Remote co-founders, yay or nay?

Try finding someone with an overlapping timezone to avoid the awkwardness in setting up meetings. As a co-founder, there would be a lot of brainstorming that happens between you two, which needs communication and collaboration, and long meetings. Staying late to catch up will hurt your health and not be good for the startup overall.

Invalid if the co-founder from another part of the world is bringing in significant advantage.

I think if you worked with your co-founder before in person, it will be fine (just like any remote work these days). You should split some responsibility anyways.

It's probably much harder (than it already was) to build trust when teaming up with someone new.

But I don't have experience with this yet :)

remoteco.com has really bad management, they often exploit the freelancers who just need work if it doesnt work out with one or two clients. its not nearly as open minded as other platforms, and if im honest ive seen way too much negative advertising regarding similar people. id avise to basically find people via fiver,upwork and similar type sites. best,luc

Anything can work, but working with dramatically different timezones is a real challenge. Be mindful of the fact that you'll want blocks of time to coordinate and will likely want to have impromptu conversations.

I used to be on a project at a FAANG company that integrated with a team with a 14 hour time zone difference. If you needed them to do something, and they didn't, then you lost an entire day of work. We spent a significant amount of time making communication protocols just to make sure that work happened overnight like we needed it to.

My guess on the effects of shifts: 1 hour feels like nothing, 3 hours is workable, and anything above 6 hours means that someone is starting to get majorly inconvenienced (either by staying too late or getting up too early).

If one of you likes having an atypical schedule, this could be a major advantage. I heard a story once of an engineer who moved from San Francisco to London and kept the same SF work hours. Her dream was having a leisurely morning and then working until bedtime, instead of the typical routine of getting up and going to work, and this allowed her to do it.

For my startup (BlueShip) we're 5 co-founders in 3 different timezones (US, Canada and Brazil)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueship.mobile

It's working for us.

Actually, it depends on WHO do you choose to partner with... You can find a local co-founder, but if he/she's not committed enough, it will be worthless.

And also, it's way easier to find remote co-founders than local ones.

What are the odds of finding someone local:

• who have similar interests
• who have an entrepreneurial spirit
• who's on the same tech stack as you (if technical co-founder)
• who's committed enough to work long hours CONSISTENTLY

Nearly zero...