Getting Together In Person

After skipping a year last year, USV held its annual team party last night.

It has felt great getting back to getting together with friends, family, and co-workers this holiday season. It has meant a lot of rapid testing for me, all negative thankfully, including one this morning.

We also had every single team member in the USV office yesterday, which was a first since we fully re-opened in March of this year.

And for our weekly team meeting yesterday, we had everyone around the conference room table. Nobody on Zoom. I can’t remember the last time that was the case.

I’ve been doing in-person board dinners and in-person board meetings a lot lately as well.

While Zoom has certainly transformed the way we work and I don’t expect that we will ever go back to everything in-person, the last few months of getting back together in groups has reminded me how important the human connection is to life, love, and work.

I met with a founder yesterday and he told me that his executive team gets together in person once a quarter. I encouraged him to get the exec team together in person at least once a month, if not more frequently. It is hard to be a tight team, that gives and takes, debates and commits, and moves fast in sync without the in-person connection.

We have a great team at USV and we did great working remotely during the pandemic, but being back in the office since March, working together, and celebrating together, has made things so much better. I am very appreciative of that.