At this point, use of GoDaddy at any point should be noted in any Due Diligence process by investors.
If the founders are unable to identify using GoDaddy as an unacceptable risk and are unable to quickly find an alternative, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that said founders don't know what they're doing.
If an investor is unable to recognize the risk, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that they don't know what they're doing, and should stick to Real Estate Development and Direct Mail advertising.
Personally, I like gandi.net for domain registration and hosting. They're not the cheapest, but they're not in the US.
The cultural inability to drink moderately is not inherently American. Seems you have a bit of a cultural bias, as you left out some notorious drinking cultures: Germany, Japan, Australia, and the UK among them.
Collective problem solving over group voice communications is a universal skill. Our dev team got really good at it when we all started playing Counterstrike together. MMORPG raiding would be a good place to learn this as well.
If nothing else, they'd be guaranteed to learn proper etiquette by learning what not to do.
Technical Management - either Operations or Project - is still regarded as a soft skill, and therefore isn't desired by most startups. As a result, they don't know how to recruit, don't know how to interview, and don't know how to manage their teams, whether in the office or distributed.
I've been doing it for about 5 years now, almost exclusively remote - it's not difficult, it just requires that everyone communicate well, or be willing to learn, if they don't already.
Part of the problem I've encountered are founder/senior managment who are willing to learn these management skills themselves - they are conditioned that everything is on them, so that can be tough.
At this point, I'm of the opinion that in most cases, especially with startups, remote is far more humane than in the office. It's also far more cost effective.
As a hiring manager, I always try to either (a) hire 90 day contract to full-time; or (b) hire under a 90-day trial or probationary period. At the end of the period I ask myself if I would still hire that person. If my instinct is "no", I trust my instinct. It's good for morale when everyone knows that the 90 days is a meaningful evaluation period.
As a job-seeker, I always make sure that I contact my references and give them a heads-up that the call is coming in, along with a copy of the resume I submitted for the job and the job posting. It's out of courtesy to the person I'm asking to provide me with a reference.
I've spent a lot of money (mine and clients') on different tools, and I've settled on Keynote. It covers 95% of my needs and I don't have to manage yet another tool.
Being able to sit in a meeting wireframing on Keynote is wonderful. Factor in another $15 for the iPad app and I'm cooking with gas.
Meetings get super-focused quickly when the participants can immediately see output.
I usually upload it to Google Docs post-meeting for the remote participants.
Protip: Save your mockup files as themes so that you can get to them quickly and easily.
There's a lot you can do with presentation software: PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Apps.
There are a lot of other tools available, but it's nice being able to quickly wireframe and storyboard during a meeting and respond with "... you mean like this?"
Aaron Stanton actually has a product, which is what he was trying to get in front of Google - www.booklamp.org
It's an interesting concept - Pandora for books. I spent some time looking at it as a potential complementary technology for a reader app I worked on a few years ago.
Fairly rudimentary algorithm at that time, but it's conceptually interesting and worth burning a couple of cycles watching the intro video.
If the founders are unable to identify using GoDaddy as an unacceptable risk and are unable to quickly find an alternative, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that said founders don't know what they're doing.
If an investor is unable to recognize the risk, then one might justifiably come to the conclusion that they don't know what they're doing, and should stick to Real Estate Development and Direct Mail advertising.
Personally, I like gandi.net for domain registration and hosting. They're not the cheapest, but they're not in the US.