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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The solution to this is remote work. The main benefits of being in the valley are access to investors/capital. This advantage mostly only applies to executives. So have your executives in SV and have everyone else be wherever they want to be that is cheaper and nicer for them.

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Depending on the amount of communication needed for being efficient. I work 10+ years in a Rendite First organisation and there are regular times where I think "damn, discussing this over the water cooler, while running into each other, would be more efficient" than a chat exchange or setting up a video/phone conf. Of course on the plus side I have the uninterrupted working hours, where nobody walks in to me and flexible hours to arrange my life and the tendency to not fully separate private and work which easily leads to free overtime ;)

I actually saw an interesting solution to this. I don't remember what company it was, but they had a designated "water cooler time" where they had a video chat up every day that anyone could pop into and talk about whatever they want, business or not. It gave people a chance to have those serendipitous conversations and built team morale.

What I do in my team is dedicate time in regular meetings for "fun talk" which is non work related, but still different from a true informal thing.

What friends of mine are doing is "nearmote" everybody still in a one or two our distance, so you can meet up on relatively short notice and can schedule regular team meetings, but also have benefits of remote.

I'll second this. Turning the camera on 15min in the morning to chat about anything: pressing issues, vacation or home life makes for good digital water cooler time.

"morning" is a relative term, when distributed over continents :)

Maybe we need Houseparty for work?

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