Is location important?

Is location important when you thinking about starting up? Should you startup in a particular city as compared to others? Why Silicon Valley or London, or Tel Aviv or Bangalore???

The answer is yes, a good location can assist the founders in their startup. Unless you are running a very offline or location specific business where you need to be stationed in the city of launch, it is advisable to move to a city where the startup ecosystem is stronger. In such cases as well, we can have a team in the city of launch to gather/execute the physical part of the business whereas the marketing, technology teams can be seated elsewhere. The reasons for choosing a city which is more conducive to startups are as follows:
- That is where the experts are. Having an established startup ecosystem will ensure that the location will have better more experienced people to mentor and assist you.
- The culture will ensure that you will feel in place and in general you will receive more assistance from people around. People will be more sympathetic and understanding towards what you are doing.
- Vendors & supporting Industries will be more established, thereby enabling your startup to grow with better services and experience supporting it.
- The funding community tends to be more active and involved in the city's startup scene.
- Finding co-founders and hiring the best talent will be easier, which gets drawn due to the city's reputation and culture.

Hence, if one has an option to shift, one should. 

Are layoffs in big startups a matter of concern for budding entrepreneurs?

Concern – No, Learning – Yes. We need to understand the reasons for the layoffs first. The startup scene in India started booming last year and this led to a lot of startups forming overambitious targets and efforts to scale their businesses. Without analysis their startups at a micro level, startups started marketing heavily and hiring aggressively to sustain the growth. This led to a big boom in startup hiring and somewhat created a small bubble in the process.

When investors started questioning the sustainability of the growth being seen in startups and money became more difficult to come by, startups had to assess their growth and business model. To become more sustainable and lean, they had to resort to mass layoffs to cut the extra fat they had developed in the recent period.

Hence, the startup ecosystem in India is here to stay and we will see rapid growth in the years to come. Startups should understand that growth should always be well paced and sustainable and analysis should dominate emotion in driving a venture.