We analyze 20 years of venture-capital funded startups, founded between 1992 and 2011, in the Front Range around Denver, Colorado, and in the Bay Area around San Francisco, California, including Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley is the classic model for entrepreneurial ecosystems, the Denver Front Range may in fact be more representative of most regional economies. The Bay Area gave rise to 6,938 VC-funded startups in our data over those 20 years, while Colorado gave rise to just 629; however, the two regions' startups exhibited a very similar distribution across industries and almost identical rates of failure and success as well as types of exits.
