I've always worked remotely. The lifeblood of every company I've worked at or know that has remote team members is chat. IRC in my experience, though I hear goo

I've always worked remotely. The lifeblood of every company I've worked at or know that has remote team members is chat. IRC in my experience, though I hear google hangouts are becoming popular now too. When people "get to work", they say Hi to everyone in their team's channel. They say when they are going to/return from lunch to create virtual presence. There should be at least one "water cooler" room where people are free to share youtube links or BS about non-work stuff. In short, the chat system becomes the virtual office. The team room becomes the virtual shared room where anyone can jump in on a conversation that interests them, or start one up casually. The company MUST have a day to day internet communications based culture for a remote team member to be successful. If a team has a key remote member from the start it's easier. All remote teams are of course the easiest. It's hard to add a remote member to a team that is used to being in the same offices. A lot of people will resist changing the entire culture for one "new dev". Office members will talk about a design problem at the physical water cooler instead of the virtual one. The on site team will go for beers together after instead of having a couple on a google hangout/skype video chat. The remote member will feel more like a contract dev assigned work than a creative member of the team. This is no good. Where I've seen adding a remote member done successfully, requires management and team buy in of remote working. The manager/team lead should work a few days a week, or even a week a month, remotely. So should the other team members. After the team lead sees what it's like to be the lone person on speaker phone while everyone else is in the meeting room, you understand why if a remote member is in the meeting, everyone should be using skype/google hangout for it. The offices should become more of a shared coworking space that happens to have your company name on the door. I myself prefer to work remotely. It's not for everybody or every company though. For a startup I think a remote culture from the beginning makes a lot of sense. Unless you require it to show off to investors/clients, skip the office. Have the cofounders work from home. Meet up atleast once every 3 months in real life for beverages and discussion. Talk on chat, every day. That's my thoughts. One last thing worth mentioning, chat logs are great for when the new guy wants to understand a design decision. Why did we use $nosql instead of $nosql2? Here, read the logs from 6 months ago. For operations events (downtime etc) the timestamped chat logs are great for after action reviews. Can you brainstorm better in a physical room or a chat room? I've found the ability text chat gives you to allow everyone to talk at once, without talking over anyone, allows for discussion to proceed at a more rapid pace and more paths followed. This can be of course good and bad, such is life. :)