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If you want to get your foot in the door at these startups, take your shoes off.
In an X post on Tuesday, Ben Lang, an employee at coding tool startup Cursor, posted two pictures of shoes strewn all over the hardwood floors inside what looks more like the entrance of someone’s apartment during a house party rather than the offices of a company valued at $9.9 billion.
“Cursor office(s) in San Francisco,” Lang wrote in the post.
In another X post from Sunday, Lang said he’s only worked at startups with a no-shoes policy and was curious if other companies had the same dress code. Lang later posted a list of 25 other “‘no shoes’ startup offices.”
Other startup leaders started to chime in.
“We are no shoes and no pants culture,” Kyle Sherman, founder of Flowhub, a cannabis software company based in Denver, commented. “Shorts are required though.”
Sherman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We’ve done this for years,” Andrew Hsu, cofounder of SF-based Speak, a language learning app, said.
A spokesperson for Speak confirmed the no-shoes policy, adding that “employees get a slipper stipend when they join the team.”
“Speak’s first market in 2019 was South Korea,” a spokesperson for Speak said. “Our ‘policy’ pays homage to the traditional Asian culture of no shoes inside.”
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Some X users found the policy off-putting, mainly fretting about potential odor issues. Others found it to be an attractive job perk.
Lang assured skeptical minds that “shoe covers/splippers” are available at the entrance.
Cursor CEO Michael Truell and a spokesperson for the startup did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside working business hours.
A no-shoes policy is not a new trend in Silicon Valley. Business Insider wrote in 2019 that going shoeless had become the techie uniform, along with the hoodie, t-shirt, and jeans; the main reason being that some company CEOs grew up in a no-shoes household.
Then the pandemic hit in 2020, forcing a lot of tech workers to go remote. (Presumably, this meant a lot of them were also keeping their shoes off.)
A 2023 CBS News/YouGov survey found that 63% of Americans don’t wear shoes in their households.
Now, more companies are starting to enforce return-to-office mandates. It’s unclear if shoes will become increasingly optional.
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