All Large Companies Are Remote

The premise is false, so dissolve it

Alex Bouaziz, co-founder of Deel, opens his remote-work argument by refusing the usual terms of the debate. Most arguments over in-person versus remote are fought over productivity studies. Bouaziz reframes the question: past a certain size, he contends, every company is already remote, so the choice founders agonize over is between two things that converge anyway.

His argument is structural. Genuine in-person work exists only among the roughly ten to fifteen people within earshot of each other. Beyond that, across multiple rooms, floors, and offices, collaboration happens through screens regardless of who commutes. The engineer at Apple checks Slack, joins a Zoom standup, and reviews a pull request from a teammate she has never met. The product manager at Google shares a spec for comments and takes back-to-back video calls across floors and cities. The salesperson at Microsoft logs into the CRM and joins a pipeline review across three time zones. In Bouaziz's phrasing, "the entire infrastructure of how work gets done today is digital. The office is just a building around it."¹

The choice that remains

If work is digital either way, the burden of proof flips onto the office. The real decision, in Bouaziz's telling, is whether to pay for the building and constrain hiring to its radius. He weighs the pull of co-location against that constraint directly, conceding the appeal ("if you could put all 1300 people in this room with me today, I'll be the happiest person") but judging that "being able to hire the best talent versus being forced into hiring in a 30-mile radius, it's outweighed like crazy."² The receipts he cites for Deel: more than 1,200 people hired in under a year, and every funding round raised remotely. His disarming framing is that he has never worked in an office, "so I don't know either."

Bouaziz treats the argument as the premise beneath Deel's whole operating model. Once work is accepted as digital, the operational questions become the real ones: accountability without line-of-sight through OKRs, onboarding without ambient osmosis (a concern he addresses through a one-month impact window), writing over talking, and deliberately scheduled in-person time such as retreats and offsites in place of accidental proximity.

The 2022 embryo

The claim did not first appear in Bouaziz's 2026 essay.¹ In a 2022 documentary, both Deel founders state it in embryonic form.² Co-founder Shuo Wang gives the essay's core move as a joke: "If your employees are working on the 10th floor, and the other one works in floor one, they're working remotely from one another. They don't even know each other and probably will never talk to each other. So what's the difference, really?" Bouaziz supplies the cost-benefit version. That the belief was argued publicly at 1,300 people, four years before the formal essay, is Bouaziz's evidence that it is a first-principles position rather than a post-hoc rationalization of a company that happened to grow up remote. It shares a root with the singular product focus logic that a constraint, honestly examined, points to a different default than the industry assumes.

Tensions

The argument establishes that offices are not sufficient for in-person collaboration, not that they add nothing. Serendipity, apprenticeship by osmosis, and trust formation among the co-located core are the standard counters, and other founders treat physical presence as a culture moat. Bouaziz himself concedes there "would be value in having everyone in one place"; he simply weighs the costs higher.¹ His own mitigations, from retreats to quarterly dinners to daily onboarding standups, are tacit admissions of what the building was providing. The disagreement is narrower than it first appears: whether those needs are better met deliberately than ambiently.