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Why Virtual Teams Don’t Work In Early-Stage Startups

Finding a great team of co-founders to begin your next startup is hard. While you can certainly rebound from an initially bad co-founder relationship (or departure), nailing it right the first time is significantly preferable. And getting it right requires a shitload of hard work and determination:

1. You need to perfect your story, your vision, and your pitch to potential co-founders that you’re trying to court. This is especially true if you’re trying to recruit technical co-founders. They get 1,000 pitches a month for new startup ideas to join. Your’s needs to stand out, and you need to come across as formidable that you are the person to lead them to the promised land.
2. You need to find co-founders that complement your skill set. If you’re a non-technical co-founder, you need to find one (or two) amazing engineers to join you as co-founders. The opposite if you’re a technical co-founder.
3. You need to find co-founders that you get along with. Co-Founders are by nature Type A personalities. They are generally very passionate people with strong points of view on how things should be done (and if they’re not, then they’re not usually co-founder material). It’s tough to find co-founders that you can have a spirited debate with, but still not want to kill each other afterwards. This dynamic is imperative because there are always going to be things that come up that you disagree on, and you need to be able to work through them. Otherwise, you’re going to spend the next 5–10 years being miserable every day, working with people that you hate.
4. You need to find co-founders who can work full-time for equity-only at the beginning (or very close to equity-only). This is the one that blocks most entrepreneurs from finding their ideal co-founders. Most people are not in a position to quit their well-paid, full-time jobs and commit to doing a startup for free. Maybe they’re able to do it for a month or two, but you legitimately need co-founders who can commit to a bare minimum of 12 months with no or very little pay.

If you do all of the above things right, it will still probably take you 2–3 months to find your ideal co-founder(s). Mess up one or more of the above, and your search could protract to 6 months or longer.

The trap that entrepreneurs fall into is when they try and “speed up the process” by expanding their geographical reach by bringing on remote co-founders (domestically or internationally). This happens most when trying to find technical co-founders, since they’re in such high demand.

But settling for a remote co-founding team at the earliest stages of a startup is generally disastrous:

1. In the earliest days of a startup, face-to-face time is super critical. There are so many serendipitous moments in the early days that lead to company-altering discoveries, that not having those moments together as a team can lead to massive voids in product/market fit, overall strategy, etc. In my past experiences, I can’t tell you how many critical epiphanies happened as a result of random face-to-face moments that would have never occurred if we had been working remotely.
2. Being a co-founding entrepreneur is lonely. Very lonely. Everything is on you and your team to get done. There’s no external guidance or anyone to lean on for directional support. In addition, the roller coaster of emotions of day-to-day startup life can be exhausting. One minute, you’re growing 10% week-over-week and every VC in the valley is chasing you, and the next minute, growth has stalled and no one wants to touch with you with a 10-foot pole. Having a team close by that you can physically interact with on a day-to-day basis and lean on for emotional support is important. This is something that just cannot be done when you have a remote team.
3. Company culture suffers. Culture is defined differently at every company. But one constant is that it’s a vibe or feeling of what it is like to work somewhere. How can there be a positive vibe or feeling of what it’s like to work somewhere, when in fact, there’s no actual place to work at or people to work with? Culture with virtual teams is virtually (pun intended) non-existent.
4. Recruiting becomes very difficult. A players want to join companies with great cultures, challenging work, and fun/smart teams. Of course there are people that enjoy working from home all the time. But a vast majority of employees crave human interaction on a day-to-day basis with their co-workers. Recruiting is already hard. If you don’t offer a cool place to work, you’ve just made recruiting 100x more difficult.
5. You’ll have to do more convincing to investors while fundraising. For the above four stated reasons, investors are skeptical of early stage co-founding teams that work remotely. They know all of the challenges above that you’ll face, and this makes them wary. Plus, it’s harder for investors to meet the entire team when everyone isn’t local (not all investors care about this, but many will want to meet the entire co-founding team during due diligence). Startups are already hard enough as it is, and you’ve just made it harder, which puts more risk on their investment. You better be crushing it, or forget about getting a check. Why put yourself at a disadvantage compared to all of the other startups out there that already have local teams?

If the only reason for settling on a remote co-founding team is because it’s taking you too long to find someone locally, then chances are, your pitch or what you’re looking for is a bit off. Spend the time to get your story super buttoned up so that co-founders are naturally attracted to you and your vision. From there, you should have no problems in finding that amazing co-founder who is local.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 291,182+ people.

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