ARTICLES
The Top 6 Reasons to Stop Ranking Cities
I often find myself cringing when I see someone try to rank tech hubs or startup communities.
In today's era of big data collection, it can be really tempting to rank. After all, rankings get a lot of attention. Everybody wants to see if they made the list.
Lately we've seen a lot of rankings in the startup world; everything from the top countries and industries for entrepreneurs to the top 9 company names.
I often find myself cringing when I see someone try to rank tech hubs or startup communities.
Should we be ranking cities at all? Consider the following:
If we were ranking things that are by nature competitive with one other - like sports teams or all the pizza restaurants in Brooklyn - that's helpful. But startup communities are better off collaborating with each other than competing. When somebody ranks cities, it tends to create animosity between communities. The damage isn't visible. Leaders in one city will silently overlook an opportunity to help a company or a program in another city so that their community comes out on top in the next ranking. It's damaging to startup culture on the whole. I wish people didn't act this way, but they do. You'd think they might look at a city that ranked better than them and think "what we can we learn from those guys?" But they don't. They think "how can we beat them next year?"
Consider that a city like New York City is incredibly well-monitored, where as smaller cities like Des Moines may not have as much data on which to rank. These latter cities might therefore look less favorable, not because they actually are worse places to do business, but because there just isn't as much data to make a fair comparison. This is particularly true when using datasets that have a strong bias towards companies in SF or towards funded companies. This is why we at Startup Genome are just as interested in bootstrapped companies as we are in companies that take funding from investors.
Showing Miami how it ranks against San Francisco isn't very helpful. Miami should only be benchmarking itself against its former self. Taking a page from those self-help books that say the most informative comparison you can make is one against former self--actually provides information that entreprenuers, VCs and others can use.
One of the biggest weaknesses of rankings is that they very rarely give the reader recommendations for improving one's place on the list. When St. Louis reads an article and decides it would like to take steps so that it's in the Top 10 of (Blank) list next year, they are often on their own in figuring out how to do that. From now on, let there be no rankings without recommendations.
The next time you're reading a ranking of the "Best Cities for Coworking" or "Top 25 Cities If You Know You'll Need Seed Funding in 2015", don't write it off completely. There is knowledge to be extracted from rankings. Look for the source data and understand the formulas used. Don't hate communities that did better than you. Make it your goal to meet people who live there, learn from them and build partnerships. Find something that they struggle with but at which your community excels, and help them.
If you're working on creating a ranking system, consider ranking on the growth of variable rather than only the raw number, and always include recommendations for readers that want to improve.
Lately we've seen a lot of rankings in the startup world; everything from the top countries and industries for entrepreneurs to the top 9 company names.
I often find myself cringing when I see someone try to rank tech hubs or startup communities.
Should we be ranking cities at all? Consider the following:
Rankings are Always Competitive
If we were ranking things that are by nature competitive with one other - like sports teams or all the pizza restaurants in Brooklyn - that's helpful. But startup communities are better off collaborating with each other than competing. When somebody ranks cities, it tends to create animosity between communities. The damage isn't visible. Leaders in one city will silently overlook an opportunity to help a company or a program in another city so that their community comes out on top in the next ranking. It's damaging to startup culture on the whole. I wish people didn't act this way, but they do. You'd think they might look at a city that ranked better than them and think "what we can we learn from those guys?" But they don't. They think "how can we beat them next year?"
Rankings are Usually Unfair
Consider that a city like New York City is incredibly well-monitored, where as smaller cities like Des Moines may not have as much data on which to rank. These latter cities might therefore look less favorable, not because they actually are worse places to do business, but because there just isn't as much data to make a fair comparison. This is particularly true when using datasets that have a strong bias towards companies in SF or towards funded companies. This is why we at Startup Genome are just as interested in bootstrapped companies as we are in companies that take funding from investors.
Rankings are Usually Useless
Showing Miami how it ranks against San Francisco isn't very helpful. Miami should only be benchmarking itself against its former self. Taking a page from those self-help books that say the most informative comparison you can make is one against former self--actually provides information that entreprenuers, VCs and others can use.
Rankings are Usually not Actionable
One of the biggest weaknesses of rankings is that they very rarely give the reader recommendations for improving one's place on the list. When St. Louis reads an article and decides it would like to take steps so that it's in the Top 10 of (Blank) list next year, they are often on their own in figuring out how to do that. From now on, let there be no rankings without recommendations.
The next time you're reading a ranking of the "Best Cities for Coworking" or "Top 25 Cities If You Know You'll Need Seed Funding in 2015", don't write it off completely. There is knowledge to be extracted from rankings. Look for the source data and understand the formulas used. Don't hate communities that did better than you. Make it your goal to meet people who live there, learn from them and build partnerships. Find something that they struggle with but at which your community excels, and help them.
If you're working on creating a ranking system, consider ranking on the growth of variable rather than only the raw number, and always include recommendations for readers that want to improve.
Contact Us
Our data shows that collaboration is at the core of the fastest growing startup ecosystems. We work with forward-looking organizations who understand that joining the global startup economy is key to to drive innovation and spur economic growth.