Definitely my experience; one of the first things that happens after an A-round is all the remote workers get asked to move near HQ, and can’t, so they have to resign with no severance. And the standard startup recruiting playbook is to say “we will consider remote for the right candidate” when inquired, but all their hires seem to come from the same central California town the company founders live in.

I've experienced this in my current fund-raising endeavors.

A reductive narrative: a lot of investors like to pattern-match, and SV is full of many more success stories of a small tight-knit team collaborating well in a tiny shared garage office than it is of teams who managed to create a functioning collaborative distributed workflow.

(In our case, we've managed to sidestep this so far by working with smart angels who get it, and by working in a space — indie games — where distributed teams are comparatively common. Also helps that my cofounder is in SF and can take in-person meetings. I do worry we'll feel pressure at the A round to consolidate, but I'll be pushing hard against it.)

Yes, this is very much a thing. When one startup I was at took another round, the new VC demanded everyone be in SF. We were asked to move to SF or get fired. We all chose to get fired and took our severance somewhere else.