I'm someone who has mostly worked for startups, but I just came off a stint working for IBM (Canada), and the difference in the "office culture" at IBM from the startups I had worked at kind of blew me away.

IBM's office culture was basically built around two ideas: 1. that everyone working on a team would be spread around the globe (not necessarily at first, but certainly as IBM had to send them around to do sales engineering.) And 2. that workflows should be designed to accommodate people with disabilities.

This led to a number of "features" that I will miss in any future startup:

• The offices have some "open-office"-like areas... but also cubicles, and individual closed offices, and meeting rooms. All of these—except for some of the cubicles—are flex-allocated. You just sit down at an empty one, and clean up after yourself when you go. IBM even has "work centres"—offices just for people (and entire teams) travelling, with no permanent staff other than ops+janitorial. This office design style resembles EC2 (far moreso than your average co-working space): you can "allocate" part of a floor to be a team's office on any given day, and that space will be some other team's office on some other day. This is just as much about the culture (you don't "stake your claim" to the space, any more than you would a library desk) as it is about the amenities.

• Everything is done online, mostly over text. (Yes, yes, Lotus Notes. But also, increasingly, Slack.) You don't have to come to the office; you can work at a coffee shop, or from home, or from any other IBM office/work centre. You just need to sign into the IBM VPN and you're good. Even weekly meetings are electronic (though often over voice- or video-conference rather than text.) You know who this is great for? People in a wheelchair. People with a sprained ankle. People with social anxiety. New parents, past their leave period, who still want to spend most of their time with their kids. People who don't speak English well but can type and read it just fine. A hundred more types of people, who SV never bothers to hire.

• There's a no-pets policy. There's a no-perfume policy. There's a no-music policy. There's probably a bunch more. The spirit of these isn't "no silliness"; it's "make allowances for people with sensory processing disorders, even if you aren't aware that anyone you know here has one, because it's their right not to tell you."

• IBM offices don't offer amenities like food (other than some meh coffee), and they usually aren't close to anything, rather being in an office park that with low land-values. If you're going to the office, you eat breakfast before you go, and you bring a lunch with you. You eat dinner after going home. Which, of course, means that everyone wants to go home at a reasonable hour, so that they'll still have time—and energy—to make and eat dinner. Going to the office is like taking a day-trip. You pack for it.

To sum up, IBM basically assumes that everyone working there is a responsible adult with a private life that is important to them, that is respected as private by others; and that, while at work, they'd like to get some freaking work done so that they can be done with it and go home.

If anyone has heard of a start-up that follows this philosophy, I'd love to work there. (Otherwise, I'm open to starting a chain of co-working spaces that operate like IBM's work-centres, and give all their member-startups a VPN Intranet and a PBX for voice-conferenced meetings.)