An excerpt from Peter Diamandis' newsletter on 12/15
Amazon just made returning to the office a requirement starting January 1, 2025. Is that the right way to go?
If you’re an entrepreneur starting a company or a CEO/business owner, what are you doing? Is there a 3rd option?
Jack Hidary, CEO of the unicorn startup SandboxAQ says YES. There is a 3rd way, a much better way.
I just had a fascinating conversation with Jack on my Moonshots podcast about this very topic. For background, SandboxAQ ("A" stands for AI, "Q" stands for Quantum) spun out of Google with $500 million of startup capital, scored $100 million of revenue last year, and landed Eric Schmidt as the company’s Chairman.
As Jack points out, part of their success comes from their work model and agility. They've gone from zero to infinity faster than most any company I know.
What’s their entrepreneurial work model? How are they reacting to the “Return to office” policies of other companies? And, what is their better approach?
Let's dive in...
Here’s Jack’s opinion on what he considers a false dichotomy:
"Return to office as a total policy” – FAIL
“Work from home as a singular policy” – FAIL
The world of work has painted itself into a corner with this either/or thinking—what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified as a false binary choice. Jack and his leadership team at SandboxAQ have defined what they consider a "third way" – he calls it the “Three Cs.”
On my podcast with Jack and SandboxAQ’s General Manager of AI Simulation, Nadia Harhen, we discussed this 3rd option, characterized by the Three Cs and a focus on agility: meaning the right people, in the right locations and clusters at the right time.
Flexibility rather than rigidity, trading office real estate budgets for travel miles and off-sites.
1. Collaboration: A focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration. At SandboxAQ, with 80+ PhDs and 70 engineers who represent fields ranging from pharmacology to quantum physics, this isn't just theory—it’s how breakthrough innovation happens. They're breaking down traditional silos, much like what Michael Crow has done at Arizona State University.
2. Customer: Rather than working from home or an office, SandboxAQ embeds entire teams with their customers for weeks or even permanently – focusing on customer-first thinking. Recently, they placed a five-person team at a customer site for two weeks, and they're planning to permanently embed 10 employees in partner offices worldwide. It's about deeply understanding customer pain points through direct experience.
3. Community and Connection: Their mantra is "work where you thrive." This means recognizing that people perform best when they have their support structures intact, whether that's family nearby for childcare, a local university for continued learning, or community connections that spark new ideas and customer relationships.
Jack goes on to say that organizations should treat their employees as adults. Establish Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and allow teams the flexibility to achieve these objectives without constantly holding their hands. Help your employees, teams, and organization focus on outcomes, not hours worked.
In this model, leadership looks different.
As Jack explains: "Is the senior executive supposed to sit in some fancy office in an ivory tower on Mount Olympus and send out commands? No. That is a prescription for failure."
Instead, it's about what Jack calls “service leadership.” Jack doesn't even have an office - he travels to team off-sites, supporting and enabling rather than directing. Again, it’s about focusing is on outcomes, not time spent in an office or counting vacation days.
To achieve this, SandboxAQ's teams hold quarterly and annual gatherings in university cities like Palo Alto or Cambridge, where they collaboratively set goals for the coming year. As Nadia explains: "We're trying to revolutionize drug discovery. We're creating chemicals and matter that haven’t ever existed before. How do you get a group of people located across the planet on that singular mindshare?"
Jack predicts the most successful organizations will be outcome-based, agile teams leveraging AI in all its forms - from software to robotics.
They'll embrace both human talent and artificial intelligence, recognizing that traditional ideas like “going to the office” and "retiring" need to evolve.
For entrepreneurs and leaders, the message is clear: the old, highly structured ways of working create an impedance mismatch with today's speed of change. As Salim Ismail and I discussed in our book Exponential Organizations 2.0, the future belongs to companies that embrace geographic arbitrage and build infrastructure for agility.
The most important asset in today's rapidly accelerating world isn't a fancy office—it’s organizational agility.
Highly over-structured organizations will fail as the pace of change accelerates.
The winners will be those who embrace this "third way": focusing on outcomes, treating people like adults, and building truly exponential organizations.
