Startup success outside of Silicon Valley

Founder Collective put together an interesting analysis on the last ten years of software M&A and IPOs by geography (Jan 2009 - Aug 2019). Seattle got a nice ☕ emoji, and $50B of exit value over the last decade. That’s pretty good at $8B higher than NY, but $10B behind Boston and LA.

However, as we saw in Version One data a couple weeks ago, power laws define venture returns, which means the biggest winners return significantly more than the median investment. In fact, $525B of the total Bay Area value comes from Facebook alone (almost 2x every other city combined).

Let’s make sure the next Facebooks gets founded in the PNW! ⛰️

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