A variety of metrics are used to measure the health of a startup ecosystem, including venture capital, revenue growth, mergers, acquisitions, and more. But, at the end of the day, it's about people. How many founders, entrepreneurs, and employees are driving a city or state's innovation economy forward?
Today, Tech Cocktail culled through data from MatterMark, a business intelligence database and resource, to list the ten states with the most startup employees. Illinois came in at number four with a total of 16,001 people, nearly .01% of the state's population. But, even more impressive, the Land of Lincoln was #2 in terms of monthly employee growth, with 3.89%.
At the top of the list, to no one's surprise, is California with over 129,000 startup employees. And the Golden State will not be losing its crown any time soon; California also has the highest employee growth figure with 4.98%.
To assemble the list, Mattermark used data from a number of public sources like Crunchbase, AngelList, NASDAQ, and the SEC. And, in order to access these figures, the database only pulled from startups that have received venture funding. So, because bootstrapped and angel-funded companies aren't included, the total employee figures are actually going to be much higher per state.
Rounding out the top five is Massachusetts (#2 at 37,598), New York (#3 at 34,853), and Washington (#5 at 11,756). Texas (#6, 11,622), Georgia (#7, 8,642), Virginia (#8, 6,338), Florida (#9, 6,206), and Tennessee (#10, 5,435). In Mass., .6% of the state's population works for a startup, the highest figure of any state in the top ten.
(Image via flickr)
