1/ I believe we are approaching the point (or have we already passed it?) where every startup in the San Francisco Bay Area will have a distributed team. Such is the reality of living in the Bay Area, with housing costs, traffic, commute times, high rents, and more.
2/ Having face-time a couple of days a week is going to be the best we can expect given this reality. Building teams and getting the right talent comes with dealing with these realities.
3/ Also has interesting implications about whether being in the East Bay, SF, or Peninsula is any different than being in India, Ukraine, or Poland. Timezone may be the only advantage at play here.
4/ As someone who has railed against distributed teams and remote work in the past (see k9.vc/NoOutsourcing) it really makes me question the tradeoffs between having that ideal colocated team vs. finding people with the right skills in a timely manner.
5/ I‘ve definitely softened my views on this after having been beaten down by how hard it is to find talented people. Given how much I hate sitting in traffic, it’s unreasonable to expect people to do that every day.
6/ That said, there is really no substitute for having a good f2f discussion with the whole team. That might mean we have to shift our working styles to quiet/independent working days co-mingled with a few group/collaborative working days.
