[eru]

Well, if you are leasing office space, you are likely in a high cost location like Silicon Valley, and so you are most likely also paying your engineers a lot.

If (almost) everyone is working remotely, you can probably get by without office space and also with lower salaries.

[gnicholas]

I'm not sure why leasing office space means you'd be in a high CoL area.

[eru]

Areas like Silicon Valley are very productive for some reason. That's why people put up with the high costs.

Leasing office space in such highly productive areas might be worth it. (I don't know exactly how the mechanism works, but I'm just assuming that at least some of the companies there know what they are doing.)

Of course, the author of the original piece also seems to implicitly assume Silicon Valley?

If there's no highly productive part of the world where you want to concentrate people, you might be better off spreading out your startup and taking advantage of lower labour costs around the country and around the world.

There's lots of smart people in eg the flyover states, or in South America, who for one reason or another can't or don't want to move.