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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Remote makes communication harder and startups generally lack good process. Bad communication + bad process = a disaster. Startups can't have good process because they don't know what they're doing yet so process would be a slow down. Startups can also be very stressful and without the human empathy component (that is hard to gain remotely) small arguments can explode into epics nuclear explosions.

Startups are about balancing a bunch of things rather than having some type of optimal stable configuration. Working in an office let's you balance a bunch of other things more easily.

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There's a large amount of software built on free time by much larger teams than are staffing new startups that are nearly exclusively remote. For example Linux has always been developed remotely from what I can tell.

There might be a survivor bias here. How can we know how many similar projects didn't make it out of that cohort?

What successful oss has been originally built by in office teams? I struggle to think of things past golang or mysql.

The point is that there are lots of failed oss projects. Further, a startup has a lot more requirements than an oss hobby project. For your hobby you can send an email to a listserv and say “burned out, taking a three month break” or you can focus exclusively on the code.

But a startup needs to make money or it can’t pay people. You don’t just need code. You need a product and you need to sell it.

> The point is that there are lots of failed oss projects.

There's a lot of failed start ups in general. Doesn't seem like its a feature unique to remote-only projects.

Sure. My point is that "linux exists" is not evidence that remote startups will be statistically as likely to succeed as in person startups.

Linux isn't the end of the list. You can also include everything from Gitlab, HashiCorp, and Elastic and they make quite a bit of software.

Hadoop, Kafka, Kubernetes, Angular, React, GraphQL, TensorFlow, TypeScript, Android.

A lot of the Apache projects came from companies. Although some of these were more like one person at the company developed it and the company funded and maintained it.

> Kubernetes

Did Kubernetes start in person as in in the same room? It was built by multiple people but I don't know if they shared an office space. I thought it was that they shared a building.

All of the other ones though are pretty solid examples of team-driven OSS work.

MongoDB

The world is different now. The remote world will become the norm. Startups are about building a new business: and the new business needs to ready for this brave new word.

Startups are about building new businesses, but not necessarily new business practices. Each startup is different, just like any other business. From culture to team makeup to line of business, no two companies are exactly alike.

I imagine that many startups can and will be successfully fully-remote from Day 1, whereas other startups won't possibly be able to work successfully without close and constant in-person communication.

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