While startup and venture performance in the Bay Area is a valuable datapoint that provides meaningful insights into our industry, I recommend a different strategy for evaluating our respective ecosystems’ health. To get an actionable — not to mention less daunting — perspective of our performance, we must look beyond the Bay and across all of the country’s innovation communities. My firm HPA recently did this by partnering with PitchBook, Silicon Valley Bank, and CBRE to analyze a broad spectrum of data, which culminated in the development of our 2019 Midwest Startup and Venture Capital Market Analysis.
