Startup Genome puts together a massive 200-page report every year ranking the world's top startup ecosystems. These were some of the highlights for us this year:
1)European cities are on the up when it comes to startups.
Yes, Silicon Valley is still at the top of the ranking of global startup ecosystems. Yes, the next five are still the very predictable New York, London, Beijing, Boston and Shanghai. But after that things get interesting.
Paris moves into the top 10. The Lausanne-Bern-Geneva region joins the list for the first time, as do Dublin, Barcelona and Munich.
In fact, European cities now make up a third of the list of top startup cities, with steady growth since 2012.
2) Deeptech is the fastest-growing sector in tech
Nearly half of all new startups are in a deeptech sub-sector. The biggest growth in seed and series-A funding has been for advanced manufacturing and robotics, blockchain, agtech and AI.
Adtech, edtech, gaming and digital media are on the way down.
This opens up all kinds of possibilities for new, less well-known startup hubs. Silicon Valley may have ruled the roost when it came to silicon chips and the internet. But the next phase of innovation will not be based on those technologies.
To quote Peter Thiel: “The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t start a social network company.” Maybe she’s building a robotics company in Munich.
3) Europe is not great for female founders.
Just 8% of founders in Paris, for example, are female. What is going on? If New York and Shanghai can manage 24%, why can’t European cities do the same? Even egalitarian Stockholm only scrapes in 16%. This is really poor.
4) Premature scaling is one of the biggest reasons for startup failure.
Hiring too fast, writing too much code, spending more than $15,000 a month on customer acquisition especially if your user base is still less than 100,000 are all bad signs.
