Betting harder than ever for remote work

We founded MarsBased in 2014. The three founders, Xavi, Jordi and I, had known each other since early childhood. We studied together, grew together and took our first professional steps together. While we never worked in the same project the three of us at the same time, our paths intertwined for well over 10 years before we decided to create our own company.

During all this time, our friendship grew as did our trust. We knew we could trust each other, and so we did: we created MarsBased not because we were friends, but because each one of us knew that the other two were the best candidates for the role.

In 2014, I was travelling half of my time; Jordi lived outside of Barcelona, about two hours by car, and Xavi was the only settled and rooted in Barcelona. Therefore, why did we need an office?

Inspired by the 37Signals book "Remote: No office required", we decided to forgo the idea of having an office. What'd be the point, if only Xavi would go? Moreover, our jobs can be done remotely. Having an office would impact negatively our financials and add an extra worry in terms of security, maintenance, paperwork, etc.

As a result, we decided to create the company around the concept of being an officeless company. We betted for a hard-remote model. We wanted to balance our lives with the work we do. Only by being at our very best in our personal department, we could bring our best to the professional side.

Twelve years in, I have to say that not once has the idea of having an office crossed our mind. Not once. Never. Jamais.

We occasionally joke about it when I complain about having a full wardrobe at home with company swag, or when I say that if we had an office, we wouldn't have to rent a studio for the podcast. Outside of that, we're happy as we can be with our setup.

There are a million blog posts out there about the benefits of remote work, so I won't repeat them here.

In 2020, we lost the competitive edge of being a remote company. As we discussed in Betting hard for async, when everyone adopted remote because of their necessity and urgency, we found ourselves competing against every company on the planet for talent. We drowned in a vast ocean of opportunities for developers and software engineers. Why work for MarsBased when you can work for companies in San Francisco, paying 3x more money?

In short, we moved to offering async for a couple of years. While that helped modestlyto stand out and to hire more, the model didn't quite work for us, so we eventually reverted that policy. It's hard to pivot to being 100% async if your company wasn't built for that. The same happened to companies that were forced to adopt a 100% remote model overnight because of covid: it could never work.

Luckily for us, as things started to get better covid-wise, and companies found themselves overbloated with people they didn't need and stricter financial controls by their boards, they started laying off thousands of people. Slowly, they began to revert remote work as well, and return-to-office policies crept back to the corporate sewers, whence they should never have escaped.

That helped us: not only did we go back to the pre-covid situation, being one of the few companies offering hard remote jobs, but we confirmed that we have always believed in remote.

In 2026, we're seeing more return to office policies than ever. Companies that used remote-friendly policies to attract talent when they were growing are betraying their workforce, admitting that they used remote only for convenience and to speed up their hiring processes.

As our company grows, more and more people come out of the woodwork to say "you're too big to be remote now", which makes absolutely no sense for us. How is headcount a metric to decide whether your company should own an office or not? We are about to hit 30 people in headcount and internally, we don't see a reason why we should stop being a remote company. Most likely, we will not see it either when we will reach 50 people.

For MarsBased, remote is not an option, not a passing fad, not a whim and we don't do it out of convenience. For us, remote is a core pillar of our company culture and the foundation of our beliefs.

Going forward, we can't envision our company not being remote. MarsBased can only work 100% remote.