Ranking Startup Cities

The debate about the top hubs of startup activity continues. Paul Graham kicked it off with this excellent post in which he made some slightly negative comments about New York City.

I responded with this post in which I asserted that NYC was clearly the number three startup center in the US.

Tim O’Reilly follows with this post in which he cites (and graphs) the work of Roger Magoulas, the head of O’Reilly Research.  In Tim’s post, he asserts that Seattle/Tacoma is number three and New York City is number four.

Well that’s what Tim gets for using data from Simply Hired (I am joking here, we are investors in Simply Hired’s competitor Indeed which is the leader in the job search vertical).

But interestingly, we did the same search back a month or so ago when I was having my initial debate with Paul.  Here are the stats we got out of the Indeed job index for "startup" jobs.

San Francisco, CA  2,288 jobs
Boston, MA  1,815 jobs
NYC…   1,625 jobs jobs
Seattle, WA    1,126 jobs
Austin, TX    372 jobs

I guess we’d have to reconcile our methodologies to understand why the difference in the results. I am guessing its probably due to definition of the geographic region but who knows.

What is clear though is that by any measure, New York is one of the top four hubs of startup activity in the country. And that continues to surprise a lot of people, but not me.

#VC & Technology