Should I pass on a remotely located co-founder?
SwellJoe: My current business was started with a co-founder that was nearly as far away as it is possible to be while remaining on the same planet (I was in Texas, he was in Australia...which some folks think is bigger than Texas, for some reason).  I wouldn't have chosen a distant co-founder if I were "hiring" someone from a pool of roughly unknown choices, it just happened that I'd known him for about eight years and had worked with him numerous times (with him as a contractor working for my previous company).There are circumstances where it can work fine, and my situation just happened to be one of those circumstances.  I think the following has to be true for it to work extremely well:1. Very clear boundary between your job and your co-founders job.  If you need to touch the same files in your codebase more than once or twice a week, you're probably working on stuff that is too closely related.  In my case, the software was my co-founders job, and everything else (including some UI work, but mainly the website to sell the product, the business-related paperwork and banking/taxes minutiae, marketing, documentation, etc.) was mine.2. A good working relationship, where you both understand the others goals and understand what aspects of the task are to be done by each of you.  Some sort of task management tool--we've used a bug tracker heavily from the very earliest days of the company--helps here.3. Equal dedication to the goal.  Since you aren't in the same room very often, it can be hard to be sure that everybody is doing their part.  And if everyone isn't "firing on all cylinders" for the good of the company, it will fail.But, you should keep in mind that the vast majority of Open Source projects are built and run by people who meet maybe once or twice per year.  I worked for years on the Squid project and only ever met two of them in person (there are about 5 long-time core developers on the project) and spoke to a couple of others on the phone a few times.  It doesn't stop them from getting great things done.  MySQL AB was a famously distributed company--they had developers all over the world.  If being acquired for $500M isn't a great success story, I don't know what is.Though, I should also fess up to the fact that my co-founder and I now both live in the valley, a ten minute drive away, and we get together once a week for status meetings.  We're still pretty distributed though...most of our peers that I've met out here work in the same office or in the same apartment.  I don't know that I'd be more productive in such a circumstance, or that we'd be further along in our plans...but maybe.