Portland, Oregon, is (one of the) most entrepreneurial towns in the world
siliconflorist.com
siliconflorist.com
I'll start from an arts angle.
I really like music, and one of the main reasons I live in Portland is the incredible music scene. Coming from San Francisco, one can see a million reasons why so many bands (and artists) move from SF/Oakland to here. A million more houses with basements, let alone dwellings that don't share two sides with others. (in SF, even practice spaces are hard to get, even when you're able to afford one).
And of course the cost of living is better than SF, so theoretically artists can spend more time on their art.
But then you notice a lot more "community" resources in Portland, too, like the IPRC for zinesters. (free/very low cost access to old-school letterpress, Macs w/layout apps).
And MANY small venues for bands to play/artists to have shows, including many all ages venues, sometimes co-ops, sometimes regular business, sometimes house shows (but houses that have "real" names, and a decent setup, and show schedule) (high turnover, but these places are always starting up).
The venues are a really important building block for artists. Sometimes they're coffee shops with 20 feet of wall space for photos, sometimes they're spacious warehouses for orchestra bands.
But they are not just a satellite for OTHER artists, these spaces are somebody's dream in their own right. I now see restaurants and cafes in Portland as their own kind of awesome art/startup business that I've never seen anywhere else.
A dungeon-like donut shop? Vegan convenience store (they don't even try to be healthy :D), An all food-cart food court?
For whatever reason, people try crazy business/art ideas all the time in Portland, probably because failure isn't that terrifying financially.
But it's not just the "low cost" that I give credit to in Portland, but the symbiotic nature of businesses and projects. It's probably fragile, but all these disparate pieces are critical parts of other peoples projects. It's not mere generosity or community spirit, but just the nature of the ecosystem that gets created when you have enough people with a sincere passion in different parts of a common theme.
Some of the traditional building blocks of tech startups are missing in Portland (VC, multiple universities with business friendly tech research), but I think one reason that Portland geeks are unphased by this is that we're so grounded in some of the DIY principles of punk (there, i said it), that resourcefulness/open source/small scale scrappiness are just "business words" for values we've already internalized.
could be wrong though ... every time I try to go there, the line is around the corner
That being said, in my list of best cities for startups, Portland makes a good case for 3rd place.
Quality of living is super high. Combined with a reasonable cost of living, it's a fantastic place to live.
I think that everybody thrives in their own way in different places - I love promoting Portland because it'll work very well for some people. For others, not so much, but that's how it goes with almost everything.
Just in the last few days, I came to terms with the fact that while I didn't really want to move "back home," Portland is the ideal place. Decent-size place, nice climate year-round, plenty of culture, great variety of stuff to do within a day's drive or less ... it is kind of a mini-bay area without the tech tilt in many ways. I grew up in a mid-sized town several hours away, but many of the more interesting people I knew in high school have ended up there.
Added bonus: If you live in Vancouver, WA (north suburbs of PDX) and work from home (or just in WA), there's no state income tax.
Eugene? That's where I'm from.
> nice climate year-round,
Let's be honest, if it were, then it would be inundated with people because it is a nice place in so many other ways. It's not, though, IMO; it's gray and drizzly from October to early summer (and usually stops raining the 5th of July). If people don't mind that, it's a great place, though, although it does tend towards laid back rather than busy/active. IMO you could do a lot worse.
"Nice" is probably overstating the climate, but the flip-side is that it's rarely too hot or too cold; you don't usually suffer through the heat+humidity of the eastern seaboard, which probably has something to do with me holding that opinion right this second!
You just don't really see that many umbrellas here (especially outside of downtown).
[edit: basic grammar]
Yes, that's precisely the problem. Instead of a brief downpour, you get a week where it sprinkles on and off and it's cloudy the whole time.
I lived and worked downtown for several years, walking to work every day. In that whole time, I was actually rained on during that walk maybe a dozen times. I have no idea how this works, but it does.
It can rain all day every day for a week, while somehow never actually raining on you.
Northern England, on the other hand, goes out of its way to rain directly on you whenever you try to get out and do anything.
To me, Eugene was always kind of frustratingly way too laid back. It never seemed like people were doing things.
Please, please, please don't suggest that more people take advantage of this loophole! The Vancouver/Portland commute has already rendered I-5 useless, and the residents on the Washington side are currently lobbying aggressively for a new 12-lane bridge (whose cost would be paid largely by Oregon) across the Columbia to ease the congestion without taking any steps (light rail, tolls, etc.) to reduce the amount of traffic.
Portland is what it is in part because residents of the city and Multnomah county are willing to pay relatively higher taxes than those in neighboring areas for a higher level of service from the city. Our transit + public services are pretty good, but the folks who drive down from Vancouver and ride the MAX through Fareless Square to shop without paying sales tax or income tax are just freeloading.
The differences between Portland and Vancouver are particularly stark, as the lack of an urban growth boundary in Clark county (where Vancouver is located) makes real estate (and therefore property taxes) much cheaper on the Vancouver side.
When you get right down to it, my point is simply that people who like a progressive, tax-heavy city like Portland enough to spend a lot of their time there should probably be willing to pay the taxes that go along with that lifestyle. Otherwise, they're just making it that much harder on the full-time residents.
Two interesting tech startups that have connections to Reed College, which is not known as a tech school are Tektronix which was started by a physics PhD candidate who needed the tools (so the story goes) and Apple where Steve went to school. Tektronix is credited with starting the Silicon Forest.
One suspects that this is less well known as part of a conspiracy to guard against Californification of the state.
Speaking of food, does anyone remember the "Heavy Number Taco Company" chain which used old gas stations?
First the original article never said the "Best" or "Top Ten" entrepreneurial cities. It was just a "here are some good towns to start a business in"
It's also very much not tech focused.