This week’s Economist has an article, “Start Me Up“, on the progress made by London’s Tech City (which I like to call the Silicon Roundabout) when it comes to fostering a startup ecosystem.
The piece was slightly short of hard data, though:
The proliferation of start-ups is impressive. An online map showing their location in the area around the Old Street roundabout in east London and neighbouring districts boasts hundreds of dots…
Dots. We have dots. Hundreds of them. But how do the dots compare to, say, the dots in San Francisco?
One way to look at it is to mine TechCrunch’s database of startups, CrunchBase. It so happens someone has already done that, over at SeedTable. Here’s some data from SeedTable on the number of startups securing Angel funding, VC funding and the number of startups that exit in London on one hand and San Francisco on the other:
The statistical rigour of these numbers is probably on a par with the Economist’s “hundreds of dots” and the upward trend is due to CrunchBase’s growing dataset – not the ecosystems. However, the data does shed some light on the difference in startup activity in the two cities. And the data indicates that the Valley still leads London by a wide margin. But we already knew that.
The CrunchBase data also seems to show that London leads Europe, at least when it comes to submiting their startups to CrunchBase and pestering Mike Butcher for coverage:
As the Economist rightly points out, London needs more big exits to catch up with the Valley. And the folks in Berlin need to start updating CrunchBase. Let’s hope King’s (of Candy Crush fame) upcoming listing will churn out a PayPal-esque clique interested in reinvesting in the ecosystem. If they do, maybe London will one day become the Silicon Valley of casual gaming.