The World’s Leading Startup Cities

Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area have long been the world leaders in high-tech startups, giving rise to cutting-edge companies from Apple and Intel to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. But recent years have seen the rise of an increasingly potent group of cities around the world that are generating new startups in creative and unique ways.

The 2015 edition of the Startup Genome Project from Compass (I wrote about the previous edition of the report back in 2012) provides a new ranking for the world’s leading startup cities. The report is based on data from 11,000 global startup companies, interviews with more than 200 entrepreneurs worldwide, and data from Crunchbase and other sources. Its ranking gauges the world’s leading startup ecosystems—the broad infrastructure of talent, knowledge, entrepreneurs, venture capital, and companies that make up a startup community. The report measures these ecosystems based on their quality of talent, pool of venture capital resources, experience and mentorship provided by startup founders, market reach of their companies, and the ultimate performance and exit value of their companies. (One omission of the report: due to language barriers, it was not able to collect sufficient data to evaluate cities in China, Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea.)