

Why Your Startup Should Have A Retreat - rafaelc
http://blog.learnboost.com/blog/why-your-startup-should-have-a-retreat/

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LeonW
I really like this idea of a week together. However 7 days is quite a long
time. It might apply for startups who have grown beyond 4-5 members. Otherwise
I think what you are saying is still feasible, but maybe not for the entire 7
days. A weekend spent together might be enough.

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rafaelc
We had 6 people when we did our first retreat, so you may have a point. Let me
be clear: we were there Monday to Friday, so it was 5 days.

It was important that we did this during the week so that we didn't cut into
personal weekend time, e.g. with families, spouses, and so on.

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matzner
Yeah, that's key! It's too tempting to just rope in a weekend for this sort of
thing.

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jacquesm
When you're still small forget about this, you need to mind the shop and keep
moving.

Treating your whole company to a week 'off' is a great idea but you need to be
a bit bigger before you can even begin to think about stuff like that, unless
you're very lucky with your launch, cash flow and new hires (who gets to go
and who doesn't?) you will probably need 'all hands on deck' for the first few
years.

A good reward at an earlier stage might be to throw the occasional collective
dinner when milestones are reached for everybody to let their hair down for a
bit, but after that: back to the grindstone, no start-up that I know of could
afford a full week 'off' for the core team in the first two years or even the
first three.

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rafaelc
I'm not saying to take a full week "off", but rather to mix fun and work in a
great location.

We're starting month #8. One of our investors, who co-founded Mixer Labs (now
part of Twitter) did this early on as well. Any other examples out there?

