Remote teams · Entrepreneurship
Natalie,
A lesson from days of yore, touchtone phones no less, at the beginning meet in person two or three times to get sense of each of the others and then migrate to remote. Some really good suggestions have been made to you so take a few, e.g., a tradeshow, and do attend together them migrate.
In addition, I would seek to compensate for "remote" by having each person do some profiles, such as HBDI, sales aptitude, cognitive capability, and share them, something which should be done in any case to provide additional insight into workmates. If you really want to get results, push the boundaries and have 360 sessions where each individual appraises the others and provides that information to the person being appraised, a must for the CEO.
Let us know what you do so we can all learn, perhaps remote does not reduce the odds of success as much as Sam Altman at Y Combiator believes.