He sells companies something nobody brags about owning: a clean answer to the question "where is the laptop?"
Every think-piece about remote work argues about culture, focus, and pajamas. Oscar Mattsson built a business around the part nobody romanticizes - the gear. The laptop that has to arrive on day one. The monitor that has to make it to Lisbon. The $2,000 machine an employee never shipped back.
allwhere is the New York company he started in 2021 to do all of it at once: buy the hardware, configure it, ship it anywhere, track it, repair it, and - the line that makes finance teams lean in - get it back when someone leaves. It couples an employee-lifecycle platform with the unglamorous logistics that distributed teams quietly bleed money on. Mattsson brought it out of stealth in July 2022 with $9.5 million in seed funding from DESCOvery, the venture studio inside the hedge fund D.E. Shaw.
The name is a tell. "Allwhere is an Old English term meaning 'everywhere,'" he says, and that is the whole ambition compressed into a word - support a worker in any spot on the map, from a Brooklyn loft to a kitchen table three time zones away.
In the months after launch the company tripled in size and told the press it expected to double again before the year closed. Not bad for a startup whose core promise is making sure a charger ends up in the right apartment.
While the current market is temporary, the new ethos that's emerged regarding flexibility and employee wellness is permanent.- Oscar Mattsson, on why he bet the company on distributed work
Before he was diagnosing supply-chain headaches for HR departments, Mattsson took an unusually scenic route. He passed through The Lawrenceville School, then the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied information technology and corporate organizations. His first jobs had nothing to do with laptops: production at Temple Hill Entertainment in 2013, corporate marketing at Morgans Hotel Group in 2014.
The turn came in 2015, when he joined WeWork as a founding member of its enterprise business - the team selling shared offices to large companies. Over five years he cycled through corporate development, global growth strategy, and a seat in the Office of the Chief Growth Officer. WeWork was, depending on the week, the most exciting or most chaotic experiment in the future of work. Mattsson left with a conviction: how we work reshapes society at scale, and the physical setup of work is the part people underestimate.
When the pandemic flipped every office into a shipping problem, he had already been thinking about it for years. He spun up and exited an early venture inside D.E. Shaw in 2020, did a stint in product and operations at Teamstand, then came back to D.E. Shaw's studio to build the thing properly.
He didn't build it alone, and he didn't go looking far for help. allwhere reunited the enterprise crowd: Ben Kessler as chief marketing and growth officer and Josh Rosenthal running customer experience, both WeWork alumni who had watched the same movie about flexible work from the inside.
I saw a gap in the market for a solution that catered to businesses adapting to a newly remote, hybrid and distributed world.- Oscar Mattsson
"After two years of remote and hybrid work, nearly half of knowledge workers still do not have the tools they need to do their job." His point: the conversation moved on, the hardware problem didn't.
"A strict return-to-office plan often leads to losing top contributors even in a recession." Forcing people back, he argues, costs you the ones you can least afford to lose.
"Most companies are working with different vendors for all of these things." allwhere's pitch is consolidation - one provider for procurement, deployment, retrieval, and the human stuff in between.
I personally believe the future of work is about flexibility. It's not about one work model.
Teams have realized they can work just as efficiently using a distributed model.
Most companies are working with different vendors - HR, IT and executive teams are relieved to find a solution that does it all.
allwhere provides white glove, personalized service at scale, so internal teams can focus on other tasks.
Mattsson's stated aim is to make distributed work as frictionless as walking into an office - to dissolve the seam between "remote" and "in person" until it stops being a category at all. allwhere's own framing puts it bluntly: turning remote work into remote-first.
He arrives at that future by looking backward. On his own "Work Everywhere" podcast he traces his read of where work is heading to research he did on the history of technology - the recurring pattern of new tools quietly rewriting how and where people gather to do things. It's a founder who treats the office not as real estate but as a centuries-long question that keeps getting re-asked.