Why I flew to Indonesia to see my team

Hey everyone, hope you're having a great week!

A couple weeks ago I flew to Indonesia to see my overseas teams. Academy in Bali, and Paired in Jakarta.

I've been running both companies remotely for years. Slack, standups, all of it. It works pretty well. I still think if you have a team in another country, you should go sit with them. It makes a huge difference in company culture and is a very important part in retention and employee happiness.

I think a lot of founders with overseas teams never get on that plane to go hang out with their team. They treat team comms as solely on Slack, for years. That works ok for a bit but I see a ton of teams that aren’t as cohesive and “strong” as I thought they could be. It’s because they are stuck seeing each other on Slack only.

Here are the lessons I learned from these 2 company retreats I did.

1. Go sit with your team.

You will learn more in two days in person than you will in two months of Slack. Who is actually leading, who is stuck, how people talk to each other when nobody is typing.

Slack makes everyone look the same. Same check-ins, same "sounds good." In a room you see what's really going on. Who the rest of the team looks at before they answer. Who is quietly carrying a lot. Who is checked out.

If you've never done this, don't overthink it. Pick the city where the most people already live. Go for 3 or 4 days. Work during the day. You don't need some crazy retreat agenda. You just need to be in the same room as the people doing the work.

2. Watch them work.

The useful part of Bali was sitting in the AI workshop and watching how the Academy team actually does the job. You see broken processes you would never catch on a Zoom. Extra steps. Tools nobody uses. Handoffs that only exist because nobody ever sat next to each other and asked why we're doing it this way.

If you fly out and spend the whole time talking at them, you wasted the trip. Put their real work on the table. Dashboards, channels, a recruiter's workflow, whatever. Then fix it together.

3. Use the week for the one thing that is stuck.

Don't try to cover every department. Pick the problem that's been sitting there for months and make that the reason you went.

For us that was AI. We have an AI implementer on the team. I hired him out of China, and he's building internal tools that I think will change the trajectory of the business. Better tracking on our videos, dashboards, and soon some external tools that pair with our channels.

We could have sent another Slack message about it. "Hey guys please use AI more." Nobody changes from that. We sat in a room and actually did the workshop on their work.

If you're stuck on paid ads, make the week about ads. If you're stuck on fulfillment, sit with fulfillment. The trip forces a decision you've been putting off.

4. Hire someone whose only job is to make the new thing real.

This is bigger than the trip, but being there made it obvious.

Most companies buy the tools and then hope. Claude logins, ChatGPT seats, some Notion AI add-on. Usage is terrible and everyone goes back to the old way.

An implementer sits with each person, looks at what they actually do all day, and builds the workflow for them. That's a different job than "go figure out AI." Actual tools. Actual dashboards. Actual tracking so you can see who is using it.

That's why I hired one. The internal tools he's building only happen because it's someone's full-time job. Video tracking, dashboards, and then products that sit next to our channels. If it's everyone's job, nothing ships.

If you take one hiring idea from this email, take that. One person whose whole scoreboard is whether the team is operating differently than they were 90 days ago.

5. Put bonding on the calendar.

The 3:20am card game mattered (we played We’re Not Really Strangers). That's how people stop being names on Slack and start being a team.

Founders skip this because it feels unserious. You flew all this way, why are we spending it playing silly games? But a team that has never laughed together will not tell you when something is broken. They'll just Slack you "all good" and you'll find out three months later.

So schedule it. Dinner, a game, something that isn't a meeting. We're Not Really Strangers worked for us because you can't hide behind a laptop. You have to answer the question and be vulnerable.

6. If a chunk of your team lives in one city, get a real presence there.

Paired has a chunk of the team in Jakarta. We have an office. We have a studio for the Indonesian YouTube channel.

That changes the company. People have a place to go. New hires can sit next to someone who already knows how you operate. You're not managing 10 separate bedrooms.

