I’m not someone who is against the way we adopt “new” technologies, otherwise I would be out a job quicker than you can say “multi-agent systems where specialised AI agents collaborate on complex tasks” (I had to fit this in for SEO).

Now that it is clear that I’m not some Luddite railing at the modern world from some rocking chair, I have spent enough time watching people make decisions to know this: if you want to understand someone, it’s much easier being in a room with them.

A video call is to a real meeting what a photograph of steak is to dinner. It contains the right information arranged in roughly the right shape, and it will leave you somewhat unsatisfied.

I spend a lot of my working time in what they call sales engineering. That’s a fancy way of saying I help startups figure out whether Vercel or v0 solve their problems before they sign on a dotted line.

Comfort, the Enemy

Zoom, Google Meet and the rest are comfortable, which is precisely the problem. Comfortable people don’t reveal what’s really bothering them. They sit in their home offices with their carefully chosen virtual backgrounds, their microphones on mute and they nod along to your demo or slides like students who didn’t do the reading (I’m very guilty of this too). You finish the call thinking it went well. It didn’t go at all. It just kinda happened.

On the other hand, when you’re sitting across a table from someone, you can’t miss the chief architect folding his arms when you mention your migration path. You can’t miss the CTO glancing at her colleague when you quote a number. These are signals that tell you where the deal actually is, as opposed to where the polite noises suggest it is.

The Whiteboard, an Honest Broker

There is something about standing at a whiteboard with another human being that no screen-sharing tool has replicated. When you share a screen, you are educating and performing. When you pick up a marker and say “show me how your system works today”, you are educating and collaborating. I've always believed that the best way to understand anything, such as a business, is to ask someone to explain it to you like you're an idiot. People do this much more willingly when you're standing next to them with a marker in your hand than when they're presenting to a grid of thumbnail faces.

The Disorder of Real Conversation

Zoom has imposed a tyranny of orderliness on conversations, where everyone mutes, waits their turn and sticks to an agenda. The result is a tidy conversation where you get the meeting you planned for but not one molecule more.

Imagine you’re mid-demo, walking through a deployment flow. The engineering manager sitting at the back, who’s been quiet the whole time, suddenly leans forward and says “Wait, go back. Can that work with our monorepo?”. It’s not on the agenda and nobody briefed you on their repo structure. Nevertheless, the conversation has shifted from a scripted walkthrough to one of the problem’s that’s been blocking their team for months.

On Zoom, that interruption rarely happens. The colleague will likely stay muted and take a mental note to bring it up later, and of course never does as the topic has shifted and the thought has evaporated.

Naturally, before a change in topic, you would encourage the audience to ask questions that are on their mind. However it’s common for someone to drift away and conduct other forms of work whilst a demo is in motion. In my opinion, being present in a room forces one to focus on the conversation.

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, I was on-site with a client. It was a standard engagement, where we walked through how our serverless functions deploy their API routes. Nothing too exotic. Then their lead backend engineer cut in, “What happens with cold starts? We’ve been burned before”. So we shifted the conversation and I showed them Fluid Compute, how it keeps functions warm, reuses compute across invocations and eliminates the cold start penalty that had been costing them latency and money.

Then their VP of Product walked past the glass conference room, saw the whiteboard covered in architecture diagrams and sat down uninvited. “If we can keep things warm like that”, he said, “could we toggle features instantly without redeploying?”. Nobody had planned to discuss feature management that day, yet we were now deep into Edge Config, storing feature flags that propagate globally in milliseconds, driving routing decisions at the edge through middleware, toggling entire user experiences with a single boolean from the dashboard. (Who would I be if I wasn’t trying to sell here).

By the end of that meeting we had sketched out a full incremental migration strategy which included emergency rollbacks, preview deployments for stakeholder review and Fluid Compute to keep critical paths fast. The original agenda had three bullet points, but the actual outcome was an architectural blueprint that became the foundation of the deal.

Two “interruptions” produced all of that. Two moments of productive disorder that Zoom’s mute button would have likely killed in the cradle.

Now I want to be clear about interruptions and interruptions. There are rude interruptions, the kind where someone talks over you because they like the sound of their own voice. Those are worthless. But there is another kind of interruption, the kind born from genuine engagement, where someone hears an idea and cannot stop themselves from connecting it to something they know.

Personally I wouldn’t call that rudeness, but rather someone thinking out loud in good company. Which only works when you can read the room well enough to know whether your interjection is welcome. Somewhat of a calculus that requires seeing someone’s face at full resolution, not compressed into a two-inch square.

On Trust and Speed

People do business with people they trust, and trust is a full-body phenomenon. It is built from handshakes and eye contact and the willingness to get on a taxi, train or plane when you could have sent a calendar invite.

I’ve watched, what could have easily been, six-month evaluation cycles collapse into weeks after a single on-site visit. When a prospect or client watches you solve a problem on their whiteboard, not your whiteboard, theirs, the conversation stops being “should we buy this?” and starts being “how can we collaborate further?”

Final Thoughts

Don’t get me wrong, Zoom and other alternatives have their place. Status updates, quick check-ins or even the kind of meetings that shouldn’t have been meetings in hindsight. However, for the conversations that matter, the discovery, the deep technical work, the moment where trust is either built or isn’t, show up. Physically. In the room.

About four years ago, I launched this newsletter to write about web technologies and programming. At the time, I didn’t have a clear long-term direction, the momentum fizzled out, and I shifted my focus to YouTube instead.

A lot has changed since then, so I’m bringing the newsletter back, repurposed around what I’m thinking about now.

Two Goals

1. Share my ideas and observations on startups, business, engineering and whatever else I’m exploring.

2. Use this newsletter as a bridge to meet more people in real life, through events like The Baggala Club.

How I’ll publish

Inspired by Taleb’s philosophy on writing, I’m not forcing a schedule or writing for the sake of consistency. I’ll publish only when there’s something I genuinely want to explore, which will be driven by curiosity, not obligation.

A little about me

My name is Farhan Ali. I’m based in the UK and work as a Senior Sales Engineer on Vercel’s startup team. I spend most of my time collaborating with startups across Europe and the Middle East, helping them achieve their technical and business goals.

The Baggala Club

One of the goals of this newsletter is to create opportunities to meet people in person, through private dinners, workshops, parties and small gatherings designed for good conversation.

My intention is to build a community of people across different industries. Startups and tech will be the common thread, but everyone is welcome. The point is simple: get the right people in the same room and let something useful happen.

To give it a name, I’ve gone with The Baggala Club (the waitlist).

A baggala (also spelled baghla) is a large, traditional deep-sea Arabian sailing vessel that was historically used as a merchant ship in the Indian Ocean trade.

I’m a big believer that the right environment can be the start of a compounding relationship. Sometimes it just means putting two people in the same orbit - people who have never met, but share overlapping interests. One conversation later, you’ve got the start of something that can last for years: partnerships, hires, investments, customers, or simply the right advice at the right time.

I want to use this newsletter as a channel to create events that foster those encounters.

Thanks for reading

Whether you’ve found this through Substack or my socials, thank you for reading. Feel free to subscribe if you’re interested in what I publish, or if you want to hear about upcoming events.

• X (Twitter)

• LinkedIn

• Email: me@rithmic.dev

How you can get involved

Join my newsletter where I will keep you up to date with events I’m hosting.

🥳 Want to come to my events? See what’s coming up here. I also host invite-only, curated events/dinners/workshops in London. Join the waitlist here.