The debate around remote work has collapsed into a false choice: fully remote, fully in-office, or "hybrid."

Each side is entrenched. Remote advocates cite autonomy and broader talent pools. In-office defenders talk about culture, collaboration, and speed.

Hybrid attempts to strike a balance, often resulting in the worst of both worlds: half-empty offices, scattered teams, and a diluted culture.

The problem isn't the options. It's the frame of the debate.

This isn’t a three-way standoff. It's a chess game. And most companies are missing the queen: Office-First with Flexibility (OFWF).

Why "Hybrid" Falls Short

Most hybrid models fail because they lack a strong centre of gravity. In the absence of a clear default, they gradually drift toward remote by default, often unintentionally.

Teams are told they can "choose" when to come in. The result: inconsistent attendance, thin in-office energy, fragmented collaboration.

You can't build a high-trust, high-performance culture if people are physically scattered without rhythm or purpose. Slack and Zoom solve logistics, but not culture. Not decision speed. Not the ambient learning that occurs when great people work shoulder to shoulder.

Nicholas Bloom’s research shows most employees like hybrid models about as much as getting an 8% pay raise. That’s useful to know, but preference isn’t the same as performance. Just because hybrid is popular doesn’t mean it works.

Designing your company around what’s liked, rather than what drives outcomes, is how performance degrades over time.

The nuance: good hybrid systems have a clear default and social expectation. Without that, you’re just paying for expensive offices no one uses, while creating a second-class experience for those who show up.

What "Office-First with Flexibility" Actually Means

Office-First with Flexibility flips the dynamic:

• The default is working in-office.

• Flexibility exists (for legitimate needs, e.g. appointments, childcare, focused work, etc.).

• No attendance tracking, no rigid mandates. The goal isn’t to police; it’s to create an environment where high performers thrive.

• No arbitrary quotas like ‘three days per week.’ Instead, there’s a clear expectation: if you're in a city with a core team, you're in the office most days. That’s the norm, not the exception.

This is not "hybrid.” This sets a cultural gravity around being together, while treating people like adults.

The idea that office-first is about managers ‘looking over shoulders’ is a lazy caricature. This isn’t about control. It’s about proximity, speed, and shared momentum.

Netflix captured this spirit early:

"People tend to do their best work when they understand the context, not when they’re tightly controlled."

Sam Altman reinforces the same principle:

"The most ambitious people often want to be around others who push them."

In OFWF, offices are not mandatory prisons. They are magnetic environments: energising, focused, high-trust spaces where the best work gets done, and people want to be.

Gen Z Isn't the Problem

There’s lazy thinking, such as "Gen Z won't tolerate the office."

That’s wrong.

The best Gen Z talents (like the best of any generation) want growth. They want to be around energy, learning, and ambition. They value proximity to mentors and colleagues who raise their bar.

Max Marchione doesn’t hedge:

“At Superpower, whilst we hire some people remotely, we only hire Gen Z talent in SF. To be hired that young, you need to be an outlier. Outliers want to learn as quickly as possible, grow their networks, and be in person.”

Grouping entire generations into one stereotype is bad strategy. Focus instead on exceptional performers, regardless of age. Exceptional young talent thrives in environments that offer speed, rapid learning, and visible ambition.

If you optimise for the average, you will get average. If you optimise for the exceptional, you will get greatness.

Not Everyone Will Like It; That’s the Point

Some people will prefer to work from home permanently. Sometimes for good reasons (childcare; commute), sometimes for less good ones (comfort; complacency).

That’s fine. But high-performance cultures should be unapologetically polarising. They’re not built to maximise comfort for everyone; they’re designed to attract the few who thrive in the environment.

Some people do great work remotely, and that's okay. But if the culture is built around in-person energy and ambition, it’s better to be clear. Not everyone will want in, and that’s the point.

Alex Fala said it well:

“Companies can't optimise for everything, and ambitious environments have particular requirements that aren't for everyone.”

You can’t turn average performance into greatness just by changing where someone sits. The best companies, like Stripe and Amazon, design their cultures around exceptionalism, not comfort.

Paul Graham put it sharply:

"The natural state of a startup is growth. If you're not growing, you're dying."

High-performance cultures need density: physical, intellectual, and emotional.

The Future: Strategic, Not Dogmatic

The future of work is not fully remote. Nor is it blindly in-office.

The future belongs to companies that think function by function, role by role, level by level:

• A junior engineer onboarding? Office presence is invaluable.

• A senior back-end developer working independently? May need more remote flexibility.

• A product leader running cross-functional strategy? Needs to be in the room.

It’s not about ideology. It’s about effectiveness. It’s about setting a clear default: in-office, with flexibility, applied consistently in cities where we have critical mass.

Some roles, teams, or individuals may warrant exceptions; however, the bar is high, and the reasoning is clear.

This avoids the chaos of negotiating conditions on a case-by-case basis, while still enabling exceptional people to do exceptional work, wherever they are.

How We Operate at Partly

At Partly, we are Office-First with Flexibility:

• Where we have critical mass, we invest heavily in offices worth coming to.

• We encourage being in-office most of the week; no tracking, no rigid rules.

• We hire the best people on the planet, even in cities without offices, if the role truly allows remote effectiveness.

• We have high trust and high expectations; that’s the deal.

We believe proximity compounds trust, speed, learning and innovation. We believe frameworks beat chaos.

