I would love to hear your thoughts.
Remote: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs/role/all/remote
India: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs/location/india
That this stereotype is self evidently absurd doesn't really detract from the psychological pressure to imitate. It's like the companies who carefully copy all the hiring practices they've heard about from Google but don't bother with the compensation or aggressively targetting specific university graduates to recruit from.
It's really easy to get a single room with a beer fridge and make everyone stressed, and some successful companies had that property, so let's copy the properties we know how to.
An alternative game plan would be to try to copy the aspects of companies that made them successful, as opposed to the aspects that are easy to copy, but that's very much harder to do.
There's also the "false contractors" route, i.e. hiring remote contractors but treating them like employees. Which is also a quite common setup among early stage startups with a fully distributed DNA.
We work as contractors - not employees - so no regional employment laws apply and we're just issuing invoices for services rendered.
proof for your assertion?