[hundredwatt]

On a similar note, I am curious if anyone has experience starting a company where the founders were all remote, especially if everyone met over the internet. What were the additional challenges or advantages that the remote arrangement brought out?

[idiopathic]

The founders at our company are all remote, with developers spread across India, UK and USA. We are doing well, having won Seedcamp last year.

It still amazes me the visceral reaction people have against remote working. This would be fine as a principle, if the same people did not also complain to me that doctors do not embrace technology. But given that our platform is designed for doctors and patients to work together online (including online consultations) it behooves us to practice what we preach.

I will give the following tips: - You need different habits to work online. In my case, I have a lot of experience in setting up teams to work together virtually based on all my previous IT projects, including writing software for medical students to share their education across hospitals using Palm Pilots, and migraiting 300 employees to use a wiki. I also worked as a management consultant in a company that took pride in working with 2,700 hospitals but without traveling to the hospitals - all research was through phone and email. - You have to teach the rest of the team these habits, few people know them already. For example, in a telephone conference, you have to explicitly laugh when you would have smiled, as you cannot rely on visual cues for bonding. - Make use of wikis and document every meeting you have, as you have it, with everyone seeing what you type as you type it. - my co-founders were either people I knew, or people I got to know in person through volunteer work I would ask them to do over coffee meetings before I asked them to join the company.

By far the biggest saving we have is time. It is not being cheap and cutting costs of office space, it is about slashing the time we spend on commuting and meeting, and I would definitely say that we would never have achieved as much as we did, as quickly as we did, if it was not for working virtually.

[tdmackey]

For a brief time I worked at a startup where all founders were remote by the time development began. It seems to be much more difficult to stay committed and focused on the tasks at hand when you only interact via email and irc, especially in the early stages where little is invested in the project by most of the members. Needless to say, it fell apart, and at least from my perspective looking back I would say that the remote working part definitely hurt the project. It was also bad that two of the three guys involved weren't entirely committed seeing as they had an easy way out three months into it if it didn't work out.

[JoeAltmaier]

I work for Sococo, which has founders in Mt View and Eugene OR. Teams work in Mt View, Seattle and Iowa(!). Fortunately the product itself is a workspace collaboration tool, which we all use religeously. It turns out the dang thing works! We are in constant communication, almost like we're in the same cube space, except without the problem of distractions. Try it: www.sococo.com