New York is now the world’s number 2 startup ecosystem

Startup data benchmarking company Compass has released its second Startup Ecosystem Report. In the three years since the previous report, New York City (where TNW has a conference coming up!) has overtaken Tel Aviv in the rankings to become the second most significant startup ecosystem in the world, behind (of course) Silicon Valley.

Austin, Bangalore, Singapore, and Chicago all saw gains in the new ranking table, while Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Seattle fell. Santiago, Melbourne and Waterloo, meanwhile, dropped out of the top 20 completely.

While the pride of more than a few local ecosystem cheerleaders in cities around the world may be hurt by seeing their city drop (especially as in some cases such as Tel Aviv, the ecosystems are still growing), the data collection this time around is much more comprehensive than 2012’s report, meaning the findings aren’t directly comparable but should be paid attention to.

Compass worked with Deloitte, Crunchbase, Orb Intelligence, Global Entrepreneurship Week, Dealroom, and 60 local partners to perform research that included conducted 200 interviews with entrepreneurs and local experts from 25 countries and data from 11,000 surveys completed by startups, investors and other stakeholders in the last five months. The work had support from Ron Berman at Wharton Business School, Dr. Thomas Funke from the German Federal Ministry for Economics and startup theorist Steve Blank.

Ecosystems were ranked by performance, funding, talent, market reach, and ‘startup experience’ (which Compass describes as “first-party survey data that is linked to success of startups, such as having veteran startup mentors or founders with previous startup experience “).

Interconnected ecosystems

The report finds that ecosystems are more interconnected than you may assume. International second offices are on the rise, and on average, 29 percent of employees across the top 20 ecosystems are foreign. Meanwhile, 37 percent of all funding rounds in the top 20 ecosystems have at least one investor from another ecosystem and 27 percent of funding rounds involve at least one foreign investor.

Gender imbalance

It’s no secret that startups founders are predominantly male, and this report finds that across the top 20 ecosystems, only 18 percent of founders are female. Chicago comes out on top in the progressiveness stakes here, with women making up 30 percent of founders.

There’s a lot more to get your teeth into in the full report, and it’s worth a read if you want to understand what the top performing ecosystems are doing right.

➤ Compass Startup Ecosystem Report 2015

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