Marc Andreessen, a partner at prolific Silicon Valley venture capital fund a16z, said remote work could potentially cause an "earthquake" in how people live their lives.
During a podcast with economist Tylor Cowen, the billionaire investor discussed how the pandemic-era rise of remote work could potentially change civilization, a notion he's spoken about before.
"For thousands of years, if you were a sharp, ambitious young person — and this is true of the Medici, and it's true with the Greeks — you had to go to the city to basically get opportunity," Andreessen said on the show.
But with many companies maintaining remote and hybrid work policies since early 2020, now-untethered employees are free to leave big cities for more affordable, previously less populated places, like Kansas City, Missouri, which was recently named the No. 1 place in the US to live and work remotely.
"It's potentially an earthquake," Andreessen told Cowen. "It's potentially one of those things that in a hundred years, people could look back and say, 'That was a real turning point for how society developed.'"
The investor said he's excited by that idea, adding that "if everybody could still have access to great knowledge-work jobs online, maybe that's a fundamentally better way to live."
Andreessen wrote in a mid-2021 blog post that remote work might end up being more significant than the internet and would mark a "permanent civilizational shift."
"It is perhaps the most important thing that's happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that's maybe even more important than the internet," he said.
Major US cities like San Francisco and New York have seen a steady stream of outgoing workers fleeing high housing costs for less expensive locations, including Austin, Texas.
According to a March study from flexible jobs platform Upwork, about five million Americans have moved because of remote work policies since 2020.
