you can hire the best talent in the world of people willing to move to SV, the world is a lot bigger than SV and having worked with excellent developers plenty

you can hire the best talent in the world of people willing to move to SV, the world is a lot bigger than SV and having worked with excellent developers plenty of times around the world I think if you are hiring only in SV you are definitely limiting yourself also in terms of the perspective individual developers bring to the company. It is obviously difficult to have a pro-remote company if you hire executives or management that values "face time" above all else, and prefer phone to email/chat, this is why likely it's a lot simpler to start a company fully remote than to change an already existing one. Given the advantages of cost of labor (you can be a lot more flexible in compensation terms if you don't have to compete with SV salaries), pool of talent and retention advantages (if you have a great remote environment I think it'd be a lot easier to have very low turnover) I am really surprised more companies are not being formed doing this. But then again as you said a lot of VCs/investors won't touch companies not based in SV so that definitely can be a contributing factor in the low % of fully remote outfits.