Chapter 1/ Full Remote

Six thirty in the morning. I spend the first half hour of my day in bed, scrolling the major news sites on my iPad. Then I tear through a few dozen Instagram reels at warp speed. Not healthy, the news sites say. The influencers say it too. I should meditate first. Or slowly drink a large glass of lukewarm water with fresh lemon juice and ginger. Okay. I get it.

Still half asleep, I get up and walk into my home office. I open the MacBook Air and click Zoom, to calibrate my appearance for the still young day. I go to Settings, then Video. After a few seconds my brand new webcam disassembles me, full screen, into 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. My hair is wrecked from sleep, my eyes look tired, my skin looks pale and porous.

So I click “Touch up my appearance” and drag the slider all the way to the right.

My skin becomes a smooth, saturated surface of warm bronze. Cheekbones sharpen. Eyes brighten into an artificial blue. High definition. Digital. Not quite human. Like I could walk out of some expensive CGI movie and never look back. That isn’t me anymore, I think, watching this face mimic my movements in real time.

Good.

Now I start stage three of my morning routine. I open Outlook and scan today’s Zoom meetings.

A call with Matthei and Stephan. Then a longer working session with the entire marketing team. After that, the usual half hour for lunch. Then four agency calls in a row. And as the grand finale, a feedback session about my onboarding with HR that will probably run until seven.

A good day, actually.

Zoom is revenge. Some digital fate god designed it specifically for me. I don’t like photos of myself. I avoided video for years. It worked. For years I wore brown leather shoes and shirts under a blazer and sat in meeting rooms where nobody could freeze my face in a pixel grid and study it.

That’s over now. Probably for good.

Now I’m confronted daily with my own reality in close up. Zoom. All day.

Turning the camera off is not an option. It’s the first bullet point in the startup’s online meeting policy. Only after that do they get to gender equality and discriminatory language. The top issue is simple.

Camera on. Always.

Twelve virtual meetings back to back in a single day is my current record. Thirty minute cadence. And then, as a crown jewel, one of those new team get togethers with alcohol support, every other Wednesday night on Zoom. We hold up the labels of our newest Riesling discoveries to the webcam like proud idiots and die of boredom the rest of the time.

We had fun once, briefly, when we discovered Zoom avatars. We put on dog and cat faces in rainbow colors and barked at each other. It was funny for about half an hour. If anyone uses a digital moustache filter today, it looks desperate.

So on Wednesday Zoom nights I keep typing “fun topics” into the circle and hope someone picks up the ball and buys us another ten minutes. Gym fails. Insta reels. YouTube trash. Netflix news.

Sometimes, in a boozy burst of confidence, someone opens their digital background and shows us a few seconds of real life. Stephan’s wife, a hyper competent blonde dentist who works out daily and is addicted to meal prep tips on TikTok, waves into the camera and says she’s heard so many great things about our team.

“I really have to go,” Karin says, laughing at the camera. “The kids.”

Then Stephan switches back to the soft blur.

Our team. I basically don’t know anyone on our team. Not in the classic sense. I have never shaken anyone’s hand. I have never run into a colleague by the coffee machine. We are full remote. Nobody goes to an office. Nobody meets anybody.

Stephan, the CEO and our boss, sits somewhere near Berlin. I sit in Munich. The rest of the team is scattered across Europe. Barcelona. Geestadt. Porto. Stuttgart. Warsaw.

I haven’t even met Stephan in person, even though he hired me more than two months ago. Both interviews were on Zoom. Of course. I had a short video exchange with the HR lead, who sits somewhere outside Manchester. Then I got my contract by email and signed it with a pre set digital signature.

First the duty, then the freestyle.

After the signature ceremony I posted a heavily staged LinkedIn announcement about my new challenge. I spent a solid half hour on it. Super excited and humbled to join. Then I watched the “Congrats” comments rain in for a full hour.

“Well done!” wrote someone whose name I’d never heard.

“The future belongs to startups, not corporations!”

