in person

building relationships in a distributed life

👋🏼hello, I’m fabri

Disclaimer: what I write is how I feel. We recently moved to California via London, Paris and Milan. I have enough perspective to tell North Cal and South Cal apart but very little context and even less experience.

Since moving I've spent most weeks working in San Francisco and weekends down in Los Angeles. In total I flew 48 segments out of LAX Mondays 6am and back from SFO Thursdays or Fridays 6pm. Only 3 flights were cancelled and about 30% delayed, on average it took me little over 4 hours door to desk.

If you were to follow a similar schedule it would probably cost you some $4k per month in airfares, rides, pre-check, clear and accommodation. Not to count the metric ton of carbon emissions which you will have to pay back to this planet sometime, somehow.

there was a time in my life where this life was a dream

To compensate for the time spent apart, my wife and I zoomed shared a lot of Netflix every night. At turns we would wake up facing a dark laptop screen. It was reminiscent of our early twenties less than a year from getting married and a whole decade later. It felt like waking up in a nightmare.

The picture above is of the famous Temple bar in Dublin. This month, I also flown back to Italy to visit family and took the chance to stop over in Ireland for some extra in-person time with friends.

Having lived in five countries across three continents I’m no stranger to the concept of a distributed life. Over the last decade I’ve flown some ten times around the world, mainly to hang out with people that matter in my life.

I fly economy and became a semi-professional cheap fares hunter. No caviar nor champagne on my flights. I found actual bedbugs on my seat once.

bottom line: distributed is not a synonym for glamorous

Having said that, the actual commute between SF and LA is easy. Many blu-collar workers do much similar daily schedules without the comfort of leather seats and in-flight snacks. Even in silicon valley, where much of the industry could work from anywhere, people travel hours to join their colleagues in uninspiring and distracting open-plan offices.

Jack Dorsey, is an outspoken supporter ($) of distributed workforces and I echo much of his thinking. Personal spaces are great for focus and creativity, and everyone on a distributed team gets the privacy of their own office.

Nevertheless, just like for family and friends, in-person time is still essential to build and maintain prosperous work relationships. Our tool-kits these days are just not good enough to bridge that gap.

My days flying around the world to connect with people in person are far from over. Because of that, I truly look forward for technology to empower long-distance relationship (both personal and professional) in a way that our current communication and messaging stack won’t. Big opportunity in this space to bring humans closer together online around: