Serendipity and Remote Work ✨
The importance of in-person interactions
I was reminded of the magic of in-person interactions during a recent company-wide offsite. As a remote-first company, our days are dominated by video calls and scheduled meetings. These digital meetings are efficient and purpose-driven but they often lack the space for spontaneous conversations that can lead to new ideas.
Some things can only happen when we have no predetermined agenda and share a physical space with our colleagues. Over the three days we spent together, each casual conversation and every unintentional encounter in a hallway ignited conversations and ideas that would never emerge within structured remote meetings.
It's surprising to witness how effortlessly connections form between individuals from various departments. These interactions have the potential to spark ideas that will lead to new features, products or event startups.
A few years ago I learned about Building 20 at MIT, a simple, temporary construction that became a hub of innovation. Building 20 had long, narrow corridors and a blend of different departments. It led to unplanned serendipitous interactions between individuals from various disciplines. These chance encounters often sparked groundbreaking ideas and collaborations that would never have occurred otherwise.
Similarly, the new Apple headquarters were designed with the explicit intention of encouraging more interactions between people. The spacious, open-plan layout and the central atrium are meant to create opportunities for employees from different teams to bump into each other, strike up conversations, and potentially generate new ideas. Steve Jobs himself emphasized the importance of these serendipitous meetings, believing that they were key to Apple's innovation and success.
Innovation through experience and interaction is constrained in the digital world of remote work because the potential for new, serendipitous connections is limited. In our shift towards remote work we may be losing out on spontaneous encounters that often lead to breakthroughs and innovations.
It's crucial that we find ways to recreate the magic of these serendipitous interactions in the digital realm.
Ideas? 🤔
Whoami? 🤓
My name is Mica and I am a founder at:
Amplemarket (YC backed all-in-one B2B sales platform)
Fermat’s Library (a platform for illuminating academic papers).
I am Physicist by training. Y Combinator Alumnus. If you want to talk startups, sales, growth or science feel free to email me at mica@amplemarket.com. 🙂