A week later the MacBook Air arrived via DHL. They also included a water bottle with the company logo.

Welcome to the team.

Since then I sit in my newly set up home office. On an Ikea chair that vaguely resembles an Eames Aluminum Chair. In front of a brand new electric sit stand desk, with a 27 inch curved monitor on top like a shrine.

Everything is great, except the MacBook Air, which drives me insane because under the constant load of video calls and, probably, all my filters, the fan ramps up audibly after just a few minutes. I hate that sound. Like a vacuum cleaner eating my thoughts.

So I wrote Bora, who organizes tech for this startup from some Eastern European outpost, an embarrassingly deferential email asking if I could maybe get one of the new MacBooks that don’t have a fan anymore.

Bora hasn’t replied in two days. Which is, in its own way, a reply.

I won’t push it.

Because I have decided that for the six months of my probation period, I will represent a fully retouched version of myself. I am the funny, experienced supporter type with the bronze complexion. I do not escalate. I think in solutions. I act pragmatic.

“Running smoothly, Stephan!”

“I’ll summarize that quickly in a Google Doc.”

“Can someone make me host? I’ll present a few conceptual thoughts.”

So. Showered. First Zoom call with Stephan and Matthei at eight thirty.

Matthei, who is probably called Matthias in real life, is one of the coolest guys in the German innovation scene. A living legend spawned from central Berlin. Speaker at thousands of conferences and workshops. Author of millions of LinkedIn posts. Networking monster with fifteen thousand followers.

Matthei prefers limited edition sneakers painted by artists and pairs them with casual kimono jackets. No idea where you even buy that. Not on Zalando. That’s for sure.

Matthei is an old friend of Stephan’s and is supposed to sprinkle disruptive fairy dust in our eyes on the way to the next funding round, the complex Series B. Twenty five hundred euros is Matthei’s noticeably moderate day rate.

“Think outside the freakin box,” Stephan calls this weekly Outlook meeting.

In our last meeting Matthei joined from the saddle of his brand new Peloton.

“Audio and video quality okay?” he asked casually.

“All good,” Stephan and I answered almost in sync, thumbs up to the camera.

Then Matthei: “Trying a little hack with the bike here. You’re gonna see me sweat, boys.”

A different league than Stephan and me with our stupid virtual backgrounds. The storming of the Capitol. Or some relaxed loft vibe. Nice enough. Not competitive, though, when it comes to Matthei.

A little before seven thirty this morning I start preparing for the meeting. The problem is that Matthei is an impressive talk machine. He talks nonstop about the ideation funnel and describes “transformative cliffs” in long, breathless sentences. I can barely find an opening to enter the stream of his guru thinking.

I have to change that.

Otherwise Stephan will file me as the corporate guy who is, by default, boring.

That can’t be it. That is not enough to survive in a startup.

In moments like this I curse my decision to leave the DAX company after fifteen years, to take on a new challenge at this place. At the corporation’s HQ outside Munich, in that steel and glass bunker, I was basically inventory. As marketing director I had outlasted most people and was considered untouchable.

Then the board decided to try a dual leadership model in marketing.

“No escalation path,” the COO said, explaining the idea. “We need to become more performance oriented. Organic, social, PPC, influencer. Data. I think Marie, with her background, is an ideal complement. It benefits both of you. She profits from your long experience and you recharge with new technologies. Win win. You get it?”

Marie had spent her life in university, BCG Digital, and sports. She was twenty nine when she started, and she preferred practical blue pantsuits from Hugo or Mango with white sneakers. She was so structured and data minded she looked like she’d stepped out of a textbook called Leadership 4.0.

I briefly wondered if the smartest move would be to have an affair with her. But I was forty eight and every two weeks I used L’Oréal Men Expert gray coverage to hide my white streaks. I hadn’t stepped on a scale in two years. I had developed a bad feeling about my own body.

She, meanwhile, ran exactly 7.5 kilometers every morning in the English Garden and listened to American business podcasts. In the evening, three days out of five, she went to the gym or the CrossFit box around the corner. Her favorite influencer was a hyper styled hardbody on Instagram.

