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Comment by lostcolony | Hacker News Reader

But that provides a better incentive for remote teams. I agree that teams work better in person, but when you have separate teams, working on only tangentially related things, it makes sense to separate them out.

Obviously for small startups this doesn't make sense. But mid to late stage, opening a satellite office for development somewhere else seems like a no brainer. I assume I'm missing something though.

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Two mythologies

Our secret sauce is one thing. Exactly one thing. What do you mean "tangentially related" we'd outsource anything unrelated.

The exit strategy is to be bought by a multinational megacorporation not to have two offices, or even ten. There's sort of a financial fund raising dead zone between having one office and being purchasable and having 500 offices and buying little companies. Very few companies jump that gap and its safer to try and get bought that to try and become Google2.0

Satellite offices do make sense, however, I wouldn't want to be in one at this point in my career. I'm only a few years out of school, and not 100% settled into what I want to do. Being in a bigger headquarters (or a major non-HQ office) is important for me to socialize with other teams, find out what they're doing, and possibly switch to those teams.

It does make sense to separate teams who do different things but these teams do have to align and communicate occasionally. Meeting up in person in a meeting room is an incredibly convenient way to do that.

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