Why We Went In-Person for F30 Meetings

When the pandemic sent us all home, we transitioned F30 from a monthly in-person meeting to a weekly Zoom meeting. At the time, it helped many people get some contact with others during a time when we were all very isolated.

In many ways, the weekly F30 Zoom meetings became a real community and helped hundreds of people “get out of the house” in a manner of speaking. But as the pandemic faded, and “return to office” generally flopped, a new form of isolation has emerged; one where people sit home all day long, staring into a screen that serves as a work place, an entertainment device, and a household administration center.

When we paused F30 in late 2023, it wasn’t because we wanted to transform it back into an in-person event; we wanted to freshen the format. Attendance was dropping, and there were less startups in general as a result of various changes to the investment community. We knew we wanted to update the F30 program, but we didn’t have any firm plans. But this turned into thought not only about F30, but the ways that remote work is good and bad, and what it means for society when we have returned to what amounts to the old “artisan” model of the middle ages, where you might make baskets all day long, and live in the shop where you work. These types of societies had regular gatherings that took people out of the workplace to meet, mingle and generally get away from the routine for a bit.

Around the start of the year, it became clear that F30 needed to be more “special” than yet another video call with a bunch of heads-in-boxes on a screen. We attended many virtual events and found most of the lacking no matter how much the program organizer tried to make them special; all the more so because no matter how slick and sophisticated the virtual event, it was lacking so much of the randomness that makes life in the real world interesting.

We realized that going back to a “classic” in-person format was the right choice. The response to the decision was extremely positive, and our first in-person F30 went well, with great answers from our audience and, most importantly, a lot of interaction happening between participants after the presentations.

We hope you can attend or present at an upcoming F30!