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Tech companies in Silicon Valley, the geography, have had an incredible year. But one indicator points to longer-term changes. The internal rate of return (IRR) for companies in other startup hub cities has been even better. A big new analysis by AngelList showed aggregate IRR of 19.4% per year on syndicated deals elsewhere versus 17.5% locally. A separate measure, of total value of paid-in investment, revealed 1.67x returns for other hubs versus 1.60x in the main Silicon Valley and Bay Area tech cities. The data is based on a sample of 2,500 companies that have used AngelList to syndicate deals from 2013 through 2020. Which is just one snapshot, but a relevant one given how hard it can be to produce accurate early-stage startup market analysis at this scale. I believe we’ll see more and more data confirming the trends in the coming years, especially as more of the startup world acclimates to remote-first and distributed offices. You can increasingly do a startup from anywhere and ma...

Joey Lei Contributor Share on Twitter Joey Lei is director of service management at Synoptek . With more than 14 years of experience in engineering and product management, Lei is responsible for the development and growth of the Synoptek service portfolio and solution development with strategic technology alliance partners. More posts by this contributor How startups can leverage elastic services for cost optimization Debbie Zelten Contributor Debbie Zelten (SAFe(R) 4 Agilist, SAFe Scrum Master, CSM, LSSGB, PMI-ACP) is the director of application development and business intelligence at Synoptek . She has over 20 years of experience in implementing software and data analytics solutions for companies of all sizes. With an increasing number of enterprise systems, growing teams, a rising proliferation of the web and multiple digital initiatives, companies of all sizes are creating loads of data every day. This data contains excellent business insights and immense ...

TechCrunch recently caught up with recent Y Combinator graduate Uiflow , a startup that is building a no-code enterprise app creation service. If you are thinking  wait, don’t a number of companies already do that? , the answer is yes. But what Quickbase , Smartsheet and others are working on isn’t quite the same thing, at least from the startup’s perspective. Uiflow, a Bay Area-based concern that has been alive for far less than a year, has built an app creation tool that works with whatever backend a large company currently employs, and helps its development team build apps collaboratively. As the startup explained in a public posting , customer developers can import Figma files while their engineers can use existing UI libraries, and product managers can quickly vet an app’s logic. The service is akin to a “cross between Unity and Figma,” Uiflow says . Here’s what its own user interface looks like, per a screenshot the company provided to TechCrunch after an interview: Pe...

TechCrunch is known for its Pitch-Offs. We’ve had them in cities all over the world, and heard from hundreds of startups who have shared the story of their company on our stages. We’re excited to be bringing the Pitch-Off to Extra Crunch Live. Anyone in the audience on an episode of Extra Crunch Live can virtually ‘raise their hand’ to be selected to pitch in front of the audience and get feedback from our all-star guests. On ECL, pitch-off startups will have two minutes to tell us about their company. This is the equivalent of an elevator pitch — imagine running into a VC or potential customer at a tech conference like Disrupt or bumping into them at a park. As such, no visual aids are allowed, including decks, videos, demoes, etc. Essentially, what can you convey with your words, in a short timeframe, to get people to both understand your startup and be excited about it? This is a critical skill, and we’re creating the space for founders to practice and improve. This week, I’m...