Sharing Where We Stay

Automattic is fully distributed, with no headquarters. A few times a year, teams meet in person at places like a villa in Tuscany, a beach house on the Outer Banks, or a cabin outside Boulder.

Over time, we’ve built a valuable list of team-tested retreat spots: places that work for fifteen people with laptops, jet lag, and strong coffee opinions.

That list mostly lived in spreadsheets and our internal P2 system. I kept thinking it deserved a better home. So on the side, in evenings and weekends, I built one: meetomattic.com.

What it is

Meetomattic is a public directory of the venues Automattic teams have actually stayed in. Not aspirational listings, places we’ve booked, slept in, worked from, and would (or wouldn’t) book again. You can browse by city, see the venues, and read the kind of practical notes that only matter once you’ve tried to run a demo over patchy hotel Wi-Fi.

It’s small on purpose. No accounts, no booking engine, no affiliate links. Just a clean window into how one distributed company actually gathers in the physical world.

Why bother

This is a side project I’m tinkering with for fun. It isn’t going to move a metric. It probably won’t show up in a quarterly review. But distributed work is becoming more common, and the companies figuring it out are mostly figuring it out alone. Every team I talk to asks the same questions when they start planning their first meetup: Where do you go? What do you look for? What’s worth paying for (and what isn’t)?

We’ve been answering those questions internally for nearly two decades. It felt strange to keep the answers to ourselves.

What I hope happens

If a founder at a 15-person remote startup books a place from this list and their team comes home closer than they were before, that’s the win. If another distributed company publishes their own version and we can borrow ideas from each other, even better. The ambition is modest: Share what we’ve learned, lower the activation energy for in-person time at remote companies, and generate a little goodwill in a community that’s done a lot for us.

It’s a work in progress. Venues are still being added, photos are still being chased down, and I keep finding small things to polish. But it’s live, it’s real, and it’s ours to share.

Take a look: meetomattic.com. If you run a distributed team and end up booking somewhere from the list, I’d love to hear how it went.