This is a classic problem in start ups, and I would strongly recommend against doing remote if you can avoid it. I only know a few people who have ever pulled

This is a classic problem in start ups, and I would strongly recommend against doing remote if you can avoid it. I only know a few people who have ever pulled it off successfully, and they are really good. Statistical outliers. You cannot replace having an entire team in the same spot where people can grab a white board and clearly talk about what something means. Just the energy alone is probably enough to keep everyone active on the project. It's difficult when you don't see others contributing to a project. You start to think you're putting in more work than the rest. I've worked for two start ups. The first one didn't do remote work, and while the leadership initially was poor, the execution was actually insane. The second start up had mostly remote workers, a few PhDs in the same city, and me and another guy doing the front end and servers, and it was a little slow. I tried to recruit some people who had worked at Google and YouTube (as undergrads), and they turned the offer down simply because most of our team was remote. A lot of people join a start up because they want to meet other smart people, not just work on a cool product.