I've ran a distributed company for about 6 years now. We started as a conventional company located in San Francisco. For some context - we're https://www.data

I've ran a distributed company for about 6 years now. We started as a conventional company located in San Francisco. For some context - we're https://www.datastreamer.io https://www.datastreamer.io ... we provide data feeds around blogs, news, and social media to search engines, and data analytics companies. We have about a petabyte of content in our index now. Our SF location was SWEET. Downtown. 100 year old building. Brick walls, super nice place - until they tore it down to build the new Transbay terminal. Long story short but at that point we decided to give distributed work a try. Back then there weren't many companies doing it but I decided to embrace the benefits of it in terms of what it could do for my company. This isn't discussed often but there are actually PERKS to distributed work. If your team is in different timezones. This means you can coordinate ops so that if there's an emergency no one actually has to wake up. This has massive long term implications for morale and hiring! You can now hire ops people and tell them that they never have to be woken up in the middle of the night. We will often have issues with data indexing of sites at odd hours. We can't control when a site being indexed breaks so it can happen at unusual times. Usually at 5AM when I'm sleeping. One downside is that each country has its own hurdles for hiring. My advice is find 2-4 countries (including your own) that are close to your timezone. You will have banking, political, and infrastructure issues so limiting the number of distinct countries you work with reduces your risk. We prefer the US, Poland, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. It definitely takes some re-thinking in terms of tools. Lots of video conferencing. Lots of slack. Lots of email. Lots of Github issues. I think it's worth it though. Also, don't rule out being a hybrid company. If you have a central office (or offices) you can have the benefits of both worlds.