At Screenly, we’ve been fully remote for over ten years. For most of the year, we know each other as little squares on a video call. You know how someone writes in Slack and what time they usually come online, and not much else.
Once a year, we change that.
In the last week of September, 12 of us flew into Trivandrum (which, I learned, is the anglicized name for Thiruvananthapuram) and spent the week at The Leela Kovalam, right on Kovalam Beach on the southern tip of India. It’s our first summit in South Asia, and India now joins Croatia, Portugal, Turkey and Thailand on the list.
A few of our teammates couldn’t make the trip this time because of visas and time constraints. We missed them, and they were with us in spirit (and on Slack) all week.
For most of us, it was our first time in India. For Salman, who heads up community at Screenly, it was home. Kerala is where he’s from, and he made sure we saw Indian hospitality at its finest.
Where we came from, where we’re going
We kicked off the week with a team huddle. The last time we did one was in 2019, and almost half of us hadn’t joined Screenly yet. So we started at the beginning: where the company came from, how it got here, and where we’re headed next.
It was meant to be a 30-minute presentation. It easily turned into two hours of conversation about product strategy and what else we can do to amplify our product and our brand. Nobody was really checking the time. New and tenured folks alike chimed in with questions, ideas, and a bit of history you won’t find in any doc.
We came out of it with a fresh perspective and some bullseye targets on where we want to go. (Fitting, considering how many of us ended up at the archery range later that week.)
Finding each other
The Leela sits on 94 hectares, so there was no single spot where everyone ended up by default. Instead, we went looking for each other.
Someone would post in Slack asking who was around. A few of us would take over a lobby table, or a corner by the pool, or somebody’s balcony. Nobody planned any of it. People just kept showing up for each other.
When you work remotely, almost every conversation is booked in a calendar. This week, they just happened.
Around the table
Most of our meals were shared at The Terrace, and the chefs took excellent care of us, including everyone with specific dietary requirements.
We also had a home-team advantage. Salman became our unofficial local guide for the week. He told us what food to get, what we had to try before leaving, and gave us honest warnings about which dishes we might not survive. Thanks to him, we went well beyond the usual menu picks.
And then there was the spice. Even with his warnings, the rest of us learned very quickly that our definition of “spicy” and India’s are two very different things.
A few of our teammates also celebrated their birthdays that week, so we got to blow out candles and wish them a happy birthday in person for once.
A pitch nobody planned
One of my favorite moments of the week wasn’t on the schedule at all.
Carolyne, our Sales Head got chatting with a potential client on-site, and before long that conversation turned into a live, in-person demo. Suddenly they were all in one room, walking the prospect through what Screenly can do and answering their questions on the spot.
For a remote team, that almost never happens. We rarely get that many functions in the same room, let alone in front of a potential customer.
To make it stand out, the team built and deployed a custom Edge App in under 10 minutes, using an MCP tool for Claude that Salman had helped develop. It almost felt like a mini hackathon, right there in the middle of the summit.
Makers and hackers
Open source and open hardware are a big part of who we are, so Salman took Viktor and Renat to visit two of Kerala’s local maker spaces: the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) and Fablab Kerala in Trivandrum.
They saw projects ranging from drones to environmental monitoring sensors built with LoRa and Raspberry Pis. Viktor’s personal favorite was a set of 3D-printed tools for visually impaired students. ICFOSS is funded by the Kerala government and uses open source and open hardware to solve practical local problems, which was great to see up close.
Back at the hotel, the rest of us got our own hands-on moment. We soldered PCB badges that Salman had previously designed for TinkerSpace Kochi. Some of us had never held a soldering iron before.
Every amenity, apparently
The activities were some of the most anticipated parts of the week: archery, billiards, beach volleyball, swimming, yoga and meditation.
I think we tried almost everything the hotel had.
Archery revealed a few hidden talents. Everyone else was just glad no one got hit by an arrow.
Billiards was the surprise favorite, so much so that we’re making sure the next venue has a table. We’re already talking about a mini Olympics for next year.
Beach volleyball was a proper workout, whether we liked it or not. Between that, yoga with an ocean view (in the country where it originated, no less) and the 5-10 minute walk from the lobby to our rooms, we stayed active all week without really trying. It’s something we encourage all year through our wellness program, so it was nice to see it happen so naturally.
The nights
If there was one thing we all looked forward to, it was the evenings.
Almost every night we’d end up having conversations. Drinks, long talks, the kind where you look at your phone and it’s suddenly 1am. We talked about work a bit, but mostly about everything else. Home, family, food, how people celebrate the holidays where they’re from. I had more of these conversations this year than last, and I learned so much more about my co-workers than the little I knew before.
Until next year
We’re all back home now, back to our respective time zones and our squares on a screen. But I know the people behind them a lot better than I did a few weeks ago, and I think that will carry into how we work together for the rest of the year.
That’s why we keep doing this.
From Croatia in 2016 to Kerala in 2026, every summit has looked different, and every one has brought us a little closer.
See you next year, wherever that is.
