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:
- San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
- San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
- Boulder, CO
- Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH
- Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA
- Lawrence, KS
- San Diego-Carlsbad, San Marcos, CA
- Austin-Round Rock, TX
- Provo-Orem, UT
- Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
Source: Francesca Louise Fenzi, Inc., July 15, 2013.