The Best Cities to Find a Startup Job

Ping-Pong tables, catered lunches, and casual Friday every day of the week; who wouldn’t want to work at a startup? The tech industry is consistently one of the strongest economic sectors in the U.S., and landing a job at a hot new company can be the start of a long, lucrative career which may even include launching a business of your own and becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Sophia Amoruso.

Thing is, most people think working for a startup requires moving to an expensive coastal city. Horror stories about the sky-high rents in San Francisco and New York are enough to depress anybody looking for a job in the tech industry, but in reality startups can be found all across the country – probably even in a city near you. And since many startups allow remote working, you may not even have to consider moving.

To help jobseekers looking for tech jobs target their search, we crunched our database of millions of job postings to determine which cities where the best places to find a startup job, by looking at the ratio of tech companies to all other companies. And while the obvious places definitely made the list, we found some metro areas that don’t jump immediately to mind when you think “tech”, but are still great places to look for work:

Richmond, VA
Metro Population: 1.2 million
Startups: Knox Payments, LucyPhone, MerchantTribe

Birmingham, AL
Metro Population: 1.4 million
Startups: Baremetrics, Fleetio, Diamond Fortress

Detroit, MI
Metro Population: 4.2 million
Startups: Ambassador, Stik, Ginkgotree

Pittsburgh, PA
Metro Population: 2.3 million
Startups: Duolingo, The Resumator, No Wait

Philadelphia, PA
Metro Population: 6.03 million
Startups: DuckDuckGo, Biomeme, SnipSnap

Here’s the entire list of the 25 Best Cities to Find a Startup Job:

The Best Cities to Find a Startup Job

Photo via Flickr / Slim Teller