BILL Goes All-In on Remote-First After Its CEO Watched Silicon Valley Traffic

BILL has gone all-in on a remote-first workplace, and CEO René Lacerte says the trigger was a mid-day drive through Silicon Valley gridlock.

Lacerte, who founded the payments company and describes himself as someone who loves "the energy and connection found at the office," wrote that he changed his mind after seeing traffic so backed up that employees had already restructured their workdays around commutes. He noticed people arriving around 10:00 a.m. and leaving around 2:30 p.m. to dodge traffic while juggling personal and work commitments.

When he returned to his office after that appointment, the parking lot was sparse. When he left, there wasn't much traffic. "Why can't we get people to stay and actually build connections?" he asked himself. The old office model, he concluded, wasn't improving productivity or employee experience.

What forced the change?

The decision wasn't anti-office, Lacerte said. It was a recognition that the old rhythm of office work no longer matched the rhythm of employees' lives or the needs of the business.

The company was managing three different realities before the pivot:

• About half of BILL's workforce was already remote.
• The other half was expected in offices if they lived within a 45-mile radius of the company's two flagship locations in Draper, Utah or San Jose, California.
• That split created an awkward divide: people near a campus felt forced to commute, while others didn't.

"It wasn't fair, and it certainly wasn't the best way to get our work done," Lacerte wrote. BILL has since moved to a flatter, leaner organizational structure and is working to become an AI-native company.

Lacerte added that people's lives have changed since COVID, when remote work first took hold, "and they are not going to go back to the old way of working in the office. So we changed." His stated belief: if you want people to trust you as a leader and work smarter and faster, you need to listen to them.

Where does the broader market stand?

The 2026 workplace market is not moving uniformly in one direction. Many employers are tightening office requirements, but hybrid remains dominant. Cisco's 2025 Global Hybrid Work Study showed a global trend toward increased office work — yet 63% of respondents said they'd take a pay cut for the choice to work remotely more of the time.

The question every leader should ask, Lacerte argued, is whether the company's workplace model helps people do their best work. For him, the answer had become harder to ignore.

What should leaders ask themselves?

Lacerte keeps returning to three questions:

• Are we prioritizing seats or meaningful results? Physical presence can be valuable, but it's not the same as connection or impact. If employees come to the office only to sit in on video calls, the company might not be getting the value it expects. If some employees spend several hours a day commuting, you can give back that time to make them more productive at work and happier in their personal lives. Presence should not be a proxy for performance.
• How can we be intentional about connection? Remote-first does not mean remote-only. At BILL, local employees can still use offices in a smaller footprint for monthly company meetings, manager and team working sessions, or other deliberate connection points. The company plans to bring everyone together once a year, likely for a beginning-of-year kickoff.
• Does the work model address the competition for talent? Remote-first broadens access to talent and enables a more flexible operating model. You can recruit anywhere rather than being constrained by local hiring markets.

Lacerte still believes connection matters. But he draws a line between this shift and pandemic-era remote work: this one is intentional, not a temporary state — and it comes as the company rebuilds itself around AI.