The intense and exciting life of a startup with all its ups and downs,
what a ride! This report cannot capture what it really feels like to
be inside any of your startups, inside Startup Genome or my VR
startup. What it can do is inform your decisions and priorities using
the power of the only deep and global dataset built from the voice
of thousands of founders with the support of more than 300 organizations
supporting startups in almost 30 countries—thank you!
This year, we focus on a development in the Tech sector that is
happening at an unprecedented pace and has deep implications
for founders and our economies at large: convergence. It is the
Third Wave. We are now producing true industry players, breaking
away from the “Tech” label. Many of our companies would now
be more accurately called by their industry focus, for instance as
transportation (Uber) and hospitality (Airbnb) companies.
This report dives into leading startup ecosystem sub-sectors (or
verticals) answering strategic questions for our global community
of founders, talent, investors and supporters: which sub-sectors
are growing the fastest, attracting investor attention, and creating
bigger successes? Where should I be present to benefit from a
thriving cluster of startups, and from institutions and corporations
that can provide IP, talent, customers, and channels?
We tackle the rise of Deep Tech, and along with it, of China. We
are not only creating disruptive business models with software, we
are increasingly creating tangible IP in AI, blockchain, robotics, and
accelerating the creation of IP in other sectors, such as life sciences
and even automotives.
We pursue our world-leading research as to the genome of startup
and ecosystem performance by quantifying on a global basis how
important are Founder Mindset and Local Connectedness—for
founders to develop quality relationships with each other, investors
and experts. Startup founders who are personally more connected
see their startups grow faster. Free-riding inside a connected
community doesn’t work. Not only that, we can now quantify an
ecosystem’s Local Connectedness and demonstrate that the ones
that build a deep sense of community—for instance where founders
help each other—perform better at producing scaleups.
Along with Global Connectedness and Global Market Reach, these
constitute the new genome of scaleups and high-performance
ecosystems. Funding and Talent are very important, but they are
not enough.
Finally, we are helping startups by advising governments and other
local leaders, focusing their policy and program action plans for
greater impact, and providing a broad set of validated metrics to
monitor progress. Along with Global Entrepreneurship Network
and Tech Nation (formerly Tech City UK), we have started delivering
national innovation policy strategies and program action plans.
And with the support of the Kauffman Foundation, we are clarifying
how to take action at the earliest stages of an ecosystem. A laundry
list or “just copy the old success story of [insert favorite example]”
doesn’t work. National context and lifecycle phase matters, and
we are going further.
This is your report, the report of the global startup revolution.
Let’s raise our voices together and change the world. Let’s build a
shared engine of economic growth and job creation in every city
in the world. And let’s share the wealth we are creating—at an
unprecedented rate—with our brothers and sisters and the next
generation. This is important.
JF Gauthier
Founder and CEO of Startup Genome
Click Here for the full report
