Since Covid hit, many of Portainer’s staff have scattered to work remotely. Photo / Getty Images
An Auckland tech firm has bucked the return-to-office trend.
Portainer, founded by Neil Cresswell, is not short of lettuce. In mid-2022, it closed an extended Series A round that brought in a total
of US$12.2 million ($20.1m).
And the characteristic building it inhabited at 1 Boundary Rd, Catalina Bay in Hobsonville Point has a lot going for it. It’s light and airy with a modern fit-out. It has inner-harbour views, cafes, and a waterfront bar just metres away. It’s a 20-minute ferry ride to the CBD. Up some stairs to the main road, there’s free parking.
Yet its charms weren’t sufficient enough to lure back staff who went remote during the pandemic.
Cresswell says his preference was to get everyone back to the office (his firm employs around 40, with half in NZ).
“But after polling my staff, none of them were keen,” he says.
“All of them said they would likely look for alternate employment.”
And Cresswell’s staff aren’t as replaceable as some. His company makes tech that lets you securely manage “containers”, or tech that lets you create an app with one piece of code, then deploy it anywhere, and manage it across different environments like AWS, Microsoft and Google data centres.
To create that simplicity, Portainer has to do some clever stuff behind the scenes. Its founder needs to hire some smart cookies.
Post-Covid, a return to the office looked less and less likely.
“For 12 months, that big office basically sat empty 95 per cent of the time. It was madness,” Cresswell says.
The CEO is one of five who still live and work locally – they’ve decamped from 1 Boundary Rd to The Hangar, a co-working space above nearby Little Creatures, in a building that used to house Air Force seaplanes.
Others have scattered to the four winds.
“Many of our staff left Auckland for the simpler life of Christchurch, Palmy, Hamilton etc,” Cresswell says. One is now living all over.
It’s worked out.
“To be honest, we hadn’t seen any reduction in productivity,” Cresswell says. Interpersonal relationships still happen, but now over Slack and Zoom.
He adds, “There’s no one to two hours in wasted commute time. Almost all are online by 8am, and still online into the evening.”
And while there’s been a pervasive return-to-office trend in NZ (you’re not imagining it if you think rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-Covid levels), Cresswell says many of Portainer’s global clients now have a heavily remote workforce. He sees the trend as the new normal, and “irreversible”.
If you like the look of Portainer’s old digs, the building’s 400sq m over two floors will set you back around $160,000 per annum, the Herald understands, if you lease the whole space.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
