How can you collaborate remotely and communicate effectively as a start-up?

I would say that the first and most important step is to have the right systems. This means culture, strategy, incentives and everything related to remote collaboration. To work remotely is not simply to remove an office and replace presencial meetings with tools, it is to remake a culture and set the correct expectations. In fact, you may need to hire different people. Tools are just enablers, but without the right mindset, tools can only get you so far.

I keep it simple with tools that are already part of most ppl's toolshed with M365 or GoogleDocs and leveraging the capabilities that come with that toolbox. There are lots of newer, better and niche tools - but in a startup often we just need a common base to move fast and make business or product decisions than debate tool stacks.

I get a sense of everyone's superpowers and ask them to narrate their origin stories to each other (how they got those superpowers). Then I ask them to share their creative processes, operational processes to getting things done and their preferred methods for communications, management and structure. This precedes getting to communicate my vision, vision and processes on how the org/team will move forward with a collective sense of what could work for us.

Easier said than done. In a world where big brands have chosen to break trust amongst employees that took decades to build with massive layoff decisions - I think the trust at the workplace is a genie that cannot be put in the bottle. However trusting the people who work with each other and understanding one another is more important, so that should the entire team be laidoff (which can happen anytime these days) the people survive with a support.

Be comfortable with asynchronous collaboration where you can communicate in text/messages with another team what your needs, wants and inputs are while taking the inputs, needs and wants of others into account - as they give theirs at a time/day that works for them. When done as a practice this has worked wonders for my team who feels like they are flexible in bringing their best to the workplace at a time that works for them without jeopardizing productivity and performance.

we have found that Visual communication is extremely important for remote work. I often write personas, motivations, needs, wants, sketch prototype ideas or write stories to help my remote design and product teams understand what I have in mind, so that they can do their roles best without us iterating for weeks trying to actually get on the same page. This is often necessary when the teams are across the world and do not have the user context that some teams have.