Best Cities to Start a Business in California

With a state GDP that dwarfs those of most nations and unrivaled access to venture capital funding (boasting 41.9% of the U.S.’s venture capital deals), California remains the number one destination to grow a business in the field of technology. California’s tech portfolio is unparalleled: industry giants such as Google, Apple, and eBay all began as small upstarts in the section of San Francisco’s Bay Area known as Silicon Valley, growing to dominate their respective industries.

The advantages Silicