Rules for Thee: The Cofounder Fired by His Own RTO Mandate
A cofounder signed the return-to-office order, ignored it, and got fired for it. The office policy is the least interesting part.
William Nieporte co-ran Bramshill Investments, an $8 billion firm, with two high-school classmates. In 2022, all three signed an email telling staff to be in the office five days a week. Nieporte was living in San Ramon, California, hundreds of miles from the nearest office, and didn't comply. His partners fired him for it. His defense now is that the mandate was written for employees, not owners. He's suing HR provider ADP for at least $30 million and is in arbitration with his former partners. Here's the full story.
Jenni and I spent a good chunk of Episode 66 on this one, and the return-to-office headline is a distraction. The real story is the 12% equity. A company provision forces shareholders fired "for cause" to sell their stake, and Nieporte claims the whole thing was engineered to push him out after a lowball buyout offer. The office policy was just the cleanest lever available.
Jenni didn't soften it. This is everything that's wrong with leadership: the rule is for all you lowly employees, not for me, because I'm too important. It doesn't survive contact with a modern workforce. You can't run "that's the rule for you, this is the rule for me" and expect the credibility to hold. And no amount of good internal comms papers over that contradiction, because the contradiction is the message.
The question Jenni kept coming back to is the one that should worry anyone running a leadership team: why was none of this discussed among the three founders in the first place? Which office, which meetings, how it would work for a partner living in California. That silence points to a bigger management problem than the firing does. And if it was really a problem, why is it only surfacing now, years later?
I kept thinking about Starbucks, whose CEO ordered everyone back while himself commuting to Seattle from California. It's the same arrogance, and the same blind spot about what that arrogance costs. Nieporte is now feeling that cost in dollars. It also echoes a report Jenni and I covered a few weeks back: something like a fifth of executives and HR leaders admitted they were using RTO mandates as a quiet way to push people out. Watching this play out, it's fair to ask whether the mandate was ever about the office at all.
The uncomfortable part for practitioners isn't the lawsuit. It's that most "collaboration" and "culture" mandates carry a bit of this DNA. When a policy applies to everyone except the people who wrote it, employees notice immediately, and they draw the obvious conclusion about how much their leaders actually believe it.
Also in this episode:
We opened with Marc Zao-Sanders' third annual AI usage study, which has stopped being about adoption and started being about what heavy use is doing to us. He coined "think slop" for the lazy thinking that creeps in when you outsource the reasoning, not just the task. Therapy and emotional support is the top use case for the second year running and it doubled, from 5% to 11%. Jenni and I compared notes on how our own habits have moved, both of us away from content generation toward thought partnering, admin, technical troubleshooting, and summarizing calls. The line that stuck: AI is optimized to keep you engaged, so it will happily gaslight you into thinking you're a genius.
Gustavo Razzetti, author of Remote, Not Distant, has run over 300 executive offsites and argues most fail because leaders treat bonding as the point instead of paying down what he calls "conversational debt," the compounding cost of every real conversation a team keeps dodging. I pushed Jenni on whether leaders can actually handle an offsite that ends in conflict rather than a group hug. Her take: they can handle it in the room, the failure is what they do (or don't do) in the weeks after. Read his seven reasons offsites fail. Jenni also made the case that a good facilitator is non-negotiable, and that her job is to agitate as much as facilitate.
New St. Louis Fed research complicates the popular story that AI is eating entry-level jobs. For 18-to-24-year-olds, a general shortage of openings drove unemployment up 2.9 points, while AI-skill hiring shifts explained only 1.1. Blaming AI is just the easier story, because the villain has no face. Jenni raised the sharper worry: while everyone rushes to upskill in AI, the human skills that actually get you hired and promoted, relationship building, influence, persuasion, are the ones nobody's teaching, and the hardest to teach yourself.
We closed with a study from the New York Fed, University of Virginia, and Harvard finding remote work accounts for roughly a third of the rise in mental distress since 2011, hitting people who live alone hardest. Our friend Stanford's Nick Bloom pushed back hard, as he does, arguing his randomized trials show remote work improving mental health and that the real issue is loneliness, not location. Jenni's framing is the one I keep returning to: this is a design problem, not a location problem. Organisations have quietly cut the connection stuff because you can't measure the return on it, and that's exactly the thing worth doing anyway.
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.
The Frequency Podcast
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