I don't think that's surprising is it? Silicon Valley is known to be the best place for VC in the world. I'm sure if you draw arbitrary lines around the hottest investment communities in Israel the numbers would also be much more even.
That Israel as a country beats us in per capita investment is an interesting figure which we should all consider.
On the other hand the population of the bay area is quite comparable to that of Israel.
Smaller countries tend to have more specialized and targeted economies. If Israel were to attempt to play in all the industries that the US does, they would do very poorly at almost all of them.
Much of the US economy is in large established technology and manufacturing companies, where VC no longer has a role.
I would expect that for every possible region of Israel, it is possible to find a region of similar population in the bay area that has a higher per capita VC investment.
It is not surprising, which is why I said "as expected".
I would like to see how the numbers compare for hot cities in Israel vs. the U.S., and I also think we should obviously try to raise the national number. I am not in the valley myself, so that would certainly help me!
Well, what's the VC per capita for Haifa? Why do you think it's interesting to compare the area with the highest concentration of startups in the US to another entire country? Either compare country-to-country or highly concentrated startup area-to-highly concentrated startup area. I doubt there are more startups in Eilat than there are in Boise.
What is the number for Haifa? I genuinely would like to know.
Separately, I am not trying to be a valley-partisan, just noting that the number for silicon valley is much higher than for the country of Israel, as you would expect. I don't even live anywhere near the valley.
The denominator in NYC is very high, so poorly on that metric. It might be closer (though I suspect not particularly close) if you compared VC$/square foot, or VC$/engineer.
All these metrics are but approximations of the impossible-to-measure VC$ available/VC$ sought number that actually matters to startups. I suppose we could compare VC$/GDP$, to get some idea of how much of a nation's economy is based on startups.
