I've felt those "week vs 15 minute" issues. Some of that is developer-specific, no doubt, but that's fundamentally a communication issue that needs to be managed.
I've also worked gigs where people were in the same room and didn't talk to each other, or wouldn't answer emails due to office politics, and in general stuff that should have taken 15 minutes still took a week, even though everyone was in the same building.
Are they things that wouldn't have similarly been resolved by remote pairing?
You also miss out a lot on serendipity. Many of the best ideas that eventually become actual Google products happen because a bunch of folks are hanging out over beers, or they're sharing the latest cool thing they've stumbled across on the Internet, or they're shooting each other with nerf darts before going home. This sort of relaxed socialization seems to be exactly what you need to get creative ideas to bubble up to the surface. When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.
VNC, emacs
>> and real-time voice communication,
telephone
>> and remote whiteboards, and ideally real-time video
projector, webcams, monitor
>> The technology to do this is very, very expensive at the moment, though, which is presumably the raison d'etre of this startup.
When you are considering $75k versus $150k per year, the above is not expensive
>real-time voice communication Webmeeting
>remote whiteboards, Webmeeting
>ideally real-time video skype
> When you have to feel like you're "on a call" to get together with someone, you don't get this sort of spontaneous idea generation.
Some of our best ideas at a previous startup came straight out of our Scrum meetings: when we had the CEO, the COO, and everyone all arguing (no bruises, but close sometimes) about what we should/could do next. I'd like to try that over web conf.
Plus, you still get the idea generation from external techie meetings. I'm in San Diego. I'm not moving to NYC. But we still have a great tech scene.
It doesn't really surprise me that ex-Googlers would insist you work in person. As a large multinational, Google feels the pain of distributed teams more than many companies, which is probably why they're founding their startup. It'd probably sink their startup if one of their key employees was not working in person with them.