Employers are waging a war over work from home. WFH is winning.

Hello!

Welcome to this weekly roundup of stories from Insider. I'm Matt Turner. Subscribe here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday. Plus, download Insider's app for news on the go – click here for iOS and here for Android.

What we're going over today:

• Employers are waging a war over work from home. WFH is winning.
• Grubhub was once the premier food delivery service. Then Uber Eats and DoorDash knocked it off the top spot.
• DeepMind's cofounder was placed on leave after employees complained about bullying and humiliation for years. Then Google made him a VP.
• Top venture capitalists shared their picks of biotech companies they expect will have banner years.

What's trending this morning:

• Insider tracked down 59 former Pete Buttigieg staffers. Here's where they landed after the 2020 campaign.
• Helium mining is booming. One prolific miner explained how he capitalized and profited from the trend.
• The relationship between Amazon Web Services and its cloud partners is strained, according to former and current employees.
• Want to fly a plane? Some airlines have developed programs that can take candidates from the streets to the cockpit in five years or less.
• Facebook, Google and Amazon are having a banner year and it's causing ad prices to spike. Here's exactly how much.
  
• Why chief marketing officer may be the most influential job in wealth management.

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The battle over work-from-home has only just begun.

After over a year of remote work, many staffers aren't looking for a return to pre-pandemic business-as-usual. When companies like Uber and Google announced mandated in-person work days, a wave of employee turnover forced them to create more flexible schedules.

Emboldened by the red-hot job market, Americans felt free to shop for flexible work arrangements that better suited their needs. Threatened by a full-blown exodus, executives suddenly realized they could no longer afford to ignore the uproar over working from home.

Amazon backtracked on its "office-centric" plan, agreeing to give employees two optional days a week to work from home. Google and Uber, which initially said they would mandate at least three days a week in the office, scrambled to offer more flexibility.

It was a remarkable sight: some of the world's largest and most powerful corporations being forced to bow to their employees' work preferences.

Get the full scoop here:

• Employers are waging a war over work from home. WFH is winning.

Also read:

• Half of Gen Z employees say they'll quit if they can't work flexibly. Here's how BCG recommends companies make hybrid work.
• What it's like to be a 'zillennial,' part of the lost generation between millennials and Gen Z

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The fall of Grubhub - as told by employees.

Grubhub led the food delivery industry for years, but employees say it was slow to adopt new technologies and adapt to the changing delivery space. This allowed UberEats and DoorDash to overtake them.

To some employees, the company's focus on profitability was part of Grubhub's downfall. DoorDash and Uber Eats didn't have shareholders to worry about. What they had was venture capital.

"They were burning money," a former Grubhub manager who worked at the company until 2020 told Insider, describing Grubhub's rivals. "They were just spending - all these crazy ads, these crazy billboards everywhere. They were giving restaurants crazy good deals. And we just couldn't compete with that venture-capital money."

To keep up with these tech-savvy startups without profitability restraints, the company tried to buy its way to growth and tech upgrades.

Read the full story here:

• Grubhub's plunge to the bottom: Employees reveal how the company dominated food delivery, then nearly lost it all to Uber Eats and DoorDash

Also read:

• Meet the Uber Eats power network: These 12 former employees are raising millions for their own startups
• These are the 4 nightmare scenarios looming over Instacart's plan to go public

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Google hired DeepMind's cofounder as a VP, even though former employees complained he was a bully

In January, it was reported that Google had investigated the alleged bullying behavior of Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind, an important Google subsidiary. After conversations with more than a dozen current and former employees, Insider learned that this investigation came after years of internal complaints to human resources and executives about Suleyman's behavior.

Insider found that during his tenure at DeepMind, Suleyman was an executive who drove his team to great heights and, sometimes, great despair.

"He had a habit of just flying off the handle out of nowhere," one former employee said. "It felt like he wanted to humiliate you, like he was trying to catch you off your guard. He would just start laying into you, in front of your colleagues, without any warning."

"He used to say, 'I crush people,'" one said.

Read what else former staffers said:

• DeepMind's cofounder was placed on leave after employees complained about bullying and humiliation for years. Then Google made him a VP.

Also read:

• 'Bro, who would stay?' Texts from former Tanium employees surface as the $9 billion startup sues them and the firm that poached them.
• Meet Villa, the latest startup filling homeowners' backyards in California with extra, decked out living spaces

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The biotech startups that are set to surge, according to top VCs

Insider asked 12 top VCs to name their picks for biotech startups they believe will surge in the next 12 months. Among them are upstart companies ArsenalBio and Flare Therapeutics. Here's one of the picks:

Generate Biomedicines
Picked by: Robert Nelsen, managing director of Arch Venture Partners

What it does: Generate is using machine learning to program proteins at the DNA level.

Funding raised: $50 million in initial funding from Flagship Pioneering

Why it's poised to take off in the next year: The idea that artificial intelligence and machine learning can help drug companies move faster and design better medications has gained significant investor attention. Venture capitalists invested more than $5 billion in healthcare-focused AI startups last year, according to PitchBook.

See the full list of biotech companies here:

• Meet the 24 biotech startups that top VCs say are poised to take off in the next 12 months

Also read:

• Here are the 15 hottest psychedelics startups that are set to take off in 2021, according to top investors
• See the presentation that a burned-out tech employee used to raise $3.5 million for her quest to create the Yelp for holistic healthcare

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Finally, here are some headlines you might have missed last week.

- Matt

• We are still in a housing crisis
• Meet the 7 people reporting to Bank of America's top tech exec Cathy Bessant who help oversee a $14 billion annual budget and 95,000 employees
• The complete guide to getting a job at Rivian, according to 2 execs who head up hiring for the surging Tesla rival
• Deb Cleveland is a master house flipper who maintains 80 rental properties. The 30-year-real-estate investing veteran breaks down how she picks discounted houses to buy, renovate on a budget, and successfully sell or rent for huge profits.
• New MBA grads should not take jobs in venture, a Silicon Valley VC says: 'It's a bad career choice'
• The vaccines work very well against Delta, so stop badgering the vaccinated to wear masks