The seductive thing about platforms is the idea that they allow you to serve people at scale. One-on-one office meetings are hard and inefficient; if only you could get everyone on a platform, it would be so much easier.
Sometimes that’s true, and it’s easy to spot the massive examples. But many of those examples are called unicorns for a reason: those platforms met existing felt needs, which aren’t as common as the desire to build a platform.
Sometimes the difficult emotional labor of the one-on-one meeting is precisely what’s valuable about it. Even more often, a platform designed to make your life easier meets a culture that’s not ready for it, and goes nowhere.
If you want to connect everyone, you’ve got to build a culture of connection first. That’s the hard part. Do that, and life will be easier and better on the platform — but only because you did the hard part, in person, beforehand.
Colin Steele 