Startup Location Decision Record

Startup Location Decision Record

Decision rule

Choose the location that gives the company sufficient access to its most important work while staying legally, financially, operationally, and personally sustainable. A famous ecosystem is not a substitute for a company-specific dependency map.

Company jobs

The decision should begin with the work the company must complete during the next 12 to 18 months. Relevant dependencies may include customers, regulated institutions, domain experts, talent, vendors, capital, laboratories, manufacturing, infrastructure, travel routes, and government agencies.

Each dependency needs an access standard. Physical proximity matters when the work requires frequent trust-building, on-site observation, specialized infrastructure, or repeated in-person coordination. Remote access may be sufficient when the work is asynchronous, standardized, and available reliably from elsewhere.

Founder and household constraints

The record must include immigration and work authorization, entity and employment rules, tax exposure, housing cost, health care, accessibility, safety, care responsibilities, partner or family needs, community, climate, energy, and travel burden. A location that improves meetings but makes the founder's life unstable is not an operating advantage.

Some conditions are vetoes rather than weighted preferences. A location cannot compensate for an unresolved legal barrier, unaffordable baseline, inaccessible environment, or household requirement that it fails.

Evidence

The SBA location guide supports checking taxes, zoning, regulations, costs, target-market access, partners, and personal preferences. Census Business Dynamics Statistics can describe firm births, deaths, employment, geography, industry, size, and age. Neither source decides where an individual founder should move.

NBER research on entrepreneurship and cities describes associations involving suppliers, labor, education, industry structure, and local growth. These working papers do not establish that relocating a particular founder causes success.

Decision record

For every candidate location, preserve the company jobs, required access, current evidence, unknowns, vetoes, total recurring cost, travel burden, test result, counterevidence, reversibility, decision date, and owner. Separate observed facts from estimates and impressions.

The final decision should state what the city enables, what it does not solve, what would reverse the choice, and when the assumptions will be reviewed.