I'm not sure why any venture backed startup, in an area that has local talent, would want to deliberately go the remote workforce route. It hampers your ability to scale, hurts your future acquisition chances, creates and will lead to communication redudancy, and culture distractions. It rarely works out positively.
In short, while I am sure that there are some instances where it works well (eg Basecamp / 37signals), I'd expect that they are the exception to the norm.
Note: I did build a remote startup with incredibly talented people and after a lot of soul searching and time required them all to come join us locally (or helped them find a new job elsewhere). Hardest decision we made at the company and certainly the right one.
NOTE 2: the best remote recruiting tool we had was to handpick whole invited to work with us. We hung out on mailing lists and read potential employees blog posts to see what kind of amazing open source projects they were sharing with the world, before trying to individually recruit them.
In short, while I am sure that there are some instances where it works well (eg Basecamp / 37signals), I'd expect that they are the exception to the norm.
Note: I did build a remote startup with incredibly talented people and after a lot of soul searching and time required them all to come join us locally (or helped them find a new job elsewhere). Hardest decision we made at the company and certainly the right one.
NOTE 2: the best remote recruiting tool we had was to handpick whole invited to work with us. We hung out on mailing lists and read potential employees blog posts to see what kind of amazing open source projects they were sharing with the world, before trying to individually recruit them.