Bit curious as to what you all view as the top VC markets in the US/Internationally currently? In the US, I'd assume that the San Francisco Bay Area is the top but what other major cities do you see as hotbeds for lots of activity right now? Also looking on towards the future, what are some up and coming areas and do you see any areas in decline anytime soon? Same questions apply for international markets.
EDIT: Someone brought up a great point about the quality of startups in a lot of these major cities. Where do you see startups actually being successful and undergoing meaningful exits?
Scranton, PA
The Bay Area leads by a mile. Boston (really) follows, then New York, LA, and Seattle in that order.
Check CBI or Pitchbook if you need to confirm.
Here are a couple articles (same author) with no paywall with pretty fresh data: https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/the-spiky-geography-of-venture-cap…</a">CityLab (2014) and https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/global-startup-c…</a">The Atlantic (2016).
Boston is the sleeper people forget about. It's the cluster for hard sciences: aeronautics, robotics, a ton of machine learning, and life sciences.
It's hard to build proprietary dealflow up there, too. It's a mafia, especially in life sciences. They take care of their own. The same set of guys start a series of companies across a decade out of the same lab research they were doing as a group. They show them to the same set of investors, and as they get liquidity from their first exits, become LPs in those same investors' funds and also angels for the younger staff in their labs who want to try their own hand as founders.
Larry Bock, before he passed, is a fantastic example. The man was prolific and a genius (started 50 companies with a combined market cap of over $70bn just from those that were public exits), and nobody outside of the life sciences community knew about him. See: