Retreat Report: 2026
A retrospective on our summer retreat for 2026.
Every year, Lickability gets the whole team together in a room for a few days as a company retreat. It’s a time for us to come together as a team, reflect on our work, and decide where we want to take the company next. This year, our retreat took place in mid-August at The Malin in NoMad. Our team members outside the New York City area took planes and trains into the city, and the rest of us hopped on the subway or NJTransit into town.
Over the years, we’ve experimented with different formats for the retreat, but what we’ve found works best is just working together in a room on new problems and showing each other our work. Being a remote-first team, we know how efficient and convenient remote work can be, but there’s also something very special about working together in-person in small teams, or even just being able to tap each other on the shoulder when we need help. It’s a nice change of pace, a break from the constant notification sounds of home offices, and a way to change up our often asynchronous work structure.
Amundsen and Liberatore in synchronous collaboration.
Ashli and Deepak captured mid-conversation.
Day 1
After everyone settled in and plugged in their MacBooks, I opened the retreat with a fireside chat. The conversation was a follow-up to my 2025 presentation on where Lickability has been and where we’re going. In that presentation, I raised questions like: Should we build and ship our own new products? How hard should we lean into AI? Should we consider hiring outside the United States?
Our position on these questions felt a lot more concrete this year, so we naturally transitioned into the main event for the retreat: a hackathon. During the hackathon, each member of the team could work on whatever they thought would most benefit the company, like an internal process change or tool, a new product, or even a new way to sell or market our services to clients. The only rule was that we were all to show our work on day 2 at whatever state it was in.
Over the next 6-ish hours, teams formed and we all began working on our projects. The room buzzed with excitement, and the only interruptions were to crack inside jokes and breaks for lunches and Dr. Pepper.
The hackathon begins...
Day 2
On day 2, everyone showed up on time with only a few hours left to finish their demos. I don’t want to spoil everything here, but we saw incredibly impressive demos of new social games, clever uses of iOS’s widget system, apps for tracking leisure activities, automated sales tools, and purpose built tools for fans of music, poetry, and more. The presentations culminated with Ken’s demo, which was actually 6 separate apps he had been working on simultaneously!
Creatively recharged, we headed to a team dinner at Park Rose where we sipped cocktails, ate pasta, and reflected on all we had learned together over the two days.
Team dinner at Park Rose!
What’s Next
Many of the ideas developed during the 2026 Retreat are working their way through the company, and some of them might even become shipped software! To stay updated on their progress, follow us on Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky.
