Yes. And why didn't he explain how he turned the table on his high school bullies. Odd to include that psycho analysis and then leave out any details there.
I'm not sure why any venture backed startup, in an area that has local talent, would want to deliberately go the remote workforce route. It hampers your ability to scale, hurts your future acquisition chances, creates and will lead to communication redudancy, and culture distractions. It rarely works out positively.
In short, while I am sure that there are some instances where it works well (eg Basecamp / 37signals), I'd expect that they are the exception to the norm.
Note: I did build a remote startup with incredibly talented people and after a lot of soul searching and time required them all to come join us locally (or helped them find a new job elsewhere). Hardest decision we made at the company and certainly the right one.
NOTE 2: the best remote recruiting tool we had was to handpick whole invited to work with us. We hung out on mailing lists and read potential employees blog posts to see what kind of amazing open source projects they were sharing with the world, before trying to individually recruit them.
I'm disappointed for oculus that anyone bought them. They had a chance to lead the next generation of companies in revolutionising media... To BE the next Sony. Kudos to Facebook for snatching them up.
Maybe I missed it, but WHY does your startup have 30 days to live? You ran out of money and have no raise potential? How could your employee and cofounder not know this already?
Yes, and on top of that, you want a payroll service brand to speak to its professionalism and reliability. Not edgy "hipness" (especially if you are failing hard at that aspect).