Odin

A few years ago, I thought I had cracked the code to remote work. Now, after running two fully remote companies that both do seven figures in revenue, I’m more bearish on it than ever. When you’re building something that actually matters, you need momentum. You need energy bouncing around a room, people riffing, arguing, solving things together. That’s hard to replicate when everyone’s behind a screen. At first, it was fine. Everyone seemed busy, Slack was buzzing, things were shipping. But over time, it got harder to tell who was pushing at 120% and who was quietly coasting at 60%. You can’t micromanage your way out of it either. Nothing kills motivation faster than feeling like your manager’s breathing down your neck. People love to say, “Just measure output.” But that assumes the work being done is scoped perfectly, that tasks are all of equal difficulty. In reality, you never really know if something took a week because it was complex, stupid, or just ignored. So we ran an experiment. We pulled Slack activity data and combined it with online-time tracking. What we found made my stomach turn. We ended up letting go of a third of our team. Honestly, we should’ve done it sooner. One of them was literally working two jobs at once. After that, we built our own internal tool. It aggregates data from HubSpot, email, Notion, Slack, GitHub—everything. It doesn’t exist to spy on people. It exists so we can finally see who’s moving the needle and who’s just showing up. We’re still figuring it out. I’ll let you know if it actually fixes remote work.