And when the day ended, Marie probably trained her silky pelvic floor with some next gen toy from a boutique brand.

That was not my game.

I had been the sole ruler of marketing for years. Now I had to share power. Every day I went to the office and acted pragmatic and professional. At night I barely slept because of the stored up rage. I had built this. Over years.

Back in the gray ancient times when I started there, there was no corporation, no DAX, no win win. There was a sad tech existence in Munich’s suburban belt. First I changed the logo with reckless confidence. I buried the predictable old wordmark and replaced it with a Microsoft or Oracle type logo. Letters only. Gray and blue with a red accent.

That was the beginning.

Then we jazzed up the website and all corporate communications. “Innovation through design” became the new core message of our shiny new super company. Nobody really understood what it meant. Whatever. It sounded punchy enough for investor comms.

Money started flowing in wider streams. We grew like weeds. I went through three office moves. My team started as two people and ended as more than thirty. We were global. Sexy. Exciting. Germany’s answer to international tech firms and data krakens.

Then Marie arrived and explained the world to me again.

She took over my meetings. She briefed my teams. She introduced agile employee evaluation methods and finished the entire budget in three days.

Marie wasn’t mean. She said she liked me. It was about the change process and proving herself to the board.

“You’re the guy with the insane track record here,” she told me once, poking at her chickpea salad from Bite Delight. “Everyone respects you and everyone expects me to fail. So I have to fight. You get that, right?”

Sure. “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” Another calendar quote.

I will never forget the day I lost the fight against my rage. She scheduled another team meeting and talked for half an hour about her new data driven marketing strategy.

“The time for solo runs is over,” she told my team. “Now everything aligns with the strategy.”

Then she looked straight at me and said, “That includes you and your creative team. No more solo runs.”

I didn’t explode in the meeting. I exploded right after.

I stormed into her office and declared war. What had she done, really, with her data driven crap? Where was creativity? Where was the power of the brand we had built? And why was she lecturing me in front of the entire team? Where was the dual leadership? Where, Marie, exactly, was the win win?

I told my closest people to stop communicating with her. I openly questioned her management skills. I challenged her.

She didn’t fight. She escalated, coolly, to the board. I was an idiot and walked right into her provocation.

“It’s time for change,” a voice in my head said.

A few days later a headhunter from this startup contacted me on LinkedIn. “We have an open position that might interest you.” Basic marketing. It’s always about timing and the right offer.

Now I have to prove myself again. Everything is different and I don’t understand it. This startup has no visible master plan and no real concept. It’s all disruptive flow. Constant discussion. Endless strategy adjustments.

Everyone here seems to have come from McKinsey, or has some WHU degree from Koblenz, or did St. Gallen. So there has to be something at the core that all this intelligence is orbiting.

Our core product, an algorithm that supposedly makes it possible to predict stock prices in real time, based on the “symbiosis of quantitative capital market models and machine learning,” is still in beta.

But seventy specialists from all over the world are preparing to unleash the power of this miracle machine. First Europe. Then global. The roadmap doesn’t end until 2028, tapering off at the far end of a gigantic hockey stick.

In this mess I am the senior super guy who once performed marketing miracles at a DAX corporation.

“We need people like you,” Stephan said in the first interview. “Only kids here. It’s time for the heavyweights.”

Sure. Right.

For today’s call with Matthei I planned to contribute. Over the weekend I read a book called How to Do Everything Right and Still Fail? and stocked up on compact wisdom. Maybe I could point out the illogic of disruptive innovation. Or casually drop the concept of incremental progress. I am the quiet lake, the deep experience, rising slowly to the surface like air bubbles.

At 8:20 I start searching for suitable digital backgrounds for the meeting. Hip New York loft office. Banksy graffiti. All been done. All standard.

So I open Google in a new tab and search “Zoom background art.” The Kunstpalast Düsseldorf actually offers two or three backgrounds that are kind of mediocre. Time is tight, so I choose an image of two hands painted with ones and zeros.

Binary. Artificial. Good enough.

Two minutes before eight thirty. I select the background and click into the Zoom meeting. Of course I’m the first one there. Like always. If I bring no real value, they can at least be impressed by my obsessive punctuality. I turn camera and sound off and wait.

Stephan joins.

“Already here?” he asks, with heavy irony. “That’s not usually your style.”

He turns on his ring light. Welcome to the evening news. Stephan uses a background showing the last press conference of Donald Trump. Not super original. Fine.

Matthei enters. First as a voice. No video.

“Sorry, boys. Sorry, but the fucking camera won’t turn on. Fuck. I hate this shit.”

He wants us to know he’s here. Then, as expected, the camera comes on. He’s sitting at a white desk in a fairly bland office. Behind him, a stuffed Billy bookshelf from Ikea. Stephan is probably taking a screenshot right away so he can zoom in later and read the book titles. Everyone does that now, when somebody accidentally shows something personal.

Then Matthei switches to a digital background. An eighties bodybuilder gym. Women in tight neon jerseys training with heavy weights, hyper ambitious. It has nothing to do with today’s topic.

That’s why it’s perfect.

“Matthei,” I mumble, helpless. “What is this chaos behind you?”

“Just some stuff,” Matthei says.

“Okay, let’s start,” Stephan says, fully the boss now. “Last time we tried to open up new ways of thinking for marketing the product. Disruptive things we don’t have on the agenda. Matthei, enlighten us.”

“Am I the host?” Matthei asks.

“Hold on,” Stephan says. “Now.”

“Okay,” Matthei says, and he starts flipping through a presentation that is basically just images. The legend is that the deck has more than five hundred slides and that he can tell a full story for each one.

That’s his thing.

Matthei launches: “So. Yeah. You guys are conceptually all in on B2C now. Consumers come to the site. They check your offer. Then they bounce. Retargeting. Come back. Subscription. Okay. Works. But have you seriously thought about B2B? Like Oracle or SAP. Big business, boys. Not necessarily front row, but big. My idea: you market the algorithm to institutional investors as a white label offering.”

“How would that work?” I ask, and I instantly know it’s a mistake. I’m supposed to be the marketing genius in this call.

“Okay,” Matthei says. “You run an initial test for validation. Usual program, new channels. Landing page focused on institutional players. Benefits, bam bam bam. Only highlights. Only muscle, no fat, you get it? Then you add LinkedIn promotions on top. Killer targeting. You check performance and decide data driven. Light speed, friends. That’s how the game is played.”

“Good idea,” Stephan says, and I can feel him wondering why the impulse didn’t come from me.

“Yeah,” I echo. “Sounds cool.”

The discussion moves back and forth. Then Matthei ends screen share and we’re visible again, sitting inside our little worlds of staged backgrounds.

At exactly 8:59 Matthei’s background changes into a massive stopwatch counting down the seconds. Super busy. Every moment matters. Time is over.

While the end of time animation runs, the innovation guru keeps talking, totally unfazed. His magic trick is that everything looks seamless.

“Next steps?” Matthei asks.

“I have to go,” Stephan says. “You do the orga.”

“He’s killing me,” Stephan texts me on WhatsApp as he leaves the call. We’d probably pay Matthei four thousand a day too.

“And what’s next for you?” Matthei asks.

“A few short calls,” I say. “Then lunch.”

“Lunch. Okay. Sounds like a plan, man.”

In his loft, a Boston Dynamics robot dog probably makes lunch out of fermented soy sprouts.

Matthei clicks out of the call.

My wife calls my phone, which I put on silent earlier. I stare for a minute at my high definition, perfectly lit, expertly manipulated face in the empty Zoom window and decide not to pick up.

There haven’t been good messages from my wife lately.

I quit Zoom and close the notebook. Only the fan keeps spinning for a few seconds, cooling the MacBook’s processor and eating my thoughts.