Building from Virginia
Place and time zone as engineering choices.
We get asked, occasionally, why a software studio would set up in Virginia instead of a city that ends in a tier label. The honest answer is that we never picked “tech hub” as a feature. We picked Eastern time, a writing-friendly winter, and proximity to the kind of operators we want to build for.
Eastern time is a feature
EST overlaps with London for the first three hours of our morning and with the West Coast for the last three hours of our day. That's six hours of asynchronous overlap with almost every customer we have, and a clean handoff window in the middle of the studio's deep-work block. A Pacific-time studio gets two of those three things. A European studio gets two different ones. Eastern is the geometry that gets you all three, and we noticed it showed up in our actual calendars before we made it a thesis.
The customers are here
Sepora is a tool for cost-segregation firms. Most of them are within four hours of our office. We can drive to a kickoff. The first three pilots all happened in the same zone, with the same weather, on the same week.
Finora is more distributed by nature, but the early-cohort feedback that has actually shaped the product came from operators we already knew — and people we already knew were people we already lived near. There's a version of this story where geography doesn't matter; it's just not the version we lived.
The thing nobody else mentions
Cost of living is downstream of all of this. One engineer, no marketing team, a salary that doesn't require venture capital to underwrite. The runway math is different. You get to ship without the gun-to-the-head version of product-market fit, which means you get to read the room more carefully than the people who can't.
None of this would be true if “remote” meant the same thing it did in 2019. It doesn't. The studio is in Virginia because the studio chose to be in Virginia. The software is the product; the office is the place we make it.