Balaji Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…But face to face gets better, too, because Slack is a complement to face-to-face interaction. It’s making both the remote and the direct better. Is it changing the ratio? Yeah, at least anecdotally. What I found is, a lot of the companies that I’ve been working with have a Bay Area HQ, where your hubs are in-person and your spokes are international. What I mean by that is, it is true that executive functions, management, things like that where you’re managing people, then face to face is good. Whiteboard sessions are good, et cetera. If you’re really just primarily working with electrons, you don’t need face to face as much, and you can be on your own schedule. Let’s say, if you’re a manager, if you’re an executive, yes, face to face is still probably necessary. But as an engineer, it’s less and less necessary, I think. If you try to think it through, what’s the main failing at the margin of telepresence? If I said, “Well, I think the main failing is you cannot send smells over telepresence,” that doesn’t sound plausible. It seems you could get on with people and work with them face to face, even if you didn’t have a sense of smell. What exactly is the thing that’s missing if we get into a very good teleconferencing room, we all sit around the table, speak to people on the screen? If not smell, what is absent that makes that less valuable?…

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