There’s one thing that is really pulling me to come live and develop my startup in the valley. It’s the way of working that is so efficient. This is real-time work.
Today we’ve had 6 meetings, none of which we knew about two days before. Most of the meetings we didn’t know about a couple of hours before the meetings. So, the pace of change is really fast, and there’s the possibility that your schedule changes any minute. It allows you to actually work on what’s the most important thing at any point in time, without any unnecessary meetings. If someone gives you a really great introduction and you have the chance to do an important meeting you can do it right away. Some meetings are done, some are lost. I guess you could calculate how much more efficient this makes everything. It gives you real freedom in work when you don’t have to schedule forward more than a couple of hours.
I really like it and it’s the way I want to work. Of course it’s a managers schedule and probably not suitable for developers.
I think we should try it in Aalto, at least we can start in Aaltoes…
"
"
Indeed. Real-time communications allow you to partake in a “continuous” meeting or conversation. However, you have to set the rules of interaction very clearly in advance; for example, we use Yammer to stay constantly intouch with our Winnovation Network partners – one of which is based in China. And it works great as a notification “newstream”. However, past experience at Zipipop taught us that it does not work well as a detailed discussion platfrom, as that produces a feeling of entropy (overload) amongst others not directly involved in the conversation. So use it to make short annoucements, such as what you are up to, calls for help, checking on situations, sharing relvant links, etc. Basically creating a sense of periphery awarness of what’s going with your colleagues and work partners.