Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.
With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:
Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
People: Immigration and diversity of a city
Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online
What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:
“Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”
This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.
The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?
Venture capitalist Matt Turck has a post up on his blog that is packed full of information about the New York City tech ecosystem. (He has also written similar posts about Berlin and Paris.)
His overall thesis is that New York – as a startup/tech hub – is only now starting to catch up to the hype of 4 or 5 years ago. He now refers to NYC as the de facto Number 2 after the Bay Area.
If you’re interested in all of this, you can go read his full post. But I would like to pull out 2 points. The first is about the “rinse and repeat” cycle that happens over time that allows cities to become substantive startup hubs:
As any student of emerging tech ecosystems knows, the key dynamic to success is the “rinse and repeat” cycle. You need several waves of successful tech companies to go through the whole cycle of founding, financing, scaling and significant exit. Post-exit, the hope is that successful founders, employees and investors then contribute back both money and expertise to the next generation of tech startups, a few of which eventually become highly successful themselves and then provide money and expertise to the following generation.
The trouble is, each successive cycle takes years, because the average successful startup takes 5 to 10 years to get to a large exit.
One key reason the Silicon Valley has become such a powerful network is that this “rinse and repeat” cycle has been happening there for decades, at least since the 1940s and 1950s (Hewlett Packard), with a real acceleration in the 1970s and 1980s (Apple IPO, founding of Kleiner Perkins, etc).
I’ve written about this idea before, but didn’t refer to it as “rinse and repeat.” I’m thinking about adopting that terminology going forward.
The second is a list of New York-based startups. Matt uses it as an example of how entrepreneurial activity in New York is operating across a broad cross-section of different industries. That’s an important characteristic to identify.
However, I also thought you might find it valuable to see what startups are out there, particularly if you happen to work in one of the below verticals/horizontals. I certainly went right to the real estate line.
Fintech: Betterment, IEX, Fundera, Bond, Orchard, Bread
Health: Oscar, Flatiron Health, ZocDoc, Hometeam, Recombine, Celmatix, BioDigital, ZipDrug
Education: General Assembly, Schoology, Knewton, Skillshare, Flatiron School, Codecademy
Real estate: WeWork, HighTower, VTS, Compass, Common, Reonomy
Enterprise SaaS: InVision, NewsCred, Sprinklr, Namely, JustWorks, Greenhouse, Percolate, Mark43, Movable Ink
Commerce infrastructure: Bluecore, Custora, Welcome Commerce
Marketplaces: Kickstarter, Vroom, 1stdibs
On Demand: Handy, Via, Managed by Q, Hello Alfred
Food: Blue Apron, Plated, Maple
IoT/Hardware: littleBits, Canary, Peloton, Shapeways, SOLS, Estimote, Dash, GoTenna, Raden, Ringly, Augury, Drone Racing League
AR/VR/3D: Sketchfab, Floored
I was happy to see my friends at Floored in the above list. They are under AR/VR/3D, but they service the real estate industry.
Recently I wrote about the first Night Mayor Summit being held in Amsterdam. As part of this, I spoke about Amsterdam’s first night mayor – Mirik Milan.
Since then (but obviously not because of my post), the idea has seemingly taken off. Below are a couple of excerpts from a recent Guardian article.
This pragmatic and classically Dutch notion is now being copied across Europe: Toulouse, Zurich, Paris as well as several other Dutch cities have night mayors too.
This week the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, announced plans for a “Night-Time Commission”, a six-month assessment of how to protect and manage the city’s £66bn night-time economy which is likely to recommend the creation of a “night-time champion” role.
Berlin is considering it too, and in April, Amsterdam will host the first global Night Mayors’ Summit.
Why is this happening? Simple:
“Late-night people are typically young, educated, creative, entrepreneurial – people you want in your city, and who work in the creative industries and startups you also want. If places like Berlin have flourished, it’s not just because of low rents. It’s because they’re nightlife capitals.”
So if you’re reading this, Mayor John Tory, now is probably your last chance to make Toronto a North American leader in this regard.
It’s great that we are trying to push the Toronto - Waterloo region as a global startup hub, but so is every other major city and region in the world. A focus on startups is so commonplace in today’s economic development strategies, that at this point it almost feels meaningless. What are we going to do to stand out in this competition for the world’s best talent?
If everyone believes something to be true – such as, there’s value in having a robust startup ecosystem – then it’s no longer innovative. It’s just the way things are. To take it to the next level, we’re going to have to do things that will probably feel uncomfortable at first – particularly for old establishment Toronto.
I’m not saying that having a night mayor is going to be the silver bullet for our startup ecosystem. There’s no such thing. But I am saying that it should be one component of our larger strategy.
Because already there’s a growing number of European cities who have come to this one simple realization: people are drawn to kickass places.
If you agree with this post, I would encourage you to leave a comment below and also tweet the Mayor of Toronto.
Image: Berlin nightlife by Tom Stromer