One consequence of this is we’re going to hire people all over the world. And any employee can immediately relocate anywhere we are legally set up to employ them. There’s a fraction of employees, a minority, but a significant minority that wants to continue to work from the office in the future. So we’re going to allow them to do that. We’re going to keep the office around for them.
Is it safe to say this never would have happened were it not for the pandemic?
Absolutely. Running a remote-oriented company in the past was very difficult. I think the pandemic basically served as an education to a lot of us on how to run a company remotely. I think it’s also made a lot of employees learn that they actually prefer this. So the majority of our employees now are going to choose to work remotely forever even though we selected for a set of employees who were originally required to work from the office. I don’t think that actually would have happened if it weren’t for the pandemic.
How are you liking it? Are you finding that you are more or less productive this way?
For me personally, there are pros and cons. It’s nice to not have a commute and to get that time back. It’s nice to have more isolated space to focus. But as a leader, I spend a lot of my time in meetings with other people and meetings are a little bit harder over Zoom. I could’ve gone either way if I were just choosing for myself. But we made this choice because it was the best thing for the company and for our mission.
It also gives you an opportunity to hire people anywhere in the world. How big of a deal is that for you and for Quora?
It’s huge. We’ve always hired people from around the world who just happen to have the ability to relocate to Mountain View and get a visa if that was what they needed. Others moved here from somewhere else within the country. We’ve always hired a lot of new grads out of universities. And so we’ve always been interested in hiring the best people wherever they are. But it’s always involved this big relocation step.
