Six years remote, most of it with no office at all. I think it cost me more good ideas than I realized. Last week I spent four days in a real office with the Safe team, running strategizing and brainstorming sessions in person for the first time in years. The energy in the room was obvious. So was the output. There's a mechanical reason for that. A Stanford/Columbia study paired 1,490 engineers across five countries on the same brainstorming task, in person and over video. In-person pairs generated about 15% more ideas. The cause is the screen: staring at a fixed video frame narrows your visual field, and a narrower visual field narrows the associative thinking creativity runs on. It shows up on a larger scale, too. An analysis of 20 million research papers and 4 million patents found remote teams were consistently less likely to produce breakthrough work. Remote pushes people toward codified, late-stage tasks. The tacit work of actually conceiving the idea happens less. Six years in, I didn't think the format mattered much for this kind of work. Four days in a room told me otherwise.