In the age of rapidly accelerating companies based on competition, your potential top talent could be coming out of the local universities. Choose an ecosystem that is graduating a diverse talent base that is critical to your company’s success. Recruit some of this talent as paid interns and recruit them to be your future employees.

Education

There is nothing like success to support success. For an ecosystem to thrive, you want to have a high number of successful and aspiring entrepreneurs. They create support networks, organizations, and meetups and provide advice and mentoring to future entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs

If you are creating a biotech startup, then you should be in San Diego, one of the largest thriving biotech regions in the country. Why? Because your ability to recruit top talent is greatly enhanced. So, as you consider your startup and what it needs at the core, does that talent exist in your selected city or region?

Talent

Every entrepreneurial ecosystem needs investors. Study a potential region and look at the numbers such as capital invested, diversity of investments and overall growth trendline. Also, look to the type of investor that may be specializing in an area that your startup is heading.

Investors

While there are many cities and regions in the USA that are growing entrepreneurship rapidly, the list below contains the perennial leader, Silicon Valley and another region that has benefited from companies like Microsoft and Amazon and that is Seattle. <ul><li>Silicon Valley</li><li>Seattle</li><li>Austin</li><li>Salt Lake City/Provo</li><li>San Diego</li></ul>

The List Of Cities

Not a lot of founders look at this metric but again it could be critical to your startup’s ultimate success. If you are raising capital, you might need a burn rate or runway to attain your overall objectives. While you may want to be in Silicon Valley, all of the right ecosystem resources might be in Salt Lake City where the cost of living is lower and the potential burn rate is much longer.

Costs

We all know the failure rate of startups, about 90% over five years. And we know Silicon Valley might still be the dominant location in the United States for starting technology companies. Perhaps that is due to the venture capitalist’s insistence that companies they fund be in or move to Silicon Valley. But as you consider the type of company you wish to start, you really should examine the importance of several factors outside of funding that could hedge your startup’s success. Where you locate your startup, even in the age of remote work, might actually be more critical than you think.

The Premise

Several startup ecosystems, outside of Silicon Valley, have been quietly rising for more than 20 years.

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