Why
Why is always very important for everything that we do. So why this retreat? We at Praemineo believe future of work is remote. I have been studying few Y Combinator startups which have remote culture, just to mention a couple Stripe and Gitlab. The latter one is interesting, Gitlab has 160 employees in 160 different locations. When their CEO mentioned this in an interview, I was pretty much amazed. I started exploring pretty much how do they do it and how’s it working out for them. We were doing few of the things already to flourish remote culture. So we(my Co-Founder & I) decided to give it a shot for one of the things that they were doing “retreats”. So they have something called retreat where all team members meet once every 9 months at a location anywhere in the world, last they met in Mexico.
How
So how did we do it? First things first, budget. Being a startup and bootstrapped we had to make sure we do it in as minimal as possible expenses with full outcome. We started looking out for destinations. As I have been thinking over this since quite a sometime, I had few in my mind.
- Singapore — Air tickets are cheap and I wanted all of my team to visit a developed country because it’s altogether a different experience for us coming from a developing country.
- Bali — Exotic beaches but dropped because it’s pretty expensive.
- Maldives — Same as 2.
After discussing with my team I got to know that couple of them didn’t have passports. So we had to scrap international options at least for now and look for something local. After looking at our international options it was pretty much clear we were looking for a beach destination, first thought was Goa but then it’s too mainstream. Then I recalled one of my relatives doing Andaman Nicobar islands trip almost a decade ago and me seeing those beautiful white sand beaches and I was pretty much sure Andaman Nicobar islands is the place we are going, then one of my mentor Prashant KV suggested Lakshadweep but when I checked air tickets, they were expensive. Discussing with my team we finally decided on Andaman Nicobar islands as the destination for our first retreat.
Once destination was finalized. I asked for help from my team members, who would like to volunteer for the trip start to end planning? Elvis and Gaurav(my co-founder) stepped up to take the responsibility. They googled and found out different itineraries and packages from sites like MakeMyTrip, Yatra etc. After studying the itineraries and packages the budget was overshooting. So we decided instead of booking via these sites lets do all the bookings ourselves and we can then definitely save enough. Finally, we ended up saving 20%.
What
Day 1 — Morning 11am, landed in Port Blair & evening in Cellular Jail.
Day 2 — Morning ferry to Havelock island, afternoon on Radhanagar Beach.
Day 3 — Early morning beginner level scuba diving experience then to elephant beach for water activities via 2km small trek in Jungle.
Day 4 — Morning ferry to Neil island, afternoon on Bharatpur beach and evening at sunset beach.
Day 5 — Morning ferry to Port Blair, evening at a local beach and market.
Day 6 — Final day.
