Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Ask HN: What cities are set to become the next global startup Hubs?
26 points by soalian 2962 days ago
I'm based in the EU as a developper and I've been on an European Tour recently, I've been staying and working in Amsterdam and Berlin and the tech startup scene there is exploding, quickly reshaping the nature of jobs and even the urban environment. A friend of mine from "Station F" in Paris drew similar conclusions when we met, albeit I haven't gone there yet. Of course my only experience is Western Europe,and I can't compare it with the startup activity of other hubs such as China or Argentina, but in light of this, based on your experience,I'm curious to get your opinion on what international cities you think will form the next global startup hubs in the next 5 years?
7 comments

Outside of hardware in Shenzhen. No where. There's going to be a huge shift were people realize that location for the most part is not that important. With the internet you can link up with people around the world. Great products have been built by remote teams. All remote teams are growing and becoming more common. Why limit yourself to a location?
Beijing and Shenzhen are enormous.

Shanghai and Hangzhou are also fast growing and strong contenders for the next big technology startup hubs.

All of these cities are home to dozens of unicorn companies and many more startups.

If I had to bet, one of these cities will be the next global startup hub in the next five to ten years and maybe even surpass or supplant Silicon Valley.

Definitely Shenzen. At this point, if you're a hardware start-up, having contacts in Shenzen is as important as having contacts in Silicon Valley.
A good proxy to watch for emerging and growing startup ecosystems is where the venture capital is flowing.

I don't have a visualization for it today, but I think it'd be interesting to put funding data from Crunchbase, AngelList, or Seed-DB overlaid on a heat map of the world.

How are the salaries and work life balance in Berlin?
Quite good, although rents are rising
Montréal for AI

Shenzhen for hardware startup

Taipei for cheap engineer

Montréal for AI
Jobs for devs are everywhere that's not what makes a city "startup hub imho.

The only "real" startup hubs are the ones where venture capital is available and these would traditionally be the cities in North America, China, Singapore etc.

Singapore is no way a startup hub. The only major thing going for singapore is its EDB influenced tax sops and seed funding matching programs like 1:4 or 2:5. In addition they have made it hard to hire foreign talents, local talent pool is super small, payscales are very low and worst of all their VC and angel have hardly any tech exposures. The PE scene is better