DC ranks No. 1 in new Kauffman ‘Growth Entrepreneurship’ report

The Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation recently released its 2016 Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship and found — to the authors seeming surprise — that the Washington, D.C. metro area topped a list of U.S. metro areas with the most growth entrepreneurship.
While the D.C. metro area is “not typically noted for entrepreneurship,” (according to a Kauffman Foundation press release), the area ranks well with what Kauffman considers to be the three key indicators for growth entrepreneurship. These are a high rate of startup growth, a large share of “scaleups” (businesses starting small and growing to medium-sized or large) and high density of high-growth companies.
On the basis of these three indicators, the D.C. metro area beat out Austin and San Jose (second and third, respectively). It also came in far above the Boston or San Francisco metro areas.
The report also finds that growth entrepreneurship, “an indicator of business growth in the United States,” is spread among diverse locals in the country. San Francisco isn’t the only place where an entrepreneur can be taken seriously and grow a business — D.C. works too, for example, as does Columbus and Nashville and Dallas. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, considering this finding, the intro to the report is written by Steve Case and aligns a lot of the findings to his “rise of the rest” philosophy.
Beyond the report on metro area trends, Kauffman also published reports on state-level trends and national trends in entrepreneurship. Find all three here.