What strikes me is the geographic diversity of this list. If you look at the classic startup with young founders and big VC investments, they're almost all in Silicon Valley or San Francisco. But this list shows that you can start a business in anywhere with a reasonable tech scene.
-The culture in SV is very much centered on scaling quickly and taking a bunch of VC money to do it. If you're in Chicago or Atlanta, there's not that same sort of culture.
-Unless a company spends a ton of time in California seeking VC money, SV VC's aren't going to get to know companies outside of SV. There's already so much activity right on their doorsteps that there's little incentive or time to go elsewhere. Even ycombinator, which accepts applicants worldwide, makes applicants come to California to interview and work.
-The VC's that exist in other places don't usually focus on software/internet space like SV VC's do.
So founders outside of SV, NY, and Boston act more like they're starting a restaurant or a clothing store. They expect that they'll have to quickly build a profitable business before expanding too much. Nobody is going to say to a first-time restaurant owner, "We'll expect that your first 20 locations won't make any money, but once you get to 100 we'll all be rich."
(The economies of scale in software are different than restaurants, of course, so there's often valid reasons for software companies to expand as quickly as possible, that's just not an option without lots of outside money.)
Adrian Holovaty (of Django fame) recently caused a stir here when he argued in front of a group of investors that Chicago is an ideal place for bootstrappers:
But they've also got this on many of their pages: "Braintree is a registered ISO/MSP of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., Walnut Creek, CA". I'm not sure if this location refers to Braintree or to Wells Fargo.
13. Pardot, Atlanta (Bought by ExactTarget for 95 m, ET was subsequently bought by Salesforce.com)
14. AirWatch, Atlanta ( Recently bought by Vmware for 1.54 B dollars, AW did raise a huge VC growth round but it was much later its lifetime)
1 Carbonmade: Chicago
2 Github: San Francisco
3 Clicky: Portland, OR
4 WooThemes: Cape Town, SA
5 AppSumo: Austin
6 Mailchimp: Atlanta
7 37Signals: Chicago
8 Envato: Melbourne, Australia
9 Litmus: Boston
10 Bigcommerce: Austin
11 Braintree: Silicon Valley
12 Freshbooks: Toronto