Call it a “three-peat,” a losing streak, or what you will. Just don’t call it a surprise.
On Thursday, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation released its latest ranking of startup activity by state. For the third consecutive year, Wisconsin finished in last place.
Many of the reactions from members of the state’s early-stage business and investment communities echo what was said in August, when the 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity was released. Startup-focused individuals and groups are calling for policy changes, such as amending legislation governing corporate noncompete agreements to be more worker-friendly. Meanwhile, groups such as the Wisconsin Technology Council and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC), the state’s job-creation agency, are pointing out what they see as shortcomings in the methodology Kauffman uses to compile its rankings.
“The Kauffman report on startup activity focuses on three data points and is not a comprehensive analysis on entrepreneurship,” WEDC says in a statement e-mailed to Xconomy. (For details on what those data points are, see our report on last year’s Kauffman rankings.) WEDC’s statement suggests that the state of entrepreneurship in Wisconsin looks considerably less grim when factoring in metrics such as wages, employment, and long-term startup success.
In a column published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month, Wisconsin Technology Council president Tom Still points to another report, from the technology association CompTIA, showing Wisconsin had more than 100,000 tech workers for the first time in 2016.
In addition to states, Kauffman rates levels of startup activity in the country’s 40 most populous metropolitan areas. Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city and the only one that appears in the ranking of metro areas, is tied with Pittsburgh for last place.
There’s been no shortage of media coverage of the debate about how to improve Wisconsin’s early-stage business climate, and the extent to which it is in need of improvement (see coverage from the Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Business Journal, Capital Times, and WisBusiness.com).
Let’s instead take a closer look at Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. The latter city’s place in the Kauffman ranking would seem to suggest that a city can be viewed as an emerging technology hub despite being rated as a less-than-ideal place for startups.
Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, which has highly regarded engineering and computer science departments, among others.
In 2015, reports surfaced that Uber, the San Francisco company best known for its ride-hailing mobile app, was building a robotics research lab in Pittsburgh focused on self-driving vehicles. Uber later hired away 40 researchers who worked at Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center.
Alphabet (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GOOGL]]) has a satellite office in Pittsburgh, where it reportedly employed about 600 people as of last fall.
Pittsburgh also has a strong healthcare sector, says Clara Sieg, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group Revolution. Sieg is based in San Francisco but grew up in Pittsburgh, and says she still keeps an occasional eye on happenings in her hometown.
She points to UPMC Enterprises, a venture firm that’s part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Its portfolio includes Pittsburgh-based ALung Technologies, which makes a device for treating patients with acute respiratory failure. Another company UPMC Enterprises has invested in is dbMotion. The healthcare software developer, whose U.S. headquarters are in Pittsburgh, was sold to Chicago-based Allscripts (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MDRX]]) in 2013 for $235 million.
“There is a little bit of an ecosystem around healthtech and healthcare-related stuff in Pittsburgh now because you have UPMC, which is a huge, world-renowned healthcare center,” she says.
The Milwaukee area is likewise home to
