These startups are betting on the remote first world

For most knowledge Workers, this summer means the end of the great remote work experiment and the beginning of normalcy. People shuffled back to the office, dusted off their desks, and returned to their old routines. But for some people, the pandemic year has permanently changed the relationship with the office. Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom (Nicholas Bloom) prediction More work may be done remotely-22% of the workday in the future, compared to only 5% before the pandemic.

Not every employee will abandon the office forever. However, even if only a small group of people do this, there may be many “second-order effects,” said Andreas Klinger, an advocate of remote work. Remote Capital One 2019. A $7.5 million fund looks for startups that solve remote work problems—for example, Helping startups manage payroll When their employees are scattered all over the world, there are also those who “use remote work in unique ways.” Klinger said the potential opportunities extend far beyond traditional business services. These start-ups are beginning to reimagine what the future will be if more people can separate the place of work from the place of residence: “How will the world change if more people work remotely? How will the country, family, education, and daily life change?”

The answers to these questions not only concern economists and policymakers, but also founders and venture capitalists who are eager to profit from any damage to the status quo. Some of these startups have bold views on the extent to which the increase in completely remote work will change people’s lifestyles. Galileo, An online priority school that aims to do remote work for elementary school education and work for distributed teams. “School is one of the most important things to keep you in one place: because your children are in school, you can’t move,” said Vlad Stein, the founder of Galileo. “With our school, it is much easier to move from one place to another. We allow people to have a smoother life.”

The startup charges fees in exchange for a set of online education tools and visits to many face-to-face “learning dojos” around the world. Similar to Montessori schools, students have a personalized learning plan, and they learn all day long with the support of many online teachers.

Stan, who currently lives in Spain, said that Galileo has seen more and more families become interested in living a more nomadic life because of remote work. “We started this experiment two years ago, just before Covid, there were 20 students,” he said. Galileo now enrolls 200 students from 30 countries.

Other startups hope to attract employees who like to travel by providing housing as a service. Anyplace is an Airbnb-like marketplace that lists furnished apartments that are rented on a monthly basis, including basic amenities such as WiFi. When Anyplace was launched in 2017, its customers were mainly freelancers or people with independent income. Now, founder Satoru Steve Naito says that he is seeing more and more “people who work for tech giants like Facebook or Twitter start using Anyplace. So now we are optimizing our products for remote workers.”

Recently, Anyplace started to list its own apartment designed for remote workers, called Choose anywhere. Each room is equipped with Gigabit Internet speed, a standing desk, an ergonomic chair and a second monitor. “If you don’t have a good working environment, then remote work is not great,” said Naito, who has changed cities every few months for the past five years. He believes that if services like his make the nomadic lifestyle easier, then more people will take advantage of the benefits of remote work and make this lifestyle more mainstream.

Start-ups such as Anyplace and Gailieo target specific demographics: people who can choose to work anywhere and are actually miss you Jump from one city to another. In most cases, this is not a lot of people. Although the number of days working from home is expected to increase compared to pre-pandemic levels, surveys like Bloom’s show that this is more because employers are adopting a “hybrid” model rather than allowing people to work remotely all the time.