NYC's Silicon Alley badly trails Silicon Valley in startup influence

With the success of companies like Tumblr, Foursquare, and Kickstarter, New York's startup scene has gotten a lot of attention recently.

But despite the influence of those outfits and venture capitalists like Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, the Big Apple is a backwater when it comes to the world startup scene, according to a new report from the Startup Genome project.

In the study, New York City came in as just the fifth-ranked startup ecosystem in the world, trailing Silicon Valley, Israel's Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

To come up with its rankings, the Startup Genome -- an initiative put together by a group of Silicon Valley investors that aims to identify the DNA of successful Internet start-ups and the teams and investors that build them -- identified eight weighted component indexes: startup output; funding; company performance; mindset; trendsetters; support; talent; and differentiation.

While the project's researchers may well have a Silicon Valley bias, their data suggested that no other startup scene anywhere in the world comes close to what those in the San Francisco to San Jose corridor have going. Silicon Valley ranked number one in all eight of the indices, and unfortunately for the ego of those who think that Silicon Alley is right on its tail, New York came in no higher than third in any single index, and had only two top-five performances.

Still, the Big Apple can take comfort in the fact that the city scored higher than London, Paris, Moscow, Boston, Chicago, and many other cultural hubs. Ultimately, though, there's no doubt that the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are going to continue heading West to Palo Alto. New York is a great place to visit, as they say, but maybe not so much for getting a startup off the ground.