Building a Global Business from Odisha

I built Majhi Group as someone from Odisha, carrying the perspective, the networks, the chip on the shoulder, and the specific problem-orientation that growing up in Kalahandi produced. The business is global. Its orientation is shaped by where I'm from in ways that took me years to fully understand.

When I started thinking seriously about building a business, the conventional wisdom was clear: you need to be somewhere. Somewhere meant Bangalore, or Mumbai, or if you were ambitious and technical, San Francisco. The wisdom was not wrong, networks matter, ecosystems matter, density of smart people and capital matters. But it was incomplete in ways that only became clear through the experience of building from the outside.

What geography actually determines

Geography determines your initial network. It does not determine your eventual one.

The most significant advantage of being in a startup ecosystem hub is access, to capital, to talent, to customers, to the informal information flows that tell you what is working and what is failing before it becomes public. These advantages are real and they compound. Someone building a consumer tech company who is physically present in San Francisco has genuine access advantages over someone building the same thing from a smaller city.

But they are not universal. For a services business, for consulting, for professional services, for anything where the product is expertise rather than software, the relevant network is the client network, and client networks are much less geographically concentrated than the startup ecosystem maps suggest.

My clients are in New York, London, Dubai, Singapore. The work I do, placing executives, building systems for hiring operations, is relevant wherever organizations are trying to hire for leadership. The geographic concentration that matters for my business is not startup ecosystem density; it is where the relevant decision-makers are. And those decision-makers are reachable from anywhere with a good internet connection and a clear value proposition.

What actually constrained me

What actually constrained me in the early phases was not geography - it was the belief that geography was the constraint.

This belief manifested as a reluctance to approach clients who seemed like they required a physical presence I did not have. It manifested as a diffidence about positioning, a sense that being from Odisha in an industry dominated by firms in major global cities was a disadvantage that needed to be managed or hidden rather than simply not relevant.

The moment this changed was when I had my first meaningful success with an international client, a search that produced an outcome the client was delighted with, in a context where my physical location had been entirely irrelevant to the quality of what I delivered. The experience was clarifying in a way that no amount of reasoning had been: if the work is good, the work is good.

The clients who matter are not evaluating you on the basis of your zip code. They are evaluating you on the basis of your track record and your understanding of their problem. These things are producible from anywhere.

The actual advantage

There is something I did not expect: being from somewhere that is not at the center of things is occasionally an asset.

Not in a romantic way, I am not claiming that the outsider perspective is intrinsically superior. But in a specific, practical way: people who have built from constraint tend to be more resourceful than people who have built from abundance, because constraint required the development of resourcefulness in a way that abundance does not.

The instinct to figure out how to do more with less. The skepticism about conventional wisdom that comes from having learned it from a distance, which means having had to evaluate it rather than absorb it as ambient truth. The clarity about what actually matters, which comes from having had to choose more carefully when you have less to work with.

These are not compensations for disadvantage. They are genuine capabilities, and they were produced by the environment I grew up in.

I would not trade the origin. And I am glad it is not the limitation people told me it would be.

See also: Odisha Startups: Who Is Building Here, What Kalinga Knew About the Indian Ocean, The Advantage of Building Outside the Metro

Sources

Harvard Business Review: The Founder's Dilemma (Noam Wasserman, 2008)

McKinsey: Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First

World Bank: Doing Business in India: Regional Variation Report