A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in a conversation about startup newsletters with some of GAN’s corporate partners during our yearly Partner Summit. We’d been chatting about newsletters we loved when I went a bit negative and opened up about a newsletter I had a lot of judgments around. In the newsletter, the company sending them (which I won’t name here because I’m not that mean) keeps showing these seemingly lavish quarterly retreats at fancy resorts all over the world with its whole team. They always make me think, “First, how can you afford this? And second, why would you share with your customers that you’re using profits to take your team out like this every quarter?” (Admittedly ironic judgments, given our conversation happened at the peak of a mountain in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where we’d brought our corporate partners together in a similar way).
I got called out pretty quickly, though, when one of the partners asked me if I knew why this company spent so much on quarterly retreats. When I confessed that I wasn’t sure, she told me that the company I’d been complaining about works remotely and these trips are all about getting their team together, in person. Since they see each other so infrequently, they use these trips to do a mix of team bonding and intense work. Which means, in fact, that this company saves so much on the overhead most of…
