My experience working in New York on a small team with the rest of the organization in Mountain View is that I got 10x the communication work done when I travelled to Mountain View. Some things are just better sitting around in your cubes or gathering for lunch, versus setting up a video conference, booking rooms, writing an agenda, etc. People can veer off topic. People you didn't invite can show up. People are at their primary workstations with their work open. Collaboration actually happens, rather than a mere "here is a question that will unblock my next day of work".

I was an IC with a very small team (who were in New York), so I didn't really need to meet with other teams on a daily basis. But every couple months, I did need to fill the pipeline with future work, and it was much easier to do that in person.

I am not sure what this means for a world beyond COVID-19, but right now I feel like everyone is in a holding pattern and are just tweaking their day-to-day applications, rather than planning the next big thing. That is sustainable for a few months, but it will be interesting to see if it's sustainable for longer than that.

(Do people ever co-found a startup with someone they've never met in person? Has anyone ever had a summer internship in college remotely? I am very interested in seeing how these things work.)

I've worked with non-native English speakers my entire career. Time zones just aren't as big of a problem as you think. You have to learn asynchronous communication. That means writing which, by the way, is by far the best way to perform complex communication.

It's strange that people are telling you it's not more difficult to perform complex communication across cultural, language, and timezone gaps.