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Comment by ashishgandhi | Hacker News Reader

Why density? Does density really matter? Isn't the absolute number more interesting because whatever be the chance of meeting an important (to your success) person, you have a bigger pool to pick from.

Case of city A: Say, there are 50,000 residents of which 500 are of interest. There's an event hosted and 25% of those "interesting" people show up. You, who's attending this event, have a pool of 125 people out of which, say 5% can help you AND you'll bump into. So chances are you'll meet 6 people. Density: 0.01.

Case of city B: 5,000 residents, 100 interesting, 25 show up, chances are you'll meet only 1 person. Density: 0.02 (double).

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I think the truth is that the absolute number, along with density are both important. That's why Boulder - apparently 70% more entrepreneurial than Silicon Valley - cannot really claim to be better than SV, which has an entrepreneurial population 15 times larger.

Also New York. I think I've read people talking about New York having over taken Boston and it being a potential threat to the Valley. But density-wise, I don't think it is fairing (I hope I've used the correct spelling of the word) that well.

I was really surprised to see Boulder on that list... had no idea that there were apparently many start ups there, even if it is just by percent.

Boulder's startup scene has skyrocketed in the past several years. At monthly startup meetups, hundreds of people usually show up to check out what everyone else is working on.

It's not quite a Silicon Valley, and its score is probably exaggerated by the difficulty in defining a population area that's relevant to the startup scene. However, most startups in the scene are in Boulder proper, and most founders seem to live in the city as well. So the density is there, and it's quite easy to run into other startup people on the sidewalk or in coffee shops.

That's exactly what I was going to say. This is a good first stab at measuring something important.

One thing I was wondering was what "population" was used. I assume it's the city population. Using MSA or CSA populations could lead to very different results, most likely favoring smaller locales.

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