So two friends living in two different places can never build a product and then business around it together. They must be sitting within one meter proximity or the magic potion doesn't work.
He's claiming that, but that's not all he's claiming. His claim about remote work being a big mistake for the tech industry is much broader than just early stage startups. But as far as I can tell, he has no real basis for his claim except for early stage startups; so his claim could be true for them but false for the tech industry as a whole.
There are plenty of companies working fully remote of different sizes ranging from a duo to a trio of three up to few hundred.
The claim is as absurd as startups not having mechanical keyboards or not using JIRA fail miserably to capture market.
While some of the execs have met in person now, the whole thing was bootstrapped by a handful of people before they met.