Ask HN: What is the most up and coming city for tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the most up and coming city for tech?

5 pointsarmenarmen9 comments

I was wondering what the community's thoughts were on what the best city (outside of silicon valley) for tech is and ask why they thought so,

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My preception is mostly for the Canadian market, but for Canadians, Toronto is the place that I'd tell folks looking to get into the industry that they should go. I've worked in Ottawa, Montreal, and Atlantic Canada beforehand, and the amount of action going on in TO dwarfs all of them put together. Tons of companies, tons of potential opportunities, it's the best place in Canada to get started if you're into the IT sector.

Full disclosure: I currently work in the GTA. I also loathe living in the city, especially Toronto (I'm not a city guy, but you go where the work is in Canada so...)

I live in Seattle so I'm a bit biased, but I really do think that it's a fantastic city for tech. All of the big dogs are here (amazon, google, facebook, Microsoft) but there are also a lot of very innovative and creative well known startups and smaller companies. (Cheezburger, Tippr, etc..).

I have also heard great things about Austin, I have spent some time there as well and I love it as a city. I just don't know much about it in relation to the tech market.

I'm a little confused by the question ("up and coming" relates a different meaning to me than "outside silicon valley"), but I wouldn't call Seattle up and coming by my personal definition. Especially since Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo, et al are there. The existence of smaller companies doesn't negate the fact that there are already huge, established players there and the city is already known to be a huge tech haven.

My opinion would point more towards something like Detroit. A city not well known for tech (and well known for not being an economic powerhouse). But with Dan Gilbert's "Webward Avenue" and Dan Izzo's "Bizdom U" startup accelerator (founded when YCombinator was still a baby), new tech is starting to trickle into Detroit. See also: Detroit Venture Partners, M@dison.

There's a backing of billionaires willing to put as much as they can into Detroit to make it a tech haven, and so far it's showing some progress. I don't live in or even near Detroit, but it's a pretty promising sign for a city (and state) suffering the full brunt of technology's impact on unskilled labor.

[1]http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/06/transfor...

[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-izzo/go-midwest-young-entr...

Thanks guys, I live in Houston (in UH's entrepreneurship program and teaching myself to code) now so Austin is one of the places I'm really considering, but I am from Denver so boulder too is appealing. What do you all think about Boise? I hear that it's like Austin ten years ago, and click bank and some other big guys are based out of there. I've got one year until graduating so the clock is beginning to tick!

Austin is on the verge of being a clear #2 to Silicon Valley in my view. The recent growth has been enormous.

Austin looks better and better to me every day

My co-founder and I are hopping among different start-up hubs in the US to get a feel for this sort of thing. So far, Boulder has been the most dense (though it's small in size- ~ pop 100,000). And Austin seems to be one of the most active (not as dense, but a larger population overall- so a larger critical tech mass). Austin feels like it poised to be a giant.

Chattanooga looks interesting.

They have reasonably priced, supafast internet access and there are quite a few startups in the area already.

Don't they have a big start up grant thing as well no?

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