> That’s sad to hear given as I’m looking to raise funds but also hoping to build a distributed team given the abundance of worldwide talent.

Are you looking for VC funding or angel funding?

If you have the ability to use foreign teams, you are probably better off taking angel funding and bootstrapping.

Remember, VC's want "up or out". "Cheap remote workers" isn't really relevant to that to a first approximation.

In fact, some VC's will look at it as a detriment. They wanted you to spend that couple million and succeed or go up in smoke. With cheap remote workers, you look at that couple million as 3+ years of runway for really solid organic growth.