Given covid-19, we have been pushed to WFH environment for people in the startup world. The longer we stay in WFH, people are either contemplating about moving or have already moved to other regions. I was interested to comparing various states and regions from today to ten years ago, as a way to think about what region/state might breakout in the next 10 years.

The data below is from Pitchbook. I took a look at companies that are HQ’d in these regions and have raised an aggregate of $1M+ of funding from VCs. I compared two date periods: Jan 1 2009 through Dec 21 2010 and Jan 1 2019 to Dec 5 2020 (today’s date). Here is the data.

I have been living in the NY Metro area now for 10 years, so the NY numbers were not a surprise, almost a 4x growth in 10 years, truly remarkable at the growth but also aggregate, being in the #2 spot overall. Was surprised to see the growth of Chicago / IL region. In terms of the future, I believe that Atlanta has a lot of upside and could catapult to the 5th position. There is a lot of chatter of about Texas and Florida, there are a fair amount of startup people moving there from the Bay Area and NYC, so there certainly is a chance that they could move up quickly. I do wonder if these moves are temporary due to COVID or are permanent. Texas and Florida are a bit challenged as they have a handful of large cities within the state which makes impacts the concentration of talent. If you look at the top regions above , it is usually one large market in a state that has the concentration of talent. In Texas, you have Austin, Dallas, Houston, etc and in Florida, you have Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, etc. It will be interesting to see who move up the chart in the next 10 years, who do you think has the best shot, feel free to post your thoughts on twitter or comments section below.