Remote Work's Quiet Third Way Most Startups Won't Name

The kitchen has one window and the window faces a glacier. Justin Aversano is making coffee in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, on a Tuesday morning in late 2025. He has been on the road for eleven months. Behind him, a portable printer hums against the cold, spitting out a contact sheet from the previous afternoon's shoot in the Drake Passage. The coffee is instant. He does not seem to mind. He is talking, between sips, about what it means to make art when you are never in the same place twice, when your studio is whatever table you can clear, when your collaborators join you over Signal at odd hours and then vanish back into their own time zones. The project, called Moments of the Unknown, is a love letter to humanity shot across seven continents, and Aversano, known for his Twin Flames series, has arranged his entire life around the premise that presence does not require proximity. He has not had a fixed address in over a year.

I learn this not from visiting Ushuaia but from a video call, the kind where the connection drops twice and he apologises, once, for the light. Aversano's project is not a startup. But the way he works, the way he has built a small team of editors, fixers, and collaborators who meet almost entirely asynchronously, sits at one end of a spectrum that founders in Dublin, San Francisco, and Bangalore are quietly redrawing. The remote work debate has, by 2026, hardened into two familiar positions: the full-throated return-to-office mandates epitomised by executives like Jamie Dimon, who told a conference this spring that his anti-remote culture would crush you if you were not ready for it, and the fully distributed model embraced by a wave of younger CEOs who, according to a Business Insider report from February 2026, are statistically more likely to let their teams work from anywhere. But between those poles, a third thing is happening, messier and less legible, and founders are not especially eager to talk about it.

It is the mostly-in-person experiment. Not hybrid, exactly. Not three days in, two days out. Something looser and harder to defend in a board deck. A founder will say, We are mostly in the office, and the word mostly is doing a great deal of work. It means the engineering team comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays but nobody really checks. It means the head of product moved to Lisbon and nobody has explicitly addressed it at the all-hands. It means the co-founders have different answers to the same question, and they have agreed, tacitly, not to ask each other too directly.

The Fortune headline from last spring captured the tension precisely: "For startups, remote work versus return-to-office is a balance, and an experiment." The word experiment is the right one. Startups have always run experiments on product, on pricing, on growth. Running one on the basic architecture of how people work together feels both natural and existentially risky.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Aversano's glacial kitchen is the fluorescent office park in San Mateo where a Y Combinator-backed startup I will call Verge Health has been running what its founders describe as a 996 schedule: nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. The Forbes contributor Dasha Shunina profiled this emerging pattern in a January 2026 piece that caught the attention of founders across the Valley. Shunina reported that the old "work hard, play hard" ethos is being replaced by something starker: sober founders, relentless focus, the kind of schedule that leaves little room for anything resembling a life outside the office. When I visited Verge Health on a Thursday evening in April, the parking lot was still two-thirds full at 8:45 p.m. Inside, a junior engineer was eating cold dumplings over his keyboard. The office was quiet, not in the way a library is quiet but in the way a hospital waiting room is quiet. Everyone was present. Nobody was talking.

The co-founders of Verge Health, Arjun and Lina, agreed to speak separately. Arjun, the CEO, talked about culture, the importance of serendipitous hallway conversations, and how trust cannot be built over Slack. He is thirty-one. He used the word intentional seven times.

Arjun believes presence is a proxy for commitment. I believe presence is a proxy for being in the building. Those are not the same thing., Lina, CTO of Verge Health (name changed at source's request)

What Lina described is the thing founders avoid talking about at demo days and investor updates. The culture experiment is also a power experiment. Someone decides. Someone else lives with the decision. In a company of fifteen people, there is no HR department to mediate. The co-founder who wants more flexibility either wins, loses, or leaves.

The startup world's obsession with culture has, in the past decade, produced a torrent of writing about perks, about values, about mission. But the question of where work happens is more fundamental than any of those. It determines who can work for you. A 996 office schedule filters for people who are young, able-bodied, and unencumbered by care responsibilities. A fully remote schedule filters for people who can thrive without ambient social contact, who have reliable internet, who do not need a manager in the room to feel seen. Every choice is a filter, and most founders are uncomfortable admitting that their culture experiment is also a selection mechanism, and that the mechanism has costs they have not fully accounted for.

What the Mostly-In-Person Compromise Hides

If the extremes are legible, the middle is where the actual ambiguity lives. Across a dozen conversations with founders in Dublin, London, and Berlin this spring, a pattern emerged. The official policy is usually something crisp: three days in the office, core hours ten to four, everyone in on Wednesdays. The actual practice is knottier. The CTO works remote on Thursdays because his child has swimming lessons. The head of growth moved to Barcelona and flies in once a month. Nobody has updated the handbook. Nobody wants to be the person who insists on updating the handbook, because updating the handbook would mean surfacing a conversation the founders are not ready to have.

One chief of staff at a Dublin-based SaaS startup, a woman named Orla who has been with the company since the seed round, described her role in these conversations as "translator." The founders, she said, "speak different languages about the same thing. One says 'flexibility' and means 'you can come in at ten instead of nine.' The other says 'flexibility' and means 'I want to live in Lisbon.' And neither of them realises they're using the same word for different worlds." She has not brought this to their attention. "It would collapse something," she said. "I'm not sure what."

The silence around the mostly-in-person compromise is not just about avoiding conflict. It is also about preserving the story founders tell themselves about their own companies. A startup that has a clear, enforceable office policy is a startup that knows what it is. A startup that has a policy nobody follows is a startup that is pretending, and the pretending is itself a kind of culture, an unspoken agreement not to look too closely at the gap between what the company says and what it does. This gap is, for early-stage companies, unusually expensive. It burns trust. It creates two tiers of employees: those who have negotiated private exceptions and those who have not. It makes every hiring conversation a negotiation rather than an alignment.

Back in Ushuaia, Aversano's project offers a different kind of answer, one that does not translate neatly to the startup context but is worth holding up to the light anyway. His team does not have an office policy because they do not have an office. They have a shared belief that the work matters, and they have structured everything else around that belief. "I miss the part where someone hands you a print and you both just stand there looking at it," he said. "You can't send that over Signal. You can't send the standing there."

What to Watch For

The culture experiments running through the startup world in 2026 are not going to resolve neatly. The Jamie Dimons will keep insisting that remote work crushes people. The younger CEOs profiled by Business Insider will keep betting that distributed teams are the future. And in between, thousands of small companies will keep doing what they are already doing, which is making it up as they go, one private exception at a time, one co-founder disagreement they agree not to name.

What will force the conversation, ultimately, is not ideology but attrition. The early employees who leave, like Priya, are not writing manifestos. They are simply walking out of the room. They are choosing companies whose policies match their lives, and they are doing it quietly, which is how talent drains from organisations that believe themselves to be beloved. The founders who notice, who really notice why people are leaving, will be the ones who stop calling their policies experiments and start calling them choices, with costs and beneficiaries and a paper trail. The ones who do not notice will keep saying mostly, and wondering why the word feels heavier every time they say it.

Lina, the CTO of Verge Health, decided to leave the company at the end of the quarter. She was not starting a competitor. She was not writing a blog post. She was going to take the summer off, then look for something where she could set the policy herself.