You don't need a giant headquarters. A room, a few desks, and a reason to be in the same place a few days a week is enough. If you have 8+ people in one country and they've never sat together, that's a pretty cheap problem to fix. It doesn’t even need to be a permanent office - rent them a space for 8 hours every single month, or something like that.

7. Don't treat overseas people like contractors.

A contractor setup is send the task, get the file, pay the invoice. A lot of US founders hire overseas and then run it like that forever.

If these people are running your channels, your recruiting, your fulfillment, they are the company. The way you treat them is the culture. Showing up in their city, sitting in their office, staying up playing a card game until 3:20am... that's you telling them this is for real.

The founders who get average work from overseas teams are usually the ones who never treated them like a team. That's on you, not on the country they're in.

If you have people in another country and you've never sat in a room with them, go. Three or four days, one stuck problem, and one night that's just for the team.

Hope this helps, and have a great rest of your week!

- Charlie

How to vibe code for free. Full beginner walkthrough of building a working app with AI and publishing it, without hiring a developer. Watch it on YouTube

Zapier’s Wade Foster on My First Million. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri get the $5B Zapier founder’s actual AI stack: morning brief, war council, and how he uses AI to hire. Listen to the episode

Andrew Ng: vibe coding still needs software fundamentals. His latest skills-map letter says agents make bad latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs unless you know which tradeoffs exist and can steer them. Read it on LinkedIn

Stripe’s Patrick Collison at YC Startup School. New business formation on Stripe is roughly 2x year-over-year and the median new business is doing better. He says there’s never been a better time to start. Watch on YouTube

Claude Code’s Boris Cherny is letting Claude maintain the apps. Daily Slack routines opened hundreds of PRs, about 180 merged after review. Read the post

Lenny Rachitsky launched a clips YouTube. Topic-specific cuts from Lenny’s Podcast so one idea is shareable without the full episode. Read it on LinkedIn

Canada fires back Sept. 8. The U.S. put 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods, and Ottawa’s matching $20 billion on 700+ U.S. items hits next week. CNBC

Amazon is unplugging Mechanical Turk. The 21-year gig board that once listed 500,000+ turkers shuts Sept 30. CNBC

SpaceX is putting $100 billion into a second Starbase. Vermilion Parish gets five launch complexes and 3,000 jobs at $92,600 average pay. TechCrunch

Tesla raised the Cybertruck $5,000 with no spec changes. Dual Motor is now $74,990 while Gigafactory Texas is running under 10% of its 250,000-unit capacity. Electrek

Vanguard is buying Altruist. The advisor custodian stays a standalone brand. Vanguard will not confirm price; people familiar with the deal put it at $4.6 billion cash. Vanguard

Meta tried to go AI-native and the agents broke stuff. Project OT modeled 60% cuts on some teams. Internal posts say agents drove a 40% jump in major incidents. Ars Technica

A few people from Paired you can hire right now. We’ve already vetted them. If one of these is a hole on your team, book a call and we’ll make the intro.

Janett — Influencer Marketing Manager · Mexico · $5k/mo · available in 2 weeks. Recruits and coordinates creators across DTC US brand campaigns, pipelines of about 50 to 200 creators a month, CAC down 15 to 25% QoQ while holding 3.0x+ ROAS.

Raman — Creative Strategist · India · $4k/mo · available now. End-to-end AI creative. Hook Rate, Thumb Stop Rate, Hold Rate, ROAS.

Ulises — Property Management Coordinator · $2k/mo. 14+ years US property management. Buildium, AppFolio, Rentvine.

Rafael — Real Estate Operations Manager · $1.8k/mo. 10+ years bilingual real estate ops, 6+ STR. Hospitable, OwnerRez, GoHighLevel.

Marko — Shopify & Front-End Developer · $3.5k/mo · available in 1 week. Liquid, OS 2.0, ReCharge, CRO.

Alright, that’s a wrap. See you in the next one.

- Charlie