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This could've just as easily been written about the Phoenix metro area. Phoenix is the 5th largest population center in the US, barely now beating Philly, and while we've had a handful of few dozen small or medium successes (and a very small handful of big ones), our startup scene is... mediocre at best. The good vs. bad angels thing is a factor: we have no REAL good angels to speak of. (Happy to be corrected here.) No one is in the game for the game's sake. And our bad angels are even few and far in between. There are a handful of VCs, family offices, and such, but they usually want lower risk, post-revenue opportunities. There are one or two "angel" groups, but they take forever to stroke a check and it's an ordeal that's discouraging and not a lot of options. Instead, we have a lot of SF (and other prominent geo) companies moving their ops here because we have lower cost of living and lower tax rates (though our top bracket just took a big step up due to 208) and a decent talent pool. And while there have been a few incubators and such and there's a feel good startup community in YesPHX, there isn't any real circulating _money_ here. The uber wealth in this state is concentrated in old money forms like real estate and healthcare and conservative family offices and Bruce Halle's tire money and whatever the hell Bob Parsons is up to, but we lack that interconnected network of IPO-30-and-40-something-millionaires-willing-to-throw-down. We don't have anything resembling that. From what I've heard, SLC is doing better on this front and beating us at a game we should be winning, but no one stays here after they make success, no one rich enough to matter is willing to splash out any real money themselves, and it ends up being a self-fulfilling, far too conservative environment for startup investment. That being said, there are definitely some great startups still trying to make a go of it here. And per Gregslist & Crunchbase, we have over 300 startups here, with over 100 of them VC funded. And you'll see successes come out of here: InfusionSoft, CampusLogic, and sure a bunch of others... but nothing quite like a mega IPO, and nothing that feeds enough capital back into a huge pool of newly minted moneyed people ready to pay it forward into the next cohort. That ecosystem is damn hard to build up, it turns out. |