Many people ask me what I think about running a startup in which the founder(s) are in Silicon Valley and the development team works from another city / country. This is what IndexTank did, and we were successful. The answer is easy: this setup helped us as much as doing hard drugs helps a rockstar. It’s a handicap, you can succeed in spite of it but I recommend avoiding it if you can. I defer to the words of Steve Jobs, when he was explaining the design of the Pixar building to encourage random meetings:
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”