What Was I Thinking When I Signed the Lease?
Right in the middle of Covid, I took office space for five years. It’s worked out—but not in the way I expected.
By Ami Kassar
Every once in a while, I think back to the middle of Covid and ask myself, What exactly was going through my head? Everybody I knew was trying to get out of leases, shrink space, or go fully remote. Meanwhile, I went and did the opposite: I signed a brand-new, five-year office lease.
This decision wasn’t the result of deep thinking or some strategic off-site. I found a place in a location I really liked—right next to a train station—and convinced myself that this was going to be an excellent perk for younger employees. Five years later, I can report that precisely zero employees have taken the train. But I honestly believed that when things calmed down, we’d want a physical place to come together. And on that point, I was mostly right—just not in the way I expected.
Now that the five years are up, here’s where we landed: We’re renewing the lease. Not all of it—we’ve sublet part of the space because we don’t need that much room anymore. But for the folks who are local, being together once in a while still means something. It gives us something Zoom can’t.
What I never imagined back when I signed the lease is that less than half of our team would end up living anywhere near the office, and the ones who do live nearby would come in about half the time. If you’d shown me a picture of the company today, I would’ve assumed you had the wrong business. Covid forced us to think in a totally different way.
For example, we stopped hiring by ZIP Code. Before Covid, if you couldn’t commute to the office, you probably weren’t joining the team. That wasn’t a policy—we just never considered it. But once we were all working from home, we started questioning everything. We found good people. Then more good people. And suddenly, where someone lived didn’t matter at all.
Today we’ve got team members in five states and two countries. No master plan. No whiteboard exercise. It just happened because we kept chasing talent. Hiring offshore was new territory. I didn’t know where to start. For us, the answer was engaging DOXA Talent. They made it easy—recruiting, screening, onboarding, the whole thing. And we ended up with a fantastic team member in the Philippines. She’ll be visiting us in person for the first time next year, and the whole team is excited. When we need another offshore hire, we’ll use DOXA again.
Every week, I see another story about some big company ordering everyone back to the office. Three days, four days, mandatory Mondays—pick a model. I read these articles and think, That may be great for them, but I can’t relate. Some of our best people don’t live anywhere near Philadelphia. One lives 8,000 miles away. And our culture hasn’t collapsed. If anything, we’ve become more intentional about it. That said, I’m not anti-office. Not at all. The office still matters—just not in the way I thought.
When the local crew comes in, there’s something tangible that happens. You can’t replicate it on Zoom. Conversations are quicker. Ideas flow differently. People laugh more. So even though we don’t use all the space we have, the part we kept still matters. It’s still us.
And yet, culture does take more work now. With a distributed team, nothing happens by accident. We have to create a connection: We bring everyone together twice a year. We meet regularly on Zoom. Our team chats are basically a 24/7 group text. It’s work. But it keeps us knitted together.
When I signed that lease in the middle of Covid, I thought I was committing to a physical space. Looking back, the fundamental shift was that we were becoming a company defined by people, not geography—a company that hires wherever the talent is, a company that’s flexible in ways I didn’t even have the language for five years ago.
This is not the company I expected to have. It’s better. And who knows—maybe one day someone will actually take the train.
Ami Kassar is CEO of MultiFunding.
