The companies with strongest engineering culture and most value growth I've worked at were two US-based startups who hired a lot of remote people, including Latin America and Europe.

I would say the predominant reason for them to hire remotes was the fact that you can get some very good to amazing people for a price of someone unremarkable in their area (NYC and SF respectively). Also, if you just need manpower, you can get some solid performers for $60k-$90k. Given the tight budget of early stage startups (one of them refused to take funding and relied on a lot of remote people until they got sold for hundreds of millions), their call was that higher caliber of people outweights locality.