Think of the other direction - if you can't go on land (actually you can, but let's assume you couldn't), then folks from Silicon Valley can visit the ship. Project managers can sync periodically with developers on the ship, fellow developers can be sent on the ship for training sessions etc.

Working in your own country just doesn't seem to produce the amount of innovation that happens in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, we should be able to see lots of successful geographically-distributed startups made of software developers who use teleconferencing and other online tools. While that does happen with many open-source projects, it doesn't seem to work as well for commercial ventures.

Why might that happen? A hypothesis I find interesting is that face-to-face contact increases trust, which is a crucial aspect for a startup. Oft-cited piece of research that support this are Dahl and Pedersen, 2004 - "Knowledge flows through informal contacts in industrial clusters" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733304...), and "Building Trust: A Matter of Proximity?" (Bruneel, 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1064201).