Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder and CEO, interviews Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic. They talk mostly about online publishing, but around minute 26 Matt talks about Automattic and its distribuited force of 235 employees:
Just like today it seams crazy to discriminate on something like gender, not just morally but also mathematically –you are taking off half the qualified applicant pool–, just by selection bias you are going to have a less qualified people. And 99.999 percent of people in the world aren’t going to be in the Bay Area (San Francisco). There is a lot of smart people not here. Arguably, collectively more intelligent than the people who are here.
So, when you stop discriminating on the basis of location, what happens? It turns out that you can get incredibly talented and smart folks, who can almost live-style overcharge, in base of Bay-Area-salaries with non-Bay-Area-living [costs].
The whole interview is an hour long and is worth watching, but you can listen to just the fragment below.