an afterthought. Rituals that create cohesion across time zones instead of relying on physical proximity to do that work.
That’s the part founders truly need to understand. Don’t look at it as remote or office-bound. The decision is anchored around how you run your business.
In 2025, remote work was a standard practice for 48% of the global workforce. That’s more than double the figure from 2020. And as of March 2026, 22.6% of US employees were still working remotely at least part of the time, despite all the high-profile RTOs dominating the headlines.
Remote didn’t retreat. It matured.
The cost math nobody talks about enough.
I built my first company in a physical space. Cool office, great energy, kind of unnecessary in retrospect. The overhead was a constant drag, money that could have gone into people or runway.
Remote-first strategies save founders up to 65% on overhead. That number sounds aggressive until you actually map out what a physical office costs when you include rent, equipment, build-out, utilities, good snacks, all of it. Then it sounds conservative.
McKinsey reports that organizations using distributed teams scale up to three times faster than those limited to local hiring. Three times. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different growth trajectory entirely.
A startup in Austin running a distributed team isn’t competing with other Austin startups for talent. It’s competing globally, which sounds harder until you realize it also means you’re hiring globally. The constraint disappears.
The enterprise warning.
I want to be careful here because this isn’t about politics and it’s not about taking sides. Enterprise companies made a choice. I’m just interested in what that choice costs them and what it gives founders.
Only 20% of LinkedIn job listings are remote or hybrid right now. Those listings receive 60% of all applications. Read that again. 20% of supply. 60% of demand. That’s an arbitrage gap that would make any investor’s ears prick up, and it’s sitting right there for any founder willing to run a remote-first operation.
The talent that enterprise is pushing out is available and actively looking. These aren’t people who couldn’t hack it in an office. These are often the highest performers, the ones with enough leverage and enough options to say no to a mandate that doesn’t work for their life. They’re landing somewhere. The question is whether it’s your company or your competitor’s.
80% of companies reported losing talent because of RTO mandates. That talent has to go somewhere. Wonder where they went?!!!
(This Australian is still confused when to use a ’z’ or an ‘s’, looking at you ‘enterprise’)
What winning actually looks like operationally.
This is where I want to get practical, because “go remote” is not a strategy, it’s a preference. The founders who make it work have three things in common.
They’re async-first, not async-by-accident. There’s a difference between a team that doesn’t have meetings and a team that has built a genuine async culture. The latter documents decisions, records updates, uses shared project tools, and creates a written record that anyone can access regardless of their time zone. The former just has a lot of unanswered Slack messages and confused people. Async-first is a discipline. It takes longer to build than an office culture because you can’t rely on proximity to paper over the gaps.
I personally dislike the Slack category. People use it to empty their to-do list, it is awful for culture and collaboration.
They’ve solved the compliance and payment infrastructure early. This is the part nobody warns you about. Managing international payroll, local labour law compliance, tax filings across multiple jurisdictions, this stuff will eat your time alive if you haven’t built the infrastructure for it. I’ve watched founders lose weeks to this. It’s not glamorous but it’s the foundation that everything else sits on. Get this wrong and your distributed team becomes a liability instead of an advantage.
They build culture intentionally, not organically. Physical offices create culture through accident and proximity. Distributed teams have to engineer it. Shared rituals. Clear operating cadences. Regular moments where people feel like part of something rather than contractors on a Slack channel. The founders who get this right think about it like product design. What are the touchpoints? What’s the experience of being on this team from 8,000 miles away? Is it coherent? Does it feel like somewhere worth being?
Get this right, and you are flying!!!!
A note on Deel, because it’s earned.
I want to mention Deel here not because they’re a sponsor of Startups Decoded (they are and I’m grateful for the partnership) but because their story is genuinely relevant to this piece.
Deel built the tooling to make global employment work because they were living the problem themselves first. Thousands of team members across more than 150 countries, no physical headquarters. They didn’t build a product for a market they read about in a LinkedIn post. They built infrastructure for a problem they were solving in real time. That’s the kind of credibility that’s hard to fake, and it’s why founders who are building distributed teams end up there eventually.
The founder takeaway.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to…
73% of all teams are expected to have remote workers by 2028. 83% of workers report feeling more productive in a remote or hybrid model than on-site. Companies offering robust remote options see up to 25% lower turnover.
The direction of travel is clear. What’s not clear is which founders will be positioned to take advantage of it and which ones will spend the next two years trying to justify a lease they never needed.
The founders who win globally in 2026 aren’t the ones with the biggest offices or the most Slack channels. They’re the ones who figured out how to make trust, accountability, and momentum work across time zones, and built their infrastructure around that from day one.
Enterprise made its choice. Now you get to make yours.
I know which one I’d make. Just saying…
