How Nylas closed its offices in favor of on-sites

While many companies grapple with RTO policies and procedures, one tech company made that decision very simple, by making like Billy Joel and “Movin’ Out”…of all of its offices.

Nylas is a decade-old communications software company whose growth pattern has been fairly typical of a tech startup. It launched in San Francisco, then opened a New York office because that’s where an executive was based and started hiring team members there. Then it opened an office in Denver and a couple of international cities as it grew out other functions like sales and customer success.

“Different places have different concentrations of folks with different skill-sets,” CEO and co-founder Gleb Polyakov told HR Brew. “[We felt] we’d like to have access to that as we grow as a business.”

When the pandemic hit, the company had five offices, including London and Toronto. As people started working from home, Nylas employees started migrating away from the offices.

“What we saw is that the folks had diffused a bit,” Polyakov said. Many of them “found that they get a better quality of life by moving outside the city to a suburb or a place that has more land.”

Have you seen rent in SF (or New York or London or Toronto)? After realizing that most employees did not live close to an office, Polyakov and the Nylas leadership team considered the financial feasibility of keeping an office space.

“We had this budget that we were spending on physical assets…but that budget started to make less and less sense as we got more distributed,” Christine Spang, co-founder and chief technology officer, told HR Brew. “At some point last year…we realized that the amount of support spending that we were doing was very unbalanced.”

They decided more funds should be spent on enabling remote teams and gathering employees. Nylas executives told HR Brew that essentially every dollar that previously went to real estate went into a budget for two company off-sites and for department leaders to hold their own off-sites and team events.

“I don’t want to be paying for days that we’re not using something,” Waifa Chau, Nylas’s CFO, said. With this solution, “we’re providing all the different avenues for people to connect and collaborate, and sometimes actually share a beverage.”

How do you replace offices? Even though Polyakov said he was a fan of working in the office and its role in company culture, he moved forward with the decision. They hosted the first company off-site in late-February in Las Vegas.

“I am definitely [in] the bucket of people who love in-office culture and find remote work actually pretty difficult,” said Polyakov, but he told HR Brew that it made more financial sense to find a different way to build the same connections and not force people out of their working rhythm.

“We wanted to make sure that we have the ability to get together in-person every once in a while, that teams are bonding, that there’s good communication and process, that there’s clarity of who’s doing what, [and that] we can ask each other questions.

“Do we need an office to accomplish that? What we landed on was, no,” Polyakov said.

Making it work. Company leaders recognize that this is an ongoing experiment. Each department and team leader had the freedom to find the right cadence for group meetings or outings with a fixed budget, Spang said. They would start by trying to get the company together twice a year and ask department leaders to also organize something larger twice a year.

“You can’t replace a physical connection with Zoom all the time,” Chau said. “They don’t need to see you every day, but they would like to see you maybe three or four times a year, maybe more.”

The company had two rounds of layoffs, one in August 2022 and another in January 2023, going down from around 200 people to 150. In an effort to raise morale, the company planned an all-hands inside a comedy club in a casino in Las Vegas. The four-day event had shades of a standard annual kick-off, with additional programming and free time built in.

“Building a startup is very hard, and if you are fully remote and you don’t ever get together in person and just sort of work side by side, it can get lonely,” Spang said. “Another core part of getting people together on some sort of regular cadence is having that sense of solidarity and togetherness and tackling challenges together as a team.”—AK