The success of companies like Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian in challenging the dominance of Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites accounts for part of this interest, but the rise of remote and distributed teams is the most important secular shift driving the trend.

These tools make it possible, for the first time, to effectively get work done without physical co-location — at scale. The last truly significant fixed cost for many startups today is an office lease. Multiple scaled startups (Automattic, Zapier, Invision, Gitlab) have demonstrated the fully remote model, negating the need for an expensive office ... See more