We have two departments, broadly "Business" and "Product". With over 60 full-timers working with the company now, it's important to recognize that these two departments have different cultures, and BDRs joining the Business team end up having a bit of a different experience than, say, a Python programmer joining our Product team.
The "Business" department is centered around sales, marketing, finance, and operations. It only formed as a (large) department of its own in the last 3 years and it has a significant presence in NYC. However, business team hires are even told that "NYC is not HQ" on their first day, and that a better way to think of the office is as the "NYC Internet Cafe". It's a nice Internet Cafe, though! Gigabit Internet, mesh wifi network, and standard issue bamboo sit/stand desks.
The "Product" department is centered around engineering (mostly Python programming), user experience (mostly JavaScript programming) and design (graphic/web). I'm one of the two co-founders of the company and I lead the Product team, and, importantly, I am not based in NYC. This team is 100% remote, and has about 25 people on it. Everyone on this team works either from their (tailored/optimized) home office or from a co-working space. There are actually zero full-time hires on Product that are based in NYC -- this usually elicits some surprise from office visitors.
There is a legitimate concern for some of the Business team hires that if you are not based in NYC but your team lead or some of your team colleagues are, you might suffer from "out of band communication". We try to reduce this by forcing people in the office to use Slack and video conferencing (our conference rooms are set up for GHangouts and Zoom.us) instead of "shout-net" (that is, shouting rudely across the office). This is only a concern on our marketing and support teams, where they have a geographically spread-out team but with a lot of folks in NYC, as well. But they've navigated it well. It doesn't affect our Product team in the slightest because, as I mentioned, we have no team members in NYC and "NYC is just an Internet cafe".
Funny enough, one of our highest-performing salespeople had her best year ever while doing "Remote Year". She wrote about her experience on Remote Year here: https://blog.parse.ly/post/3538/digital-nomad-sales/
We do sometimes use NYC as a retreat location for our Product team. Since it's an easy city to fly to and we have co-working space available via the office, it's often used for week-long hacking sessions of small sub-teams on Product.
p.s. as a result of your comment, I'm going to have the person in charge of hiring Business Development Reps remove 'headquarters' from the job posting -- I think it was just an innocent terminology mistake when drafting the job req.