And we believe exceptional people deserve an environment optimised for their ambition, not one diluted for average preferences.

Conclusion: Build for Performance, Not Preference

The companies that thrive over the next decade won’t treat location as ideology.

They’ll design for what works: in-office by default, flexibility when it matters, and a culture grounded in trust and clarity.

The “remote vs hybrid vs office” debate is stale.

For startups that want to outperform, the move is clear: Office-First with Flexibility.

Cheers,
Harry 👋

Most companies treat offsites like a silver bullet; a few days of bonding and strategy to carry them through 12 months of execution.

That doesn’t scale. Strategy fades. Priorities shift. People forget faster than you’d like to admit.

After 17 quarters of iteration at Partly, we landed on something simple: connection and alignment aren’t events. They’re rhythms.

This post focuses on the part of our operating cadence that created the biggest step-change in clarity, accountability, and energy: our Quarterly Season Openers.

The Problem with the Annual Offsite Model

Most companies treat offsites like a magical reset button:

• Bring the team together once a year

• Set the strategy

• Hope it holds for the next 12 months

It rarely does.

Annual alignment is a myth. Strategy shifts. People forget. Startups (especially early-stage ones) are supposed to move fast, learn, and adjust. Your operating model should support that, not fight it.

Most offsites lack a clear objective. If you don’t know the "why," you won’t design the right agenda. You’ll get good vibes but not much else.

Good vibes ≠ Great execution. Team bonding matters. But not everyone wants a full week of socialising. And connection without clarity burns out quickly.

What We Do Instead

We run Quarterly Season Openers: in-person weeks for the entire company, once per quarter.

The goal is simple: reset, realign, and refocus.

In these weeks, every team aligns on quarterly goals. Every person walks away with one single-threaded priority for the next 90 days: their One Thing.

It’s not a to-do list. It’s an outcome. It clarifies what matters and kills busywork.

We host Season Openers in our hubs: Christchurch, London, and Manila. They complement (not replace) our Annual Offsite. Together, they form the cadence we call Peak Moments.

Each Season Opener runs Monday to Friday. The highlight is Launch Day on Thursday, when we share company priorities and celebrate team wins.

The rest of the week is designed to build context, accelerate learning, and deepen connection:

• Coffee delivered to HQ, team lunches, and shared dinners

• Workshops (customer deep dives, finance 101, equity overviews)

• Fireside chats with external leaders (e.g. Figma, Sharesies, Crimson)

• Optional evening events (board games, bowling, pub quiz, etc)

• Local meetups and community events

What We Learned (The Hard Way)

1. More is not better. We used to pack Season Opener Weeks with sessions and activities. It was too much. People left exhausted and scattered.

Now we optimise for balance: structured sessions, space for deep work, and optional social time.

2. Structure matters. Too many small breaks = no focus. We now batch sessions and anchor them around meals. People reset properly and engage more fully.

3. Don’t force everything. We make strategic sessions mandatory. Social events are opt-in. Some people recharge solo, not at karaoke night. That’s fine.

4. Start and end strong. We used to just drift in and out of the week. Now we open with a kickoff lunch and close with a Friday wrap-up. Clear bookends create momentum.

5. Measure everything. After each Season Opener, we run a short team survey:

• NPS: How impactful was the week?

• What should we start, stop, continue?

• Which sessions were most useful?

• Are you clear on your One Thing?

The feedback loops are short, honest, and drive real improvements.

And Once a Year: The Annual Offsite

Our Annual Offsite is different by design.

It’s not about quarterly execution. It’s about zooming out. Big-picture strategy, long-term planning, and deep team connection.

We bring the entire global team together for 3 days and 2 nights. We rent out a dedicated space; no hotels, no outsiders, no distractions.

Each offsite is anchored by a single theme. Last year’s: The Road to Series B. It helped demystify our funding journey and aligned the team on what we need to achieve.

We go deep. We connect. We leave clear.

The Payoff

Quarterly Season Openers helped us stay as aligned at 85 people across 9 countries as we were at 5.

They keep us agile. They make space for deep connection and deep focus. And they reinforce the idea that execution is a rhythm, not a single event.

You can steal this. Tweak it. Adapt it to your team. Just don’t rely on one offsite a year to hold your company together.

Rhythm beats intensity.

Resources (Things You Can Steal)

📌 Want to experiment with running your Season Openers?

• I’ve compiled Notion templates you can duplicate/edit/adapt to your company’s needs as you see fit.

  • Season Opener Plan: end-to-end plan or agenda to design your week, and eventually, share with your team. See a screenshot of our “Launch Day” on the Thursday below.

    

  • Season Opener Creation Steps: outlines the step-by-step prep work needed before the Season Opener Week.

• Key links

  • 📘 All Resources

  • 🌄 (Template) Season Opener Plan

  • 🖋️ (Template) Season Opener Creation Steps

📌 Want to receive templates and startup memos in future?

Final Thoughts

Offsites are moments. But performance comes from momentum.

The best teams don’t align once a year. They reset, refocus, and recommit every quarter.

This model made it real for us. Take what’s useful. Leave the rest. Then build a rhythm that works for you.

• I write about scaling ops, talent, culture, performance, accountability, and anything else that’s keeping you up at night as a startup founder, CEO, COO, or CPO. Subscribe below to receive the monthly newsletter.

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Cheers,
Harry

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