On the mind.

Traveling Week 2 of 4 - Rajasthan

This week, I am in Rajasthan, India, on a work trip with my family. We’re here to vet a location for our next all-hands company retreat. It’s a big investment from our end, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get our team together, so we have to check it out before we host it. So far, so good, but we’re currently debating whether to hold it closer to our office in Kerala or somewhere a little farther, like the state of Rajasthan. What we do know is that our next retreat will be in India. This visit is for the retreat in 2025 or, at the latest, the beginning of 2026.

Retreats like this for nearly 100 people can take at least 12 months to plan, so we are here getting ahead of it.

A huge plus for me is that I get to bring my family to such special places. Currently, they are with me, and we met at the Delhi airport earlier this week.

Taking my family on work trips started with our last retreat to Bali.

When we were planning our trip to vet the Bali retreat, something felt weird about leaving my family behind for weeks. I was originally planning not to bring them, but then I decided to on a gut feeling I had. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if they would be a distraction or not, but I did know that I didn’t want to leave them behind. Being the co-founder, I made the decision to bring them along. The business would cover my expenses, and personally, I would buy the flights and personal expenses for my family. It seemed fair enough that I would bear those expenses, so we set off for Bali as a family.

In the end, my family did not get in the way; they actually enhanced that trip by being there. It was an incredibly special trip to bring them along! I would have work meetings without them as needed, and they would join in on anything that was kid-friendly. The memories we created together on that trip will last forever.

Summary of what I learned about the Bali trip: My family did not get in the way of business, and we created incredibly special moments together at the same time.

So here we are again at another location in the world: Kristin (my wife), our three kids (we only had two kids in Bali), Gina (who works for White Rabbit Group), and myself.

I can’t give too much away about the exact location because we like to keep some of it a surprise, and another reason that I don’t want to share much is that we may not even go with this location.

We shall see.

Today, I feel lucky to be with my family here, experiencing life and combining work at the same time. Not going to lie, it’s pretty cool, and we plan to keep the tradition going for years to come.

I wanted to share some photos from our Bali trip a couple of years ago.

In two days, we fly to Vietnam as I take a couple weeks off work to enjoy some good pho, immerse ourselves in the Vietnamese culture, and relax on the beach.

Business.

I am still running on the excitement from last week's visit to our Kerala office.

It was another big reminder that no Zoom call, no Slack group chat, no digital world comes close to the importance of meeting people in person.

Every time I meet someone in person whom I previously knew only online, the relationship changes forever.

One example that comes to mind is meeting my co-founder, Abhilash, for the first time in person. I met Abhilash online while looking for engineers for a previous company I owned and past client projects. Our relationship was good, but he was a person I was using for engineering support. Things changed when a big enough project/business, called Soul id, came to fruition, and I flew to India for nearly six weeks to work together. Our relationship changed forever.

Less than two years later, after meeting in person, Abhilash and I co-founded White Rabbit Group.

I’ve been working in the digital age pretty much my whole career, and there are many, many people I have worked with for years whom I have never met in person. It’s pretty strange when you think about it, that a lot of business is collaborated on remotely.

I do love working from home, and I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Visiting the Kerala office was just such a deep reminder though that I need to see my team in person more often.

I’m already thinking about ways I can connect our team in person more. That could be a management retreat where we have a smaller group meetup. I am definitely going to visit Kerala more often. We’re already planning to fly team members out to Kerala in the next few months because that in-person connection is so important.

If you’re working remotely, that’s fine, but don’t be fooled—nothing compares to sharing the same physical space, being around the energy of another human, and having real conversations with eye contact.

I had gotten into a place of complacency before this last trip, sitting by myself in a room for basically years, building our team. Literally, I had not visited India for almost seven years.

Nothing beats in-person. Nothing.

One pic.

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The Weekly is a newsletter that goes out each week written by Greg Bellinger, currently building and CEO of White Rabbit Group and The Labs.

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