Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Region Ranks 10th in Venture Capital

Some non-obvious regions are better for entrepreneurs than exepected, according to Brad Feld, Managing Director of the Foundry Group and author of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.  Feld wrote about the importance of “entrepreneurial density”–or the ratio of start-up founders and those they employ to the general population of a city–in his book, and emphasized the belief that access to easy capital is what makes or breaks a start-up community.

Richard Florida, a senior editor at The Atlantic, latched onto the idea of mapping capital-rich start-up centers in a series of articles published this month.  He compares communities by looking at the level of venture capital activity per 100,000 people.

The top ten regions are:

  1. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
  2. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
  3. Boulder, CO
  4. Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
  5. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA
  6. Lawrence, KS
  7. San Diego-Carlsbad, San Marcos, CA
  8. Austin-Round Rock, TX
  9. Provo-Orem, UT
  10. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA

Source:  Francesca Louise Fenzi, Inc., July 15, 2013.