We actually decided on remote early on as a way to expand our potential talent pool, when it became a key part of getting our first hire on-board. We've recently made the decision to start doing our major work in Rust after it had a strong showing building an important internal tool and prototyping a small service in it, and our mounting frustration with the current stack (plus some other issues that made it a good time to decide if we wanted to switch). A remote hiring policy has been key to confidence in that decision; we've yet to fully put that into practice with actual Rust hires, but I'd be much more wary with a talent pool restricted to just the local area (Austin, in this case).