One of the biggest things lost in remote work is chance meetings. These are very important, but hard to quantify. If you measure productivity on individual projects, everything will seem fine. Yet when you read stories of how things happened, chance meetings were often crucial.
Chance meetings are especially important in causing new things to happen. But what organization measures that? No one measures progress till there is a project to measure the progress of. I bet even Google doesn't formally measure the rate at which new things get started.
I know about the power of chance meetings because Y Combinator is explicitly designed to magnify it. Whenever YC brings together any group of more than about 4 founders for any reason, there ends up being an important conversation between some pair of them.
