Office and Hiring Radius Decision Memo

The hometown pull is weaker than founders assume

You are choosing between staying in your hometown, moving, or hiring remote. The local default has thinned. For the full American sample, the local-bias gap, the edge self-employed workers had in staying in their birth state, turned negative in the latest census used in Kerr's study. In 1970, US-born self-employed White men were 8 percentage points more likely to stay in their birth state than wage workers. In 2018, that group had a 2-percentage-point higher chance of staying in their birth state than wage workers. The share of self-employment in high-capital sectors, where firms need more capital to operate, was one-quarter during 2014-2018.

Local ties can shape operations, but they should not set the address. A founder who stays because the airport is familiar, the landlord is known, or the early hire is a cousin is making a location call from memory. Put the operating constraints in the memo before you choose the address.

The memo should be built before the lease

• Map the talent market. List the roles you will hire soon. Include the skills that are hard to teach and the roles that require in-person work. For each role, note where candidates already live, where they will relocate, and where competitors are hiring. If a role can be filled from a wider pool, say so before you score the location. The output is a short table with role, candidate pool, relocation risk, and time to fill.
• Map the customers. Identify the accounts you expect to close soon and the regions where they operate. Separate revenue customers from reference customers, accounts that lend credibility. A reference customer can justify a local presence only if it changes sales velocity, or deal speed, or support quality. Note whether your product needs local presence, local support, or only remote delivery. A customer list with labels, nearby, reachable, distant, completes the step.
• Score cost, network, and financing constraints. Compare rent, taxes, insurance, and travel costs across the shortlist. Include commuting, local recruiting, and the cost of being far from investors, banks, and service providers. Treated firms in a randomized trial in Chile gained USD 292 per month in profits, equivalent to a 13.4% increase, after receiving large loans. Customer survey data from the Chile trial showed consumer surplus, the value buyers receive beyond price, rising by USD 494 per month. The cost sheet must include capital access, not just rent.
• Set the hiring radius. Choose a radius that matches the talent list, not the founder's comfort. When the best candidates are clustered in a metro, make that the default. When they are spread out, use remote work with clear overlap hours. For remote work, define the minimum overlap and travel schedule. For local work, define the commute limit and on-site expectation. Treat remote work as a design choice, not a fallback. The written rule should cover local work, remote work, and travel.
• Choose stay, move, or remote. Give each option a score for the factors you just weighed. Write the losing options and why they lost. Pick the option that wins on the weighted score, not the one that feels familiar. That keeps the memo honest when the team later asks why you did not stay closer to home. A one-page memo stating the decision, the reasons, and the next review date closes the step.

The decision should survive a second reader

Before signing anything, send the memo to a person outside the founding team. Ask them to flag the assumptions that are doing the most work. If the answer depends on an unconfirmed source, treat that as a risk, not a fact. If the answer depends on a customer who has not signed, move it to a watch list. The memo should make the location call explicit enough that a new ops lead could defend it without asking the founder for a story.

Set a review trigger. Revisit the memo when the team grows, when a major customer changes region, or when financing terms change. Put the trigger in the operating calendar and assign an owner.