What building SoWork taught me about culture

I gave a talk about culture that a lot of people watched, and the line that stuck was the simplest one: a company's culture is what happens in the gaps. Distributed teams removed the gaps. Not the meetings — the corridor, the shared lunch, the ten seconds after a call ends when someone finally says the real thing.

We spent years at SoWork trying to give teams back those gaps: presence you could see, a space you could wander, small accidents you could have on purpose. The lesson wasn't that the office was sacred. It was that unscheduled contact does load-bearing work, and if you delete it you have to rebuild it deliberately.

You cannot schedule the moment someone decides to trust you.

The practical version, for anyone running a remote team: protect at least one recurring low-stakes place where work is not the agenda, make presence legible without making it surveillance, and treat every departure as data about a gap you failed to rebuild.