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Talent is everything when it comes to building a successful company. It’s no surprise then that access to talent tops the list for founders when asked to share the most important factors they considered when choosing where to locate their companies. Looking forward, it will be interesting to track how this changes in the years ahead. Are we going to see a shift in the perceived importance of proximity to a talent base from the choice of founding location if the trend towards building companies in a remote-first and distributed way continues? The fact that the response ‘where I lived’ ranks so highly across the key considerations also speaks to the idea that the notion of moving to build a company to optimise for geographical proximity to talent, capital or customers may be eroded by the changing acceptance of virtual and remote operations.