Patrick Collison, the Irish cofounder of Stripe, empathized with employees yearning for a return to widespread remote work. 

Speaking during a fireside chat at the Berkeley Haas School of Business, Collison said the remote versus in-person debate had turned overly religious and was really more dependent on the context of each company.

‘Cave dwellers’

The 35-year-old was speaking from experience, describing the tradeoff he has faced between his personal preference for working from home and Stripe’s business requirements that necessitate his physical presence.

“There are some people who are really effective and really enjoy working in their cave. I think I would probably be one of those people, but sadly I’m not in a role where that makes sense,” Collison said.

Around 40% of Stripe’s 7,000 employees are remote, a figure which has risen from 20% before the pandemic. 

Part of the increased share is a matter of space. Collison says Stripe wouldn’t be able to fit all its employees in the same room “no matter how draconian our in-office policy.” 

This means that in the company’s globally distributed workforce, “there’s no universe where we’re not having lots of Zoom meetings.”

While Collison’s position now means he has to show up in the office, he is a strong believer in the case for remote opportunities at his company. 

“It’s probably a significant efficiency gain to have more options for the kind of cave dwellers and the people who just want to sit in their room and do the work by themselves, again, like me,” Collison said.

Despite his positive soundings on remote work’s place in working culture, Collison increasingly looks like the exception to a more common trend of delisting remote job opportunities and wider enforcement of in-office policies by employers.

The Stripe CEO says he thinks the benefits of in-person work are more obvious for smaller organizations of up to 50 people, particularly when trying to breed a specific company culture.

Collison likes to pose the scenario to parents of their kid being offered two jobs—one is fully in the office five days a week, or a “loosey-goosey” fully remote option. 

“No parent that I’ve asked ever hesitated in answering that question,” Collison said, indicating they would choose the fully in-office job for their child.

‘Misanthropic introverts’

Collison was also asked about the onset of a “writing culture” at tech companies since COVID-19, specifically in communicating across platforms like Slack instead of face-to-face. 

Rather than coming from an innovative tendency, Collison said that his predisposition to writing things down was driven by a desire to learn from his mistakes. 

“Part of the value in writing things down is our past selves look stupider, and that’s actually very adaptive,” Collison said.

More simply, though, Collison said he was an older acolyte of writing instead of conversing thanks to his standoffish personality.

“We were just kind of misanthropic introverts in the beginning. Even when there was only four or five of us working on Stripe, we would just communicate a lot in written form because it’s kind of less oppressive than having to talk to each other,” he said.

Collison said his brother and cofounder, John, was “much more extroverted,” adding it was rare that he, Patrick, would be the one wheeled out for public speaking engagements.