I know it's not exactly a company, but the linux kernel (and other big open source projects) managed to do quite well with its "employees" being remote, which proves that a big project can be successful without face to face communication - and since you mention the emotional content of the communication, I'd say Linus is quite good at conveying that in his own way. IMHO the employees engagement to the project can be inversely proportional to the communication quality. If all the workers really believe in the project they are building, they won't need complicated process and will be fine working remotely and communicating by email. On the other hand, if the project is another cats picture sharing app...
Linus's big observation is that "debugging is parallelizable". Product development isn't, though - Linus had to release an operating system on his own before he could recruit volunteers to help with it. And many of the outside contributions come from corporations who would like to use/support Linux but need to modify or extend it in some way, and so they contribute the patch themselves.
There are big companies that work the same way. Cisco actively encourages employees to work from home. However, Cisco's product-development strategy is "buy startups that are already succeeding in the market", and so if you work at Cisco your job is generally bug-fixing and incremental improvements to existing products. If this is the sort of work you want to do, there are a bunch of options that will let you work remotely. I suspect that much of HN wants to develop new products though, and for them, empirically you need the team to be colocated in one location.
