A lot of smart and influential leaders have made the case for returning to the office. More VCs and investors are telling me that startups calling people back into the office are “more serious” and focused on execution.

I’m not here to defend remote work. That’s been done, and Brex has already made our case for it. Admittedly, building a company remotely is not a perfect solution, but nor is requiring everyone to go to the office.

The collapse of SVB, though, revealed a whole new dimension where remote work outperforms: crisis management. The SVB crisis was existential to the entire startup innovation ecosystem and 20% of Brex’s customers banked there. The situation unraveled rapidly into what became the most severe bank failure since the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. For Brex that meant billions of dollars, hundreds of support calls, thousands of applications and at least 10 different financial partners (very eagerly) checking in.

But in a matter of a few hours over a single weekend, Brex reacted more swiftly and efficiently as an organization – and in fact, evolved faster as a company – because of our remote-only organization. To protect Brex, we moved our funds to protect them from systemic banking risk, managed critical partner and regulatory relationships, and prevented fraud and credit losses. At the same time, we launched and secured billions of dollars in funding for an emergency payroll bridge loan product, onboarded 4,000+ customers, and added $2 billion of deposits from the afternoon of Thursday March 9 to Monday morning. Working that rapidly without impacting the quality of the service offered to customers was only possible with our remote-first approach. This is particularly true as a lot of these events unfolded over a weekend. I’ll explain why and offer ways to develop the same habits in your organization.

A remote-first company can spin up work more quickly. Why? Start with the asynchronous tools available to teams today. It started with the financial disclosure leading up to the crisis. SVB had been releasing various 8K filings outlining balance sheet risk. Internally, we have used a Slack channel called “#Conclave-of-Cash” to manage Brex’s liquidity for years (we decided to have some fun with liquidity management and reference the Vatican / Papal processes when deciding where we put our cash). This channel became very active as the situation escalated, as we shared analysis of SVB’s balance sheet, breaking news, and liquidity forecasts and ultimately used the channel to create an emergency Zoom meeting where we made the final call about moving the $290M+ of direct exposure we had to SVB. As the crisis unfolded, we created similar channels for specific aspects of the crisis such as #SVB-Credit and #SVB-Fraud, further easing communication and organization.

A strong risk manager once said to me, “to do risk management well, you need to have been in some accidents and survived to tell the story,” with the implication that experience in crises compounds and helps you confront new ones. As the SVB crisis unfolded, it was critical to connect with key experts and advisors (internal and external) on areas like regulatory policy, money market dynamics, payments fraud and credit risk. Capturing this expert advice and readily distributing it through our remote communication channels - while also allowing real-time Q&A and collaboration - enabled us to disseminate and absorb critical information.

As an example, we had to make a determination of the likelihood our customers would be able to access their SVB deposits and on what timeline. There was a nuance between deposits held on SVB’s balance sheet and those held in money market mutual funds. We needed to understand these nuances and connect with regulatory and financial market experts to understand ways clients could access a money market mutual fund if SVB’s trading portal did not reopen. Sharing this information immediately - with real-time feedback from recipients - allowed us to move materially faster.