U.S. Startups Locations Analysis | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Startups Locations Analysis

activewizards.com

64 pointsviktoriia_sh20 comments

If you correclty merge Washington DC and District of Columbia, it jumps to 6th place from 11/12. I have a hard time trusting an state by state analysis that doesn't get that bit correct. Also, should it really be state by state, or metro region? Near D.C. I am much closer to NY than say LA to San Francisco.

Would it be correct to merge? They are the same thing so it’s more like a duplicate. The fact that one of the stats is wildly different is quite alarming.

The fact that one of them is wildly different indicates it's a categorization issue and not a duplicate, although it's possible there are some duplicate values.

I suppose you’re right but I was somewhat skeptical of there being double the number of investors in dc as there are in mass (ie boston)

> "We are looking for the states with the best conditions for the development of startups, so we are most interested in Companies and Jobs measures."

I don't think this goal was clearly accomplished based on the analysis.

For one, it's unclear how many companies in their analysis are still "active" companies. For example, a company could still have an angel.co profile with posted jobs, but if the last company activity was ~1 year ago, their company status may not be up to date.

Utterly unusable on mobile.

Utterly unusable on desktop. I keep getting "possible security error" popups.

Clear white page of nothing on Firefox. Works on Chrome.

Works for me on mobile Safari.

Yeah, the Tableau embedded visualizations are awful on mobile.

I would like to see the same plots weighted by state population.

Oh! Or compared to available housing or housing prices!

That last bit would be interesting. You’d want to tie it to average salary of startup workers though? “Available” is a relative term right?

Why? State population is irrelevant to anyone actually making a decision. It's not "fair", but that doesn't really matter. Though state-level statistics also aren't great for decision making IMO, it should probably be computed by metro area.

I moved to NYC from the bay area, and I don't necessarily regret it, but you can see that there is a real gap in the depth of tech between the two, so if you want to work on cutting edge tech, the bay area is probably still the best place to be, though you may have to make quality of life sacrifices for that.

> real gap in the depth of tech

Do you mean it's harder to hire top tech talent? Are the companies technologically less advanced? Something else?

More companies doing innovative tech work, rather than just deploying known tech. Lots of top tech talent drawn to that work, hiring is not necessarily easier (lots of competition), but as a person moving to SF you get more interaction with those people.

NYC isn't bad on these metrics, but the bay area is just noticeably better.

I think they're asking due to this effect.

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Though I suspect your qualitative contrast between the Bay area and NY is correct.

Or a transient analysis to get a sense of trends, particularly in light of recent articles talking about "Peak Valley" [0].

[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/30/why-startups-ar...

Seems like a lot of "social network bias", in that angellist is wildly popular in California, but here in Colorado it is little utilized and often derided as out of date and useless.

Depending on a single social network like this to make sweeping generalizations about geography when social networking is very much a geographic/social proximity phenomena is pretty dubious.

I wonder the following

- What % of startups are actual tech companies?

- What is tech culture like in every city (aggregate data from meetup, event tech conferences, etc)

- Number of entry tech jobs for each city compared to number of startups, etc

- Specific tech job demographics keyword searches (PHP, etc)

- Wages, expenses comparison

- Census data, of the population in each city, what is median / mode wage of data? How many techworkers are there ratio wise (Silicon Valley, vs New York City). How are techworkers defined here (video production / graphic designers -> are they included?)

- How are different cities calculated in sizing? Radius distance from city center, zipcodes associated, etc? (For instance, most cities are 25 miles radius from what I've resaerched, san fransisco is about 15 miles radius or even less for that given specific population minus silicon valley /palo alto)

This data is pretty interesting and I think would be still more interesting if it included changes in startup distribution over time. That information would be very revealing in terms of macro-level industry trends and whether Silicon Valley is becoming more or less of a concentrated hub for tech.

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