Small Town, Big Ideas

I build technology from Chandrapur — a city in eastern Maharashtra that does not appear on any list of startup hubs, that has no ecosystem of investors, no cafés full of founders, no gravity pulling ambitious people toward it. For years I treated this as a handicap to overcome. Now I think it was one of the best things that could have happened to the way I build. The story we tell about where innovation must happen is mostly a story, and it is worth questioning.

The myth of the necessary city

We are told that to build anything serious you must be in a great metro — that proximity to money, talent, and other builders is the oxygen of ambition, and that to breathe thin air anywhere else is to suffocate slowly. There is truth in it. Cities concentrate resources, and resources matter. But the story overreaches. It quietly implies that the small-town builder is playing a lesser game, and that is simply false.

The internet did something that the myth has not caught up with: it detached the tools of building from the geography of building. The same code, the same customers, the same global market are reachable from a desk in Chandrapur as from one in a glass tower. What is not the same is the noise, and the difference in noise turns out to matter more than I expected.

What distance gives you

In a great startup city, you are surrounded by other people's ideas, other people's urgency, other people's definitions of success. This is stimulating and also deforming. It is very hard to hear your own thinking over a crowd all pointing in the same fashionable direction. Building far from the center, I was spared the herd. I did not know what I was "supposed" to build, so I built what actually made sense to me and to the people around me.

The metro gives you a thousand answers to questions you never asked. The small town gives you silence, and silence is where your own questions finally become audible.

Distance also forced a useful self-reliance. There was no one nearby to solve my problems, so I learned to solve them. There was no scene to perform for, so I stopped performing and just worked. Some of the sharpest builders I know come from places like mine, not despite the isolation but because of it — they had to develop an inner engine that people in richer environments can outsource.

The problems you can see from here

There is a subtler gift. Living outside the metro, you see problems the metro cannot. The concerns of a big city's affluent core are not the concerns of most of the country, and builders clustered there tend to solve, over and over, the narrow problems of people exactly like themselves. From a smaller place, you are surrounded by different, often larger, unsolved problems — the real textures of how most people actually live. That is not a disadvantage. That is a frontier.

I have come to see my location as a vantage point rather than a limitation. I can see both worlds: the global tools and the local realities. Builders trapped in the bubble can see only one. If anything, the small-town builder has the wider view.

What it honestly costs

I will not romanticise it into something free. There are real costs. Serendipity is scarcer — the accidental conversation that changes everything happens less when there are fewer builders to bump into. You have to manufacture, deliberately, the connections that a metro hands you by accident. And there are lonely stretches where you would trade a great deal for one person nearby who understood the work.

But these costs are payable. The internet closes most of the distance if you are intentional. And the loneliness, for me, became part of the discipline — it drove me deeper into the work and, on the other side of the day, into writing poetry, which needs solitude the way building needs focus.

Big ideas do not need big cities

The belief that you must move to a great city to do meaningful work has kept countless capable people from starting where they are. If you are somewhere small, wondering whether you need to leave before you are allowed to build something that matters, I want to tell you plainly: you do not. The tools are in your hands already. The problems worth solving are all around you. The quiet is a feature.

Chandrapur taught me that a small place is not a small stage — it is simply a quieter one, and quiet is where original work is born. I write more about building from the margins in my other essays, and a little about my own path in the about page.