The Global Future of Remote Work, According to Three HR Startup Leaders | TechCrunch Disrupt 2024
- Aisha Washington
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
Headlines about mandatory office returns can make remote work seem like a temporary experiment nearing its end. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, however, leaders from Gusto, Remote, and Check presented a more complicated—and more consequential—picture. Work is not moving uniformly back to the office. It is fragmenting into models shaped by industry, company size, geography, and employee expectations.
Their discussion also showed that the future of work is about much more than video calls or office attendance. Distributed employment depends on an extensive operational layer: payroll, taxes, benefits, equity, local regulations, worker classification, and reliable payments. As companies hire across cities and borders, HR technology must make that complexity manageable without pretending it has disappeared.
Remote Work Is Becoming a Portfolio of Models
Amazon’s decision to require employees in the office five days a week provided an obvious starting point for the panel. The speakers treated it as a meaningful corporate choice, but not as proof of a universal retreat from remote work. One company’s attendance policy reflects its leadership philosophy, operating model, and culture; it does not necessarily describe the direction of the broader labor market.
Data cited during the conversation pointed toward continued diversity. A survey covering more than 300,000 small and medium-sized US businesses reportedly found that roughly 20% were moving toward fully remote operations, about half favored hybrid work, and approximately 30% were returning to an office-centered arrangement.
The practical conclusion is not that remote work has won or lost. It is that employers are selecting from several viable configurations. A software company recruiting scarce technical talent may benefit from a geographically broad workforce. A childcare center, agricultural operator, or hospitality business must design around physical locations and shift schedules. Even within the same organization, different roles may require different answers.
The speakers suggested that the post-pandemic adjustment was beginning to settle into a durable pattern by 2024. Distributed and hybrid work no longer needed to be treated as emergency arrangements. The next challenge was to build systems suited to each employer instead of forcing every business into a single template.
International Hiring Is Moving Into the Mainstream
Remote work has expanded the practical recruiting territory of many companies. Once a business becomes comfortable managing employees across states or cities, hiring across national borders can become a logical next step. According to a figure shared during the panel, more than three-quarters of companies already employing at least one international worker intended to keep hiring internationally.
That momentum is not confined to large technology companies. The speakers highlighted a surge in entrepreneurship, citing more than 550,000 new employers formed during the preceding year—a two-decade high. They also noted that more than four million US employers have fewer than five workers.
These very small businesses are an important part of the story. Historically, sophisticated workforce systems were designed for enterprises with large HR and finance teams. Modern platforms can give a five-person company access to tools that were once difficult or uneconomical to obtain. The same shift that allowed Shopify and Square to bring commerce infrastructure to smaller merchants is now appearing in payroll and workforce management.
Better software does not make every company capable of hiring everywhere overnight. It does, however, lower the operational threshold. Entrepreneurs can assemble distributed teams earlier, recruit for specialized skills, and start businesses that would have been impractical when employment administration depended on manual processes and local expertise.
“Work From Anywhere” Still Has Uneven Benefits
The freedom associated with remote work can obscure persistent differences between headquarters employees, domestic remote workers, international employees, and contractors. The panelists cautioned against assuming that people can work from any location while receiving identical compensation, benefits, equity, and legal protections.
Contractors have often received less favorable treatment than conventional employees, particularly in benefits and ownership opportunities. The expansion of distributed work is creating pressure to improve that arrangement, but progress depends on legal reform, company policy, and better infrastructure.
Equity illustrates the difficulty. Granting shares to workers across multiple countries can introduce unfamiliar reporting obligations, taxation rules, and administrative processes. Remote’s representative described efforts to make international equity issuance and management more accessible. The goal is to let companies offer meaningful ownership without requiring every employer to become an expert in each jurisdiction.
Still, simplification must not be confused with uniformity. Countries define employment relationships differently, tax compensation differently, and impose distinct reporting requirements. A credible global employment platform has to preserve those differences inside a workflow that customers can actually use.
Payroll Is Infrastructure, Not an Administrative Footnote
Payroll may look like a back-office function, but the panel framed it as one of the most sensitive systems a business operates. Employees organize rent, food, healthcare, and family expenses around receiving the correct amount at the promised time. A payroll mistake is therefore not merely a software defect; it can immediately disrupt someone’s life.
The stakes grow as a provider handles more employers, jurisdictions, and payment volume. Gusto’s leader said the company had processed more than half a trillion dollars in payroll, illustrating both the scale of the opportunity and the responsibility attached to it.
Regulatory expansion makes the work harder. The panel cited an estimate of more than 15,000 new compliance rules appearing each year. When Gusto began, its representative said, about 35% of US companies were being fined annually for payroll-tax errors. Gusto now serves more than 300,000 businesses—over 5% of US companies—with approximately 2,700 employees.
Those figures also explain why payroll remains open to competition. No single provider can perfectly serve every kind of organization. Agriculture, for example, brings specialized requirements involving migrant labor and H-2A rules. Childcare facilities, restaurants, and coffee shops each have their own combinations of scheduling, hourly wages, exemptions, and reporting.
The strongest products may therefore be those built around the employer’s actual industry rather than payroll alone.
Embedded Payroll Turns Vertical Software Into an Employer Platform
Embedded payroll was a central theme of the conversation. Instead of asking a business owner to leave an industry-specific platform and configure a separate payroll service, embedded technology places payroll directly inside the software already used to manage operations.
Check’s representative described this as the company’s exclusive focus. Check supplies infrastructure, training, and operational support so its customers can become capable payroll providers themselves. The proposition extends beyond exposing an API: the partner needs help launching and maintaining a trustworthy payroll business.
Gusto follows a related strategy through Gusto Embedded, introduced three years before the panel. It allows platforms to develop native payroll experiences using Gusto’s infrastructure and regulatory knowledge. Chase was mentioned as one of its major partners.
The appeal is especially clear in specialized markets. A platform serving coffee shops might combine scheduling, hourly workforce management, tip calculations, and payroll in one coherent product. The employer receives guidance suited to a familiar workflow, while the software company can deliver a deeper service without rebuilding the full compliance stack.
Embedding also offers greater control than a loose integration. Check’s leader argued that a platform can tailor the experience, determine how customers are guided, and retain ownership of the relationship. This matters when employers encounter intimidating questions about tax classifications, industry rules, or exemptions. A form alone is insufficient; the product must help users make defensible choices.
Global Payroll Requires Local Knowledge and Strong Partnerships
Remote’s perspective added the international dimension. Features that customers experience as obvious—such as dependable cross-border payments or payroll in multiple countries—are supported by extensive legal, financial, and operational work.
Every market introduces different tax authorities, employment regulations, deadlines, and accepted practices. Providers must translate that complexity into understandable actions while maintaining accurate payments and filings. When errors occur, the response matters: fast communication, transparency, and competent coordination with government agencies can turn a failure into an opportunity to reinforce trust.
The market is competitive, but its size leaves room for several approaches. Competition does not rule out collaboration. Gusto and Remote, for example, partnered to give Gusto customers access to international employer-of-record services. Each company contributes expertise that would be expensive and time-consuming for the other to reproduce.
This build-buy-partner decision will remain central to HR product strategy. A company should build when a capability is core to its differentiation, buy when ownership is strategically valuable, and integrate or embed a partner when specialized expertise offers customers a faster and safer result.
AI Can Improve the Interface, but Compliance Remains Real
The panelists were optimistic about AI’s ability to make workforce software more capable. AI can help users interpret complex information, automate repetitive work, and navigate decisions that previously required specialist knowledge.
Yet the speakers did not suggest that AI would erase regulation. Payroll rules still differ sharply across countries, and tax obligations remain enforceable regardless of how elegant the interface becomes. AI’s most credible role is to make complexity easier to manage while established systems, domain experts, and accountable providers ensure that the result is correct.
This distinction matters. Employers should not need payroll training or hours of research through government documents to pay their teams. Products should begin with first principles, ask understandable questions, and guide users through exceptional cases. As Gusto’s leader put it, good software should feel like a new capability granted to the user, not another profession they must learn.
Trust Will Define the Next Generation of HR Technology
When discussing product priorities, the panel emphasized impact and intensity. Payroll and benefits products directly affect livelihoods, so roadmap decisions cannot be based only on novelty or marketability. Teams must consider how many customers a feature helps, how seriously it affects them, and what happens when the system fails.
That responsibility also creates opportunity. Complicated, compliance-heavy industries are difficult to enter, but solving their problems can produce durable value. Lindsay Ma expressed particular interest in the legal sector because legislation keeps evolving and creates room for technology to make difficult processes more accessible. Other panelists pointed toward healthcare and additional regulated fields where administrative simplification could give entrepreneurs and workers greater peace of mind.
The future of remote work, then, is unlikely to be defined by a single office policy. It will be shaped by infrastructure that allows different forms of employment to function reliably. The winners will not merely make hiring possible across locations. They will help employers pay people correctly, distribute benefits more fairly, navigate local rules, and recover honestly when something goes wrong.
