Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta on the advantages of a remote-first firm

In early April, Zappacosta, who based Thumbtack in 2009 shortly after graduating from school, defined his firm’s virtual-first choice to Fortune—and why he thinks pro-office stalwarts are solely hurting themselves. 

“There’s a shift happening,” Zappacosta mentioned, shortly after the corporate introduced a major redesign to its cellular app—its largest and most profitable launch since its founding. “I do think that this launch was aided by being a virtual-first company, not hindered.” 

Previous to the pandemic, like most of its friends, Thumbtack was enmeshed in workplace tradition. It, on the time, maintained workplaces in San Francisco, Salt Lake Metropolis, and Manila within the Philippines. “There was a lot of emphasis placed on time together in the office, and I thought we did it very well,” Zappacosta recalled. 

He wasn’t the one one; earlier than the pandemic, three quarters of Americans by no means labored remotely in any respect, and simply 6% labored primarily remotely. 

“I almost rolled my eyes at people who said they worked better at home,” Zappacosta mentioned. 

In-person work is a vestige of the 18th century

Many corporations jumped aboard the remote-work practice when it was all the trend, and now they’re leaping off, Zappacosta has observed. “That shows a lack of reasoning and principles,” he mentioned, saying he anticipates the world will “change forever” because of distributed work. 

“Going to work, as a concept, is a modern convention; it started during the Industrial Revolution,” he mentioned. Earlier than that, folks labored from house—that’s why they have been known as “cottage industries.” However quickly, folks wanted to assemble as a way to construct gadgets, which is why collaborative workplaces like factories and meeting traces rose to prominence. For many white-collar jobs, these are vestiges of the previous, Zappacosta believes. 

“We’re creating something purely digital; the work we do is pure knowledge work,” he mentioned. “To think we should work in the exact same way as our industrial forefathers just seems odd to me.”

Why distant work is a value-add

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zappacosta hasn’t thought-about mandating any quantity of in-office days. For Thumbtack, a shift to distant work highlighted a handful of unignorable enterprise propositions. The primary: the “immense leverage” Thumbtack acquired from with the ability to hire talent from everywhere. 

“The fact that we can hire all across North America is enormously valuable to our business, because it’s everywhere, too,” he mentioned. “Sixty or 70% of our technical talent is in the Bay Area; being able to recruit from South, East, and North Bay would’ve been impossible if we needed them in the office every day.” 

Of observe, the broad hiring base didn’t fairly defend Thumbtack from the industry-wide headwinds in tech. The corporate enacted a round of layoffs—30% of its workers—in March 2020, and minimize one other 14% of its global staff in December 2022. “There’s been an exogenous event that has placed a tax on human contact,” Zappacosta said in 2020, including that he slashed his wage altogether, and that of prime firm executives by 25%.

As the corporate recovers from two rounds of layoffs in 4 years, offering flexibility has been an “enormous” boon for Thumbtack, and Zappacosta says it’s helped encourage his expertise to convey in regards to the early April product launch. Plus—and this wasn’t apparent to Zappacosta at first, he famous—the extra geographically various his worker base was, the extra they mirrored the shopper base. 

“When we hired across the country, more of our people were homeowners, and they were more in tune with our customers and what they needed,” he mentioned. “That’s been a huge benefit.”

Distributed work forces managers “to make the implicit explicit.” It’s solely whenever you transfer to a digital context that you would be able to really assess how good you’re at giving directives. Digital work, he mentioned, “exposes whether or not you’re managing well.”

In a tradition that values possession and accountability, “you can’t rely on looking over someone’s shoulder to ensure they’re doing the work they should be doing,” Zappacosta mentioned. “You should have motivated them more intrinsically, making them want to accomplish more and feel more committed.” 

Digital work exposes administration gaps, he went on, “and I think the default reaction has been, ‘bring everyone back and we won’t have those gaps’. But those gaps exist in the real world, too; they’re just being masked.” 

Everybody’s in or nobody’s in

Thumbtack employs over 1,100 folks by Zappacosta’s rely—a quantity so massive, it might make full in-office work unimaginable. “We’re never getting all 1,100 people in an office,” he mentioned. “You can’t get everyone in one building or one floor; they’re all spread out, and that, too, creates power dynamics.” 

Certainly, proximity bias is a scarily highly effective power, and as Zappacosta identified, the divide between employees exhibiting up at firm headquarters versus those that dial in from satellite tv for pc workplaces creates an unfair power dynamic. As such, being solely distant “actually makes Thumbtack more cohesive,” he mentioned. “We truly feel like one team.” 

The identical line of considering wouldn’t essentially observe if Thumbtack didn’t quantity within the hundreds. “If we were 50 people, I’d want us all in the same room,” Zappacosta mentioned, arguing {that a} tiny distant agency would create “too much overhead” to handle successfully. “But once you’re hundreds, and certainly thousands, of people, my view is that those CEOs and leadership teams [who insist upon in-person work] are solving for themselves,” Zappacosta mentioned. “They’ve gotten used to working in a certain way, and managing in-person—they’re less in control in a virtual office.”

That doesn’t imply Zappacosta crusades in opposition to in-person gatherings altogether. “We save in-person work for big moments, when we reaffirm culture and values,” he mentioned. “You can’t build an organization without them, but you can do all of that in a couple days a month, and the rest of the time, you can get shit done at home.” Smaller and newer corporations skew this manner far more naturally than the older cohort, Zappacosta added, “which speaks to the fact that this is where things are headed.” 

Workplace hire is corresponding to ‘renting wedding venues each week’

At Thumbtack, Zappacosta has funneled the finances it as soon as allotted for workplace actual property into occasions. “Employee experience creates a great ROI, which I’m glad doesn’t go to a corporate boss in San Francisco.” Sustaining hundreds of sq. ft of cubicles, he mentioned, is equal to renting wedding ceremony venues every week. 

All Thumbtack has left is a 20,000 square-foot library in San Francisco for offsites or small work teams. The employees who present up at that area, Zappacosta mentioned, are typically the youthful, early-career San Francisco residents longing for the possibility to “get out of their cramped apartment, meet friends, and get mentorship.”

For all of the inarguable advantages distant work has introduced Thumbtack, Zappacosta nonetheless empathizes with bosses who’re hesitant to make the shift. 

“I wouldn’t have been brave enough to try this if not for Covid,” he mentioned. “But my initial skepticism was very quickly proven wrong, and we never wavered.”