While I concede that's not the "billion-dollar American startup that was built by a 100% virtual team",
I've worked for a startup where half of the team was distributed across america and europe. It was an amazing team, highly collaborative and flexible, successfully tackling a hard problem.
(I used to joke that the code base was CS funland: all the interesting problems in one place)
We failed mostly because our product was overly ambitious, solving a broad problem.
Yes, is just an anecdote, but my point is that distributed team can run circles around most of colocated teams and we wouldn't have been able to assemble that team if we insisted that everybody had to be on the same place.
We failed mostly because our product was overly ambitious, solving a broad problem.
Yes, is just an anecdote, but my point is that distributed team can run circles around most of colocated teams and we wouldn't have been able to assemble that team if we insisted that everybody had to be on the same place.