The Top 100 Trending Startup Cities

Do you wonder where startups trend?

Startup of the Year Voting closed after a 6 month run from June 2021 to January 2022. On Valentine’s Day, the startup of the year winners were announced and we open sourced this startup voting data if anyone would like to use it (still cleaning up and better organizing some of the data, thanks for the patience! I wanted to share some early learnings).

All of the startup winners earned tech company news pages on HackerNoon. Essentially, the community voted on which startups deserve more coverage. These pages include business overviews (such as head count, founding year, bio, social links, and domain ranking) coupled with dynamic updates every time the company is mentioned in HackerNoon stories or relevant headlines around the web.

By digging into the aggregate vote count each city’s startups earned, we can approximate the HackerNoon community’s interest for startups in all the major cities of the world.

Most voted on Startup City Award (Rank By Votes, Name, Population, Votes)

Some notable trending startup locations relative to population

IMHO this data indicates locations that have historically have been more welcoming to startups through various business and tax incentives, such as Zug (13th), Mahé (44th) and Grand Caymen (55th), are all rewarded with worldwide interest in their startups that far exceeds their local populations.

Surprisingly, Redwood City (7894 votes) received 44X the amount of votes as Palo Alto (177 votes), which historically has been more of a glorified startup scene. Also I’m not sure why, but am impressed than Porto is also hanging with San Francisco in the top ten as cities whose startup interest drastically out paces their population.

Boulder rising all the way to #1 could be a product of HackerNoon’s HQ being based in Colorado, but Boulder is nowhere near a top ten city in terms of historical readership to HackerNoon. It certainly was an overall interest in the Boulder startup scene as opposed to a single startup or two driving the activity as first, second and third place were all within a close margin (567, 527 and 520 votes respectively).

I’m looking into this data more! Will be posting what I learn here on HackerNoon.