Fully Remote Startup Orders Employees Back To Office It Has Never Had

AUSTIN, TX — Citing a need to "rebuild the in-person culture that made us who we are," Lumenvault, a 140-person software company founded as fully remote in 2021, informed staff Tuesday that they must return to the office four days a week starting November 3, despite the company never having had an office, an address, or a lease.

The all-hands memo, signed by CEO and co-founder Brayden Holcomb-Reyes, called the mandate "a return to our roots," which employees said were a Slack workspace and a shared Google Drive. It instructed staff to badge in by 9:30 a.m. at a 2-acre gravel lot off State Highway 71 that the company has placed a deposit on and expects to build on "within the next several fiscal years."

"I want to be clear that this is not about surveillance," Holcomb-Reyes said in a recorded video, filmed from the guest bedroom of his lake house. "It's about the hallway conversations. The spontaneous collisions. The magic that happens when you run into a colleague at the coffee machine, which we will be ordering once there is a wall to put it against."

According to the company's facilities FAQ, desks will be assigned on a first-come basis among four folding tables delivered Monday, and the lot's single portable toilet has been designated a "focus room" that must be booked through the calendar app in 15-minute increments. Employees living outside Texas, about 80 percent of the workforce, have been offered relocation support in the form of a $400 stipend and a link to a moving company's website.

Staff reactions have been mixed. "Honestly, I'm a little excited," said senior backend engineer Dana Pruitt, 34, who flew in from Columbus, Ohio, for the first in-office day and spent it on a camp chair joining Zoom calls with colleagues who were sitting six feet away. "I'd only ever seen my manager from the shoulders up. It turns out he's very tall. I didn't know that. It hasn't changed anything, but I know it now."

Others were less charitable. A member of the design team, who asked not to be named because badge data is now tied to performance reviews, noted that the badge reader is mounted on a wooden stake and has no door attached to it. "You walk up, you tap, it beeps," she said. "Then you're standing in the same field you were standing in before the beep, except now HR knows."

A review by workplace consultancy Tandem Ridge Partners found that Lumenvault's in-person collaboration rose 310 percent in the first week, a figure the firm attributed mostly to employees sharing one power strip run from a neighbor's barn. Productivity fell 60 percent over the same period, which Tandem Ridge described as "within the expected range for a company working outdoors in October."

At press time, Holcomb-Reyes had announced he would be leading the transition from Lisbon, where he said he would be "available async for anyone who needs me."