I should say PRIVATE companies, not publicly owned.

Inc 500 came up with a new list of 5000 privately-owned businesses across America that are growing big and growing fast.

Philly area is home to many of those, and the city itself is remarkably home to several of the fast-growers.

Kind of puts the local business environment in perspective.

Check out the Top-100 in Philly area:

http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/list...-nj-de-md.html

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

Inky made a nice blog about it as well:

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/p...5000_list.html

snippet:

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

Considering that Wharton is supposedly the BEST B-school in the USA, and that Wharton is especially known for its entrepreneurship program, one would expect a very healthy Wharton-based cadre of companies. I may have missed it, but I didn't notice any such thing. Huh?

There may well be many private companies started by or led by Wharton MBAs, but that doesn't mean they will all (or any) be in Philly or Philly area. The information above does not say either way anything about this particular angle.

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Is it ghey that I love this song so much?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl_Wc6Nm8lc

I guess you could say I'm not as jaded about "stuff" such as enduring love yet...

wharton known for entrepreneurship program? since when? best b-shool? matter of opinion.

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"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

Wharton is typically ranked in the top 5 b-schools nationwide in US News' annual survey. Whether you like it or not, that survey is widely taken as the "official" barometer of success for colleges/universities. However, UPenn has never been known for it entrepreneurship program. It has a very well respected accounting and finance program (which would make sense given its proximity to NYC) but I have never really seen much on its startup curriculum.

Also, it really becomes a chicken vs. egg issue - one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so full of startups is because the entire ecosystem out there (including the employees) is conditioned to think of that as normal. In this area, large companies and "safety" were, for the longest time, the rule rather than the exception.

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No matter where you go, there you are. (b.banzai)

It's not really a matter of whether I like it or not. When I was looking at b-schools about five years ago I decided Wharton wasn't for me. Particularly because it was somewhat weak in management and entrepreneurship. It was great at cranking out investment bankers but that's not what I wanted. While it does provide you with a gold plated name, they also have a gold plated price.
as for culture, that's a large part of it. There is a sizable startup culture here in biotech but most of it exists outside city limits. Philadelphia used to be full of startups but it's been a long, long time since then. That said, changing the tax structure so it doesn't penalize startups and independents would be a good first step.

__________________
"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

What I got from the Inc. list was that only 13% of these companies are actually located IN Phila. Some are so far removed, or in cities so distinct from Philly, that you might question their inclusion on the list. I mean Delaware and NJ? What's the point? Perhaps if the statistics included comparisons to other cities similar to the size of Philly it would be more relevant.

Places like Conshochen, Wilmington, and the South Jersey townships offer companies competing business environments. Some are dramatically different from Philly. Being from Philly and overly simplistic, it is important for me to know the reason why ALL these companies are not located in my town. (this would be rhetorical as we all know the reasons why)

Sorry, my Philly glass is still half empty.

In light of that last sentence, don'tcha think it interesting that there are still more companies on that list located in the city than in any other single jurisdiction even with the current tax structure?

Kinda reminds me of something a former co-worker (now at LaSalle's PR office) said to me about baseball: "It's gotta be a great game. All they do to kill it, and still it survives."

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
"Jazz and blogging are both intimate, improvisational, and individual -- but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both." --Andrew Sullivan, "Why I Blog," The Atlantic, November 2008

The metropolitan region is the basic yardstick for all sorts of measurements, and it's no different here.

The Inc. 5000 list includes Top 100s by metropolitan region on the Inc. 5000 Top 100 lists home page. Here are some other comparable core city figures for cities with substantial suburbs (i.e., excluding cities such as Houston, Nashville, Phoenix and San Diego that include much of their suburbs within the city limits):

Baltimore: 11 of only 50
Boston: 18 (includes one listed as in Allston, which is part of the city of Boston) (Cambridge: 4)
Chicago: 43
Dallas: 38 (Fort Worth: 3)
Denver: 21 of 50
Detroit: 4 of 50
Los Angeles: 18
Minneapolis: 22 of 50 (St. Paul: 1 of 50)
New York City: 37
St. Louis: 27 of 50
San Francisco: 35
Seattle: 21 of 50
Washington DC: 13

Not enough companies to warrant even a Top 50 list: Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, (edited to add: Pittsburgh), San Antonio

Please note the figures for many of these cities, especially the ones I've boldfaced. New York is what, five times the size of Philadelphia? And has only twice as many Inc. 5000 firms within the city limits? Los Angeles is about 2.5 times Philadelphia's size, and not known for having a business-hostile tax structure, yet there is one more Inc. 5000 firm headquartered here than in LA.

So many people compare this place unfavorably to Detroit. Look at the number for Detroit -- city and metro -- and tell me that the situation here is exactly the same.

I highlighted Baltimore because we are also often compared with that city -- and it turns out that we have roughly the same share of fast-growing privately owned companies as Baltimore does relative to its metro; it's just that there are more of them here.

Obviously a bunch of other factors explain why entrepreneurship thrives in some areas and not others (I highlighted statistical outlier San Francisco for that reason; as has been noted already, entrepreneurship is the norm in that metro, not the exception), and there may be some differences within metros too (St. Louis, for instance, which has the lion's share of such businesses in a metro not strong for entrepreneurship).

But if these figures (not the whole list) are any guide, I'd be happy to trade your half-empty glass for a half-full one.

Edited to add: And your math's off, bump. 19 of 100 is 19%.

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
"Jazz and blogging are both intimate, improvisational, and individual -- but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both." --Andrew Sullivan, "Why I Blog," The Atlantic, November 2008