Stowe Boyd

In 2010, Silicon Valley accounted for the lion’s share of venture-capital investment by far: $9.1 billion, or about 40 percent of the total. New England, with its high-tech complex running from Cambridge and Boston to the surrounding Route 128 area, was second with $2.6 billion, 11 percent of the total. New York, with its newly ascendant Silicon Alley, was third, with roughly $2 billion, or 8.6 percent. The Southeast states — mainly North Carolina but also Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama — attracted $1.2 billion (5.1 percent) mainly concentrated in biotech, software, telecom, and media. Texas accounted for close to another billion ($942 million), or 4.1 percent with its investments mainly focussed on energy as well as software, media, and semiconductors. And while the level of venture investment in the South-Central states (including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, and Louisiana) remains low relatively speaking, the region saw a staggering 540-percent growth between 2005 and 2010, the largest increase across any region of the country by far. Overall, roughly one in ten of the nation’s venture investment dollars are spent in the South.

- Richard Florida, The Spread of Start-Up America and the Rise of the High-Tech South

Florida is making a super weak argument here. The entire south — southeast and south-central states, and Texas — collectively raised about $2B in venture in 2010, which is the same as New York City.

Besides, innovation culture is an emergent property of cities, not broad geographic regions. Would be much more useful to see this broken out by cities, where I am sure that the Geoffrey West superlinearity equation — Y(0) = N₀Y(t)^B — would predict that a city of 2 million will get 1.15 times as much as a city of one million, on average, because B ≈ 1.15.