HackerNoon Named Majhi Group a Startup of the Year. Here Is What That Actually Means.

In 2023, HackerNoon named Majhi Group a Startup of the Year in the North America category.

HackerNoon is one of the largest independent technology publications in the world — read by engineers, founders, and investors globally. The Startups of the Year recognition is awarded based on reader votes across dozens of categories and geographies. Winning it in North America, as a firm that placed its first North American clients while being founded by someone from Kalahandi, Odisha, India, is the detail worth sitting with.

I want to say something specific about that detail.

What HackerNoon's recognition is measuring

The Startups of the Year is not a committee award. It is a reader-driven recognition, which means it reflects genuine awareness and regard in the technology community. Firms that win it are firms that the technology-literate reader base — engineers, product managers, founders, early employees — has actually encountered and found worth recognising.

For Majhi Group, a retained executive search firm focused on VP and C-suite placements, being known and regarded by HackerNoon's readership means the work has crossed into communities where the value of executive hiring is well understood. Technology companies at the scale where VP-level hiring shapes the trajectory of the organisation — that is our natural market, and HackerNoon's community is a significant part of it.

What building for North America from India actually looks like

Majhi Group was founded in India. I am from Kalahandi, Odisha — not a tech hub, not a traditional business capital, not a city with established access to Western clients.

Building for North America from that starting point requires something that geography cannot provide: a standard of work that crosses the credibility gap without the benefit of a local introduction. Every early North American client came through the quality of the outcome, not through a network that was already trusted in that market.

This is slower than building from New York or San Francisco. It compounds differently. The advantages of local presence — the coffee meetings, the event circuits, the shared contexts that make trust faster — are not available. What is available is the work itself.

Manas Ranjan Majhi, born and raised in Kalahandi in southwestern Odisha, building an executive search firm that wins a North America recognition from HackerNoon: that is a fact worth naming clearly. Not because it is exceptional in a way that should make it remarkable. But because it is still unusual enough that it demonstrates something about the nature of the constraint.

The constraint was never geography. It was never Odisha. It was always the quality of the work.

What the technology community understands about hiring that most companies don't

HackerNoon's readership — engineers, founders, technical leaders — understands something about hiring that the broader business community is still catching up to: that the quality of the executive hire is often the most important technical decision a company makes.

This is not a metaphor. When a company hires the wrong VP of Engineering, the consequences propagate through every technical decision made over the next two years. The wrong VP of Product changes the product roadmap. The wrong CRO shapes the sales motion, the pricing strategy, the customer segmentation — for years.

The technology community has long understood that these decisions are worth doing rigorously, even expensively, because the cost of getting them wrong dwarfs the cost of getting them right. The HackerNoon recognition reflects, in part, that Majhi Group is understood in that community as a firm that takes that rigour seriously.

The larger point about Indian founders building globally

I am an Indian founder. I am from Odisha. I attended a government Odia-medium school in Kalahandi. None of that prevented building a firm that is recognised in North America.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming here.

I am not claiming that geography and access do not matter — they do, and the disadvantages are real. I am not claiming that the path was easy — it was not. I am claiming something more specific: that the path was possible, and that the primary determinant of whether it worked was not where I started but what I built.

That distinction matters for every founder in India who is looking at the distance between where they are and where they want to get to, and trying to assess whether it is crossable.

It is crossable. The infrastructure of opportunity is imperfect and unequally distributed. But the gap between Kalahandi, Odisha and a HackerNoon Startup of the Year recognition in North America is a gap that was closed by work, not by waiting for the infrastructure to improve.

That is the thing worth taking from this recognition.

Manas Majhi is the founder of Majhi Group (retained executive search) and Majhi OS (autonomous hiring operations infrastructure). He is from Kalahandi, Odisha, India. Majhi Group was named a HackerNoon Startup of the Year 2023 — North America. See the full recognition record.