For all this "we work remote" stuff that is flying around this seems to be a direct contradiction. Is moving to the valley really necessary? I can postulate coming for a face-to-face interview, but I would never want to move to California.
But if you're both online at the same time, and you have videoconferencing or some equivalent, you can talk "face-to-face" without being on the same continent. I don't know how efficient that is compared to being in the same room, but I suspect it's somewhat less (you have to activate the app before you can have the conversation, and you never have a useful but accidental conversation because you ran into each other in the lunchroom).
Source? I'm pretty skeptical of these kinds of numbers. If you say 100 bits worth of words face-to-face, what is exactly the content of the remaining 1428 bits?
I'm frankly doubtful even about that much, but Mehrabian certainly never claimed that any such equation holds for more "contentful" communication.
For remote to work, the company should be remote native or majority remote. If 95% of the people and conversations are onsite, the remote team is going to end up being second class citizens.
Outside of the Bay Area remote work is more acceptable for startups and small companies, and most of the advocates for remote teams are in cities like Chicago and New York.
To be sure, this could also be seen as an acknowledgement of their own weaknesses. In modern business, shouldn't a contingency to reduce burn rate by hiring from lower cost-of-living areas be a valid option? If so, then why shouldn't management be able to communicate well enough to execute on that? Are they so vain to think that not only should the company be viable and successful, but that they should succeed at the highest cost possible?