These 10 Cities Have the Country’s Highest Startup Growth

This piece originally appeared on Monster.

Every year, the Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship ranks the leading U.S. metro areas for entrepreneurship growth, and this year’s results include a number of cities that might not be the ones you’d expect. For example, San Francisco, the epicenter of the tech world, lands at No. 8 and New York City doesn’t even make the top 30. Smaller cities like Columbus, Ohio and Nashville, Tennessee are proving themselves to be rising powerhouses of the startup scene—as well as IT job creation.

Washington, D.C. leads the ranking, followed by Austin, Texas in the No. 2 slot. San Jose. California, Columbus and Nashville round out the top five.

The study emphasizes that its focus is not on startup “growth inputs” like large amounts of venture capital raise, patents or other things that make newsworthy headlines. Instead, the index looks at data that indicates startups’ outputs, such as job creation and revenue growth. Startups have immediate economic benefits in terms of job creation and also in terms of harder-to-quantify positives, such as increased productivity.

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“Tech continues to play a dominant role among high-growth firms,” the Kauffman Foundation notes in its executive statement, “with tech-associated industries like IT Services, Software, Computer Hardware, and Health among leading high growth industries”. IT services ranked #1 for the highest number of high-growth companies.

The methodology behind the Growth Entrepreneurship Index entails three major components. First is rate of startup growth, using changes in employment numbers to measure how much startups have grown after five years of existence. The second is the share of scaleups, or the number of companies that grew to have 50 or more employees on staff after 10 years of existence. The third and final component is the high-growth company density of a given region, which measures the number of companies with at least $2 million in annual revenue maintaining 20% annual revenue growth over three years’ time.

With those criteria in mind, here are the Top 10 Metropolitan Areas from the Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship. If you’re a tech job seeker, you might want to consider scoping out work in one of these cities.

1. Washington (Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV)
2. Austin (Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX)
3. San Jose (San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA)
4. Columbus (Columbus, OH)
5. Nashville (Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN)
6. Boston (Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH)
7. San Diego (San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA)
8. San Francisco (San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA)
9. San Antonio (San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX)
10. Dallas (Dallas-Forth Worth-Arlington, TX)