The early stage remote vs in-person debate

I had lunch with a founder who just launched his company about a year ago today. It was great to meet in person and just interact. I’ve been starving for more in-person interactions lately. I’ve made a much bigger effort in the last month to meet people in-person and I’m loving it. Something with the pandemic has made me almost dread doing in-person meetings at times, but after I’m done, I’ve always been glad that I made the initiative.

On the topic of in-person, one thing he said to me that was interesting as that he regrets that he hired remotely right now. It has come with a lot of challenges getting the initial company off the ground.

I can completely understand why. When Secfi first started, we were spread out between Amsterdam and San Francisco. But we had our founders and others fly to San Francisco quite often. I’m not sure if we would have been successful if we hadn’t been in-person in the early days. There was just too much going on and too many changes happening too quickly.

Things are a lot different now and we’re able to functional well remote, but we’ve got much more defined processes in place.