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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

"Stop whining" should really be "stop looking at the empirical evidence," because so far all the really big successes have been focused on a single location, especially at first. 37signals is a successful company certainly, but I would be surprised if its value is 1% of Google's.

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If your goal is to go from zero to massive IPO in a small number of years, perhaps, but most software teams are not built with that goal in mind.

Size doesn't matter in this context. It's about stability and longevity of the company (and the ability to operate well without localized teams). I'd love to see some data to support the success of local vs. remote teams (especially since the ability to have strong remote teams is fairly young).

The two are not unrelated. If the best distributed companies do 1% as well as the best concentrated ones, then it's reasonable to worry that the same ratio holds all the way down the line, till you get to the point where 100n is on the right side of surviving, and n is on the wrong side.

I agree that it's reasonable to worry, though, the concept of distributed teams is still too young to compete against established, centralized teams. I'd rather look toward statistical data rather than the empirical data that we have on hand now. I'd really like to see an essay where you confute this in detail (there's a lot to dissect here that requires further research).

and yet it's not necessarily around big successes. companies aim to exit modestly all the time (not every company can be a google)

i run a company that employs "remote workers" but all centered around one city so that there is some in-person interaction and 4-6 big meetings across our two offices. i think the compromise between the talent demand "problem" and finding remote workers scattered across the world is to pick a 2nd/3rd tier city that's reasonable and set up shop there. it's worked for us and i don't think we're any company special.

I would be surprised if 37signals value is .1% of Google. Google's market cap is a little over $200B, so .1% makes for a $200M company.

Valuation, sure. If the numbers ever get out, be seated at the time. It's a very lucrative product.

I am really wondering whether physical proximity of the employees, empirically, has a reasonable relationship to early success?

A pure guess (based on personal preference) is a mix of remote and local working, favoring remote -- would still produce big successes. (Although, this balance should be kept flexible depending of the state of which the project demands.)

This could stem from programming requiring a mix of social and private time, which works naturally with local and remote working.

I think you need to adjust for the fact that many of the tools that make remote employment effective are recent developments.

Are there any notable success stories surrounding companies that began as a geographically distributed team?

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AFAIK DeviantArt's team is all remote.

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