Tech enters its shoeless era

First they ditched the ties. Then they jettisoned the jackets. Now, Silicon Valley tech workers are abandoning a new clothing item: footwear.

When he welcomed me into the Market Street office of his software startup Replo, cofounder Yuxin Zhu was wearing a pair of white hotel slippers. Before I could join him inside, he asked me to leave my sneakers on the crowded six-tier shoe rack at the door.

“Those are mine,” Zhu said, pointing to a pair of injection-molded Crocs, as he offered me slippers to wear.

Abandoning my shoes felt oddly intimate for a business setting, like going in for a hug instead of a handshake. But once I entered the office, no one batted an eye at my slippered feet. Meanwhile, I made an effort to avoid ogling employees’ toes under their desks.

Zhu is extremely earnest about the company’s no-shoe policy. When Replo’s 20 or so employees moved into this office last year, the company tried to create a space that felt welcoming, almost like walking into a friend’s apartment.

There are six oversize beanbags arranged in a circle near the front door and an 85-inch TV where employees play video games at the end of the day. A bookshelf is piled with board games, like Settlers of Catan and Dune. Although the space is very much an office — it used to be a WeWork — many of Replo’s employees spend as much time there as they do at home. 

“We were going for this homey, living-room feel, so we thought, ‘OK, we can treat this as a house of sorts,’” Zhu says. “You don’t walk into someone’s house with shoes on.”

Before starting Replo, Zhu had heard of one other company, Notion, where employees worked in socks or slippers. “I thought it was really interesting,” he says, and possibly more hygienic.

Notion ended its no-shoe office policy around four years ago, as the company grew. But since then, dozens of San Francisco startups — including Replicate, the AI company that took over Notion’s old office in SoMa — have cribbed the idea.

Now, there are so many firms with shoeless policies that there’s a “No-shoes office directory (opens in new tab)” at the well-chosen url www.noshoes.fun (opens in new tab). It was compiled by Ben Lang, who works on the community team at Cursor, where employees do not wear shoes — even in the NYC office. The list includes more than 20 companies. Some are tiny startups, where a founding team works out of someone’s house. Others are large, like Applied Intuition, a self-driving startup with more than 1,000 employees and a $15 billion valuation.

Each handles feet a little differently. At Kernel, a browser automation startup, cofounder Catherine Jue says people always wear socks, though any “no bare feet” rule is unspoken. At Speak, a language learning app company, every employee gets a slipper stipend.

Other companies are less restrictive. On a recent visit to Rime, an AI voice maker with about a dozen employees, I saw one founder standing barefoot on the cool tile floor, a practice she said felt “grounding.” 

Why the sudden rise in free feet? Some say it is a natural extension of the work-from-home era.

“It just felt natural that any space you’re in for 12 hours a day or 15 hours a day, you’d want to take your shoes off,” says Yang Fan Yun, cofounder of Composite, an early-stage AI startup with an office in South Park. “To do your best work, you need to be deeply comfortable, and we think having shoes off encourages that. One of the first purchases we made as a company was a shoe rack.”

Others point to more practical reasons, like not wanting to clean the floors every day. “At first we had shoes in the office, but when it rained, it immediately became really muddy and gross,” says Brooke Hopkins, founder of Coval, a startup that makes simulations of AI agents. “We decided on shoeless because it kept everything cleaner and nicer.” 

But perhaps the most obvious answer is that work-life balance is vanishing in the grindcore era of tech. In the past, tech companies offered extravagant perks to keep employees happy while requiring that they spend hours at the office: chef-prepared meals, massages, free laundry. Now those perks have dwindled. In their place, a shoe rack offers a small consolation — a promise that while you may have to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, at least you’ll be cozy.

The no-shoe thing is also seen as a potentially good omen for striving startups. After all, a handful of companies that previously held no-shoe policies went on to become billion-dollar unicorns. Stripe was “shoes optional” until 2019, according to Edwin Arbus, former head of community comms. So was Substack in its early days, when the team worked out of cofounder Chris Best’s apartment. And Mark Zuckerberg supposedly wandered barefoot on the carpeted floors of Facebook’s first office in Palo Alto.

Of course, there are potential hazards – an outbreak of foot fungus or the unwanted glimpse of a coworker’s unsightly toenails. (One reaction on X (opens in new tab) to a list of no-shoe offices: “I hope they invest in air fresheners.”)

It takes only one pair of smelly feet for things to go sideways.

“Everyone hears the horror story of the one person they worked with who has, like, smelly feet, or someone who has their bare feet up on the desk,” Zhu says. “It’s just a matter of someone fucking it up for it to go away.”

Gusto, a $9.6 billion payroll startup, was one of the first companies to go shoeless. It launched in 2011 out of a house in Palo Alto, where the founding team removed their footwear; the tradition stuck and carried on in the form of a shoe cubby in the San Francisco office designed to fit hundreds of pairs.

“In some ways, people feel more like themselves when their shoes are off,” CEO Joshua Reeves told The New York Times (opens in new tab) in 2016. (Caitlin Matalone, Gusto’s director of corporate and executive communications, says Gusto does not have an official requirement to take off shoes in the office. “It’s optional,” she says. “Folks are welcome to wear shoes into the office.”)

Another side effect of the no-shoe policy: It puts everyone on equal footing, says Michael Fester, cofounder of “agentic customer support” company 14.ai (opens in new tab), where visitors to the startup’s live-work space in the Haight are provided with slippers. “When they knock on the door, we ask them politely to remove their beautiful shoes and put on slippers. It’s such a great icebreaker,” he says. “They start off formal and stiff, but when you take off your shoes, things loosen up.

“You might be a very famous CEO, but when you’re in here, you put your slippers on like everybody else,” he adds.

After visiting several shoeless offices, I could see Fester’s point. Unlacing my sneakers at the door felt a little like arriving at a house party, albeit a very unfun one where people are silently glued to their laptop screens. Without shoes, I indeed felt looser, though I maintained strict boundaries to keep things professional: I never took off my socks.

At Replo, employees wear slippers rather than walking around barefoot. Most employees favor the Muji brand; visitors are offered a cheaper alternative that Zhu buys in bulk off Amazon. There is also a set of “bathroom slippers” left at the door of each of the restrooms for employees to change into, an idea Zhu brought back from a trip to Japan.

The team is still small enough that everyone knows everyone, and employees actually hang out after hours, playing poker or bringing friends to the office on weekends to play video games.

As the company scales, Zhu hopes that the culture he created with early employees will remain — whether they wear shoes or not. “If we were 500 people, someone might be like, ‘This is a bad idea,’” he says. “But it’s a time in our life, right? You don’t get to do this forever.”