The Remote Show · Tyler Sellhorn, Matthew Hollingsworth

Flo Crivello, Founder & CEO at Teamflow

·27 min·2 clips

Flo Crivello explains how virtual furniture made his investor pitch more intimidating—until a partner invited him to sit at the table.

Remote work has real upsides. Flo starts with the part most people like: no commute, more choice over where to live, and wider access to work. Then he gets to the cost. Teamwork can feel less fun, more formal, and more transactional than it did in an office. Tyler keeps that question practical by asking where TeamFlow sits between synchronous and asynchronous work. Flo's answer is really about the shape of the tools. Meeting buttons, text fields, walls of names, and walls of text can move information around, but they do not give a team much room to feel like people. Slack gets some credit for being the playful end of its category, though Flo says it still turns people into names, messages, and an input box. Zoom has a different limit. It owns formal video, while TeamFlow is trying to bring back the looser video layer people used to get from being in the same office. Flo uses a two by two to explain it: text versus video on one axis, formal versus informal communication on the other. Email is formal text. Slack is informal text. Zoom is formal video. The old office was informal video. That last quadrant is what remote teams lost. TeamFlow is pitched as a way to rebuild that space for distributed teams, not as a place where every kind of work should happen. Tyler's asynchronous question keeps the wider remote-work debate in view. Flo says it is top of mind, but his answer is less anti-asynchronous than pro-balance. Teams need each quadrant, including a cultural layer where informal presence can exist. The episode ends on a warm note, with Flo still excited about remote work and Tyler encouraging what comes next.

As heard by us

A plainspoken case for making remote work feel more human.

Flo Cravello argues that remote work did more than pull people out of offices; it also knocked out some of the casual, human texture of working together.

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Why you'd press play

Want remote work to feel less robotic and more like a real team?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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