Rise of the high-tech South, cont.

The Private Equity Growth Capital Council (PEGCC) reports that Texas received the most private equity investment in U.S. based companies in 2012: $46.6 billion in growth equity and venture capital invested in 222 companies.  (Florida ranked 4th in companies and 5th in dollars invested: 115 companies and $17.3 billion.)

This is the latest confirmation of “the gradual but inexorable geographic spread of the start-up ethos throughout the country” we wrote of when recounting The Atlantic’s road-trip through the Southeast in search of the next Silicon Valley.  The magaizine praised the Southeast as a place which “embrace(s) an ethos that encourages rather than crushes startups and the broader mentality from which they grow.”  In the same article Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, coined the term “startupicide” when describing cities or regions that might as well have been sprayed with something to suppress entrepreneurial activity:

I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions,” he wrote. “Smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out…The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It’s that death is the default for startups, and most towns don’t save them.  Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it’s more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote.

The growth corridors of the high-tech South enjoy several advantages familiar to NVSE readers: growth-oriented tax policies, lower public sector debt burdens, stronger job creation, the best climate for entrepreneurs, and a superior overall business climate.  (The actual climate happens to be conducive to a great quality of life as well.)