The Advantage of Building Outside the Metro

The advice was consistent. Everyone I talked to in my early years of building said some version of the same thing: You should be in Bangalore. That's where the action is.

Distance from the centre is a constraint. It is also an instruction to build differently.

I heard it from people who meant well. I heard it from people who were right about a lot of things. And I heard it from people who had built their own businesses in metros and couldn't quite imagine doing it any other way.

I didn't move to Bangalore. I built in Odisha, first in a smaller setup, eventually opening space in Kalahandi itself, the district I grew up in. And what I found was that the conventional wisdom about location and success had a significant blind spot.

Not because location doesn't matter. It does. But because the way people talk about the disadvantages of building outside a hub almost never talks about the advantages. And there are genuine advantages. I've lived them.

The cost reality

The first advantage is obvious once you see it, but almost never appears in the advice people give: the cost of building outside a metro is dramatically lower.

Bangalore office space in a decent area runs Rs.80-150 per square foot per month. In Bhubaneswar, it's Rs.25-50. In a smaller city in Odisha, less. When you're a young firm that is not yet generating predictable revenue, that difference is not incidental. It is the difference between having runway and not having it.

Salaries for equivalent talent, a good operations person, an analyst, someone who can run a research process, follow a similar spread. The same quality of work costs meaningfully less in Odisha than in Bangalore. Not because the work is worth less. Because the cost of living in Odisha is lower, and both parties know it.

I am not suggesting that building in Odisha is easy or that cost savings alone make a business viable. But when the founder community in Bangalore talks about how hard it is to extend runway, how expensive it is to hire, how crushing burn rate pressure becomes: they are describing problems that are significantly smaller outside the metros. I have seen the numbers from both sides.

The talent equation

The second advantage is subtler and more important.

Odisha produces a significant number of engineers, managers, healthcare professionals, and finance professionals every year who leave for better opportunities in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and beyond. This has been the pattern for decades. The talent leaves because the local opportunity isn't there.

But many of these people don't particularly want to live in Bangalore. They left because they had to, not because they prefer a two-hour commute and an apartment the size of a studio. If there were a compelling professional opportunity in Odisha, real work, real pay, real trajectory, a meaningful fraction of them would come back.

When I hire in Odisha, I am hiring from a pool that has been educated and often experienced in India's best institutions and companies, and that is now open to returning home. That pool is not visible to the firms in Bangalore who are competing for the same candidates who want to stay in Bangalore. It is, for my purposes, underserved.

This is a version of what investors call a "less efficient market." The labor market in tier-2 India is less efficient than the labor market in Bangalore. Which means, for a firm willing to operate there, better-than-expected quality at better-than-expected cost is available.

The story is different

The third advantage is competitive positioning, and it is the one I underestimated most when I started.

Executive search firms based in Bangalore or Mumbai compete in a very crowded field. There are dozens of retained search firms, hundreds of contingency firms, and a growing number of AI-assisted sourcing businesses all telling roughly the same story to the same prospects. The prospects are tired of the pitch.

When I tell a CEO that Majhi Group is headquartered in Odisha, that we deliberately built a global firm from a context that people wrote off, something shifts. It's not just curiosity. It's a signal about what kind of firm we are and what kind of thinking we do.

The story "we built this from Kalahandi and we close VP searches in 41 days" is a different story than "we're one of many firms in HSR Layout." The differentiation is built into the origin, not added on top.

I did not engineer this. It's simply true. But it's also true that it works: that the provenance of where something was built matters to certain buyers, especially buyers who care about the quality of thinking rather than just the proximity of the firm to their office.

What building outside the metro actually requires

I want to be honest about what it costs, because the advantages I've described are real but not free.

Building outside a hub requires more intentional network-building. The founder peer group that forms organically in Bangalore, through co-working spaces, meetups, mutual introductions, doesn't exist in the same density in Odisha. You have to build it deliberately: travel for the conversations that matter, use online communities seriously, stay connected to people who are building things you can learn from. This takes more effort than running into the same people at a Koramangala coffee shop.

It also requires confidence in your own judgment that is harder to maintain when you're not surrounded by people validating similar decisions. When everyone around you is doing X, it's easier to keep doing X. When you're doing something differently from most of your context, you have to be more certain of your own reasoning.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. I think building in Odisha has made me a more deliberate thinker about why I do things the way I do them. But it is a cost, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

The office in Kalahandi

The most specific version of this thesis I can offer is the ten-seater office we opened in Kalahandi.

At the time, several people I respected asked me, implicitly or explicitly, whether this made operational sense. Wouldn't it be easier to have everyone in one place? Wasn't Kalahandi a harder context to recruit into?

My answer was that Kalahandi is where I'm from, that putting a real professional office in the district matters for reasons that go beyond operational efficiency, and that someone has to be first. If the global delivery center doesn't exist in Kalahandi, then every young person from Kalahandi who wants a professional career has to leave Kalahandi to get one. If it does exist, even at ten seats, the calculus changes slightly.

It's a small intervention. I'm not claiming it changed everything. But it was possible only because I had built a firm that was not dependent on being in a particular city to function. And it reinforced something I had been learning the whole time: the disadvantages of building outside the metro are finite. The advantages compound.

Constraint as institutional design

There is a dimension to building outside the metro that I did not expect and that I think is underappreciated: the constraint forces better institutional design.

In a dense ecosystem, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, founders can substitute environment for architecture. The peer network transmits professional norms by proximity. The talent pool is already socialised into what good work looks like. The informal culture of the ecosystem does institutional work that the founder doesn't have to do explicitly.

Outside the metro, that substitution isn't available. The norms have to be made explicit. The quality standards have to be written down. The culture has to be transmitted through deliberate mechanisms rather than absorbed from a surrounding ecosystem. The decision criteria that other founders can carry in their heads, because they've been around people making similar decisions their whole careers, have to be codified, because there's nobody nearby who has made those decisions before.

This is a cost. It is also a forcing function.

The institutional architecture that emerges from building where the environment isn't doing the work tends to be more explicit, more transmissible, and more durable than the architecture that forms by osmosis in hub ecosystems. You have to design what other founders inherit. And designed architecture outlasts inherited architecture, because it is legible to people who weren't there when it formed.

Research by Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange on agglomeration economies, the productivity advantages that come from being in a dense geographic cluster, found that those advantages are real and significant for knowledge workers, particularly in early career formation. But the same research suggests the advantages diminish for more experienced founders who have already absorbed the norms and can now build on them rather than acquiring them from proximity.

The implication: building outside the metro is harder early and increasingly viable, even advantageous, as the founder's institutional design capability develops. The constraint that makes it hard is the same constraint that develops the capability. And the capability, once built, is portable.

Mine is portable. And it came from Kalahandi.

See also: Building as a Response to a Place, Building Through Uncertainty, From Service to System

Sources

Stuart Rosenthal and William Strange: Evidence on the Nature and Sources of Agglomeration Economies (NBER, 2003)

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

McKinsey Global Institute, India's Turning Point: An Economic Agenda for the Decade