I have lived and built (not so successfully) startup(s)[^n] from a small city, Nasik [^n], in India. Now when I look back on the journey, I think it was a mistake to do a startup from a small city. Small cities tend to keep you in comfort zone. Mostly because you don’t run into as many smart people as you should. Meeting, specially informally, many smart people and constantly interacting with them helps in multiple ways.

Smart people tend to challenge your ideas. Challenge your view of the world and provide important feedback. This reduces risk of tunnel vision and travelling on wrong path to the point of no return.

Meeting smart people also leads to humility. Humility leads to understanding that you don’t know lot of things and hence must seek out answers. Humility is most underrated quality.

Of course you, as an entrepreneur, might be aware of these issues with small cities and making sure you meet and interact with many smart people. Either online or offline. But your startup is not just you. Your team can greatly benefit with similar interactions, on a regular basis. Advantage of big cities is there is always possibility for them to participate in events [^n].

When you are considered smart in a city full of smart people, that in itself can be a decent validation.

Startups are hard. And working on them from a place which is not conducive to them is much harder.