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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

In my experience with very early stage teams, a lot of creativity and innovation occurs as a byproduct of spending a large amount of time together in close quarters discussing a range of topics (work related and not.) I’ve managed remote teams as well and while there are ways to replicate certain aspects of this dynamic, overall it’s much more difficult.

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Remote is so much easier to make work well with an established team and an ongoing project. When either of them is new, it makes things harder and slower.

This. IMO it's very difficult to establish trust in new relationships especially when remote.

Agreed. But as soon as a company gets mature creativity and innovation get killed. If anything, I feel that in larger companies remote people have a better chance to be creative because they don't have to go through the whole meeting circus. My team is onsite with the exception of me another guy. I feel we have the chance to fly under the radar and do stuff whereas the in-office people immediately get sucked into tons of meetings where ideas go to die.

I have some experience with this having been part of Precision Nutrition for seven years and counting. We wrote the platform as a remote team, and DID find it very helpful to have a series of important brainstorming sessions in person. At the time we did this the state of the art for video conference tech was pretty lousy. These days we're 100% remote except for a few in person meetings throughout the years -- the vast majority of which are entirely social in nature.

And a lot of creativity also gets lost (stifled) mostly after a week to a month of the team working in close quarters. Not that it does not occur in remote teams, but remote makes non-verbal communication much harder for the loud-mouths or bullies or whatever kind of suppressor disguised as a leader that can exist in a team.

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