[pc86]

I think there are a few possible reasons (I don't pretend to know which of these it is, or if it's one I haven't thought of).

1. Remote workers are actually not more productive than co-located workers. (I don't think this is it personally)

2. Investors and/or founders have some financial and/or non-financial incentive to keep everyone in SV.

Forcing everyone to be there drives up the demand for VC money as everything is more expensive, and when a CTO leaves to do his own thing, he's already there but probably can't afford to bootstrap, so he turns to VCs. If you had the same CTO working in Omaha for 90% of the pay, he'd be able to bootstrap whatever he wanted and the original company wouldn't have needed as much (or any) VC money in the first place.

I'd love to set up VC meetings then say a few days prior that I'm only interested in 100% remote team and see how many of them cancel.