Title: I&#x27;ve been looking at remote opportunities and realized that a huge portion of companies hiring remotely requires you to be in certain regions (US, EMEA, APAC) — fully international remote is rare. Personally, I&#x27;m interested in &quot;remote ok&quot; startups (YC-backed &amp; otherwise) but I&#x27;m outside of their specified regions and hesitant to reach out because of that.<p>It&#x27;s puzzling to me because I&#x27;ve been successful in previous fully international remote roles (&amp; have lots of experience building remote workflows), so I&#x27;d like to understand the motivation behind why and identify potential solutions to enabling it, as a thought exercise driven by curiousity.<p>From my perspective, there are a few barriers to this:<p>- Timezone. This is a huge one when it comes to synchronous communications, especially if you&#x27;re in the driver&#x27;s seat (as a team lead etc.) Disparate timezones between team members can break a team&#x27;s velocity if you&#x27;re not built to be fully asynchronous from the ground-up, which IMO requires a cultural shift in communications (moving towards async comms where meetings are kept to bare minimum and&#x2F;or only used for social face time). What can we do to make the switch to async comms easier?<p>- No &quot;human&quot; touch. Socializing is critical because humans have an innate desire to connect; nothing can replace real-world connections. This is why off-sites exist for remote companies. They&#x27;re way easier to arrange when your team isn&#x27;t spread across continents, and arranging for international off-sites can be cost prohibitive as a startup. I believe there is nothing we can do to replace that human touch (not even the metaverse), so what can we do to make travel planning for companies easier and&#x2F;or less costly?<p>- Difficult to figure compensation scale. Remote roles typically peg compensations to CoL (Cost of Living). The typical setup I&#x27;ve seen is applying a CoL multiplier to the base comp. for the role and tacking on +&#x2F;-20% for competitiveness (or as an &quot;error correction&quot;). How can we help them make these decisions easier?<p>- Lack of legal presence. Having no legal entity in the country you&#x27;re <i>hiring</i> in is a non sequitur, and setting up a legal entity per-country-per-hire is not scalable (beyond setting up the entity itself, you need to be aware of local labour laws, your tax obligations, insurance, etc.) I think Deel (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deel.com&#x2F;) has already solved this.<p>- Compliance &amp; regulations. The company may be handling sensitive data and&#x2F;or has PCI&#x2F;HIPAA compliance obligations. Or it may be a government organization where security&#x2F;background checks must be performed. Systems&#x2F;data access may also need to be scrutinized in situation of audits and documented ahead-of-time. Not much we can do here and I think it&#x27;s a question of risk, so no international remote is probably for the best.<p>I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m missing something important. What do you think?<p>(edit: formatting)<p>(edit2: fix typo &amp; re-phrase)<p>(edit3: typo)
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