Does remote work really work for a Startup?

All is possible with commitiment and responsability.

In my opinion 37signals is creating a lot of hype with remote work. You should always be a bit critical on all of their assumptions when they say that remote working works for them. It could work for you as well, but how do you personally feel about your team working remotely?

Nope. At that stage you need people sitting down at the same table and working closely together. Would you all work well behind closed office doors leaving sticky notes to communicate with each other? Of course not. Cut them loose.

It can be done. I'm doing it. But it works at a more sustained pace than full on pedal to the metal and you need the right team and the right processes to make it work. It's not for rookies. If you're trying to figure out how to run a business AND how to remote work, pick one or the other.

My guess is it really depends on how organized the company is and how good your communication channels are. I've had a really bad experience working for a nascent startup "remotely". They simply would not respond to my emails or calls and rarely told me anything about projects they were working on that had huge overlap (as in, drop-your-database overlap) with mine.

I just stopped billing them. Serves me right for working on a verbal agreement at a cut rate hoping to get my foot in the door and some equity.

Point being, if you aren't going to treat remote workers like they're a regular part of the team, or at least give them the information they need, you shouldn't have anyone working remotely.

read about HopStop and their work with a single consultant from Siberia who was found on eVance

Definitely doable. Need all the obvious tools - chat, remote meeting tool , etc. Make sure there are scheduled meetings to keep communication open and expected. Working through many time zones will add complexity to this. Doable - but needs focus and planning to make it work.

I'm doing it now with a 10 hour time gap and 2 team members I can't even speak with directly. (They are Russian and do well with written English but poorly with spoken English.) Thank god my cofounder is bilingual. We are using Trello and Skype extensively, have recurring meetings, etc. It's probably not the same pace of work we would get with 1 room/1 language, but we're getting it done.