UPDATE (2026): We published this survey in October 2020, when the long-term shape of startup work was genuinely uncertain. Six years later, hybrid and remote models have become the default for early-stage companies — confirming the "Next Normal" shift that 303 founders anticipated in our data.

Wing founder survey on remote work: What 303 startup CEOs said

In September 2020, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings called remote work "a pure negative." That framing dominated the conversation — but it didn't match what we were hearing from the founders we work with every day. So we decided to get the data.

Wing surveyed 303 startup CEOs and founders over a two-week window in late September and early October 2020. We asked about leadership, culture, diversity and inclusion, productivity measurement, compensation, and what the next phase of work would look like. The results painted a more nuanced picture than the binary "office vs. remote" debate suggested. Founders weren't rejecting remote work — they were already planning for hybrid, collecting employee data, and rethinking how distributed teams operate at scale. (Wing's founder network has consistently surfaced these operational challenges in remote and hybrid work.)

1. Key takeaways
2. Full survey results
3. Survey methodology
4. Conclusion

Key takeaways

1. 80% of respondents disagreed with Reed Hastings' characterization of remote work as a pure negative — a decisive majority given the intensity of the public debate at the time.
2. A majority of respondents indicated a neutral impact of remote work on diversity and inclusion, suggesting that the feared negative effects had not materialized six months into the pandemic shift.
3. A clear majority of respondents projected a substantial shift from office to hybrid and remote arrangements in the "Next Normal," signaling that founders viewed the change as structural rather than temporary.
4. 57% of respondents with 50-plus employees were already collecting employee data to measure productivity — a notably high adoption rate for early-stage companies — and 58% of those found the metrics useful.

Full survey results

The complete survey results are presented in the interactive deck below. The data covers six areas: founder sentiment on remote work, the impact on culture and diversity, productivity measurement and employee data collection, compensation adjustments, leadership challenges, and expectations for the post-pandemic workplace. Use the navigation arrows to explore each section.

Survey methodology

Wing surveyed 303 startup CEOs and founders from September 27 to October 10, 2020. Respondents represented companies across stages and sectors within Wing's broader founder network and the early-stage ecosystem. The survey covered seven topic areas: leadership, culture, diversity and inclusion, productivity, employee data collection, compensation, and the next normal for workplace structure.

The survey was fielded approximately six months after the initial wave of pandemic-driven remote work transitions, giving founders enough operating time to form evidence-based views rather than reacting to the immediate disruption. The two-week collection window captured sentiment before the U.S. presidential election and during a period of relative stability in remote work adoption.

Conclusion

Three signals stand out from this data. First, the overwhelming rejection of the "remote is purely negative" narrative — 80% of founders disagreed — indicated that the people actually building companies saw remote work as a structural shift, not a temporary concession. Second, the directional move toward hybrid was already clear in late 2020: founders expected the "Next Normal" to look nothing like the pre-pandemic office default. Third, more than half of founders with 50-plus employees were already measuring productivity with real data, and the majority found those metrics useful. That's not the profile of leaders flying blind through a crisis.

Taken together, these findings suggested that the startup ecosystem was moving faster than the public debate. Founders weren't waiting for permission to redesign how their teams work. They were already doing it — with data, not ideology, driving the decisions. For anyone building or investing in early-stage companies, these signals mattered then and continue to inform how we think about the operational foundations of high-performing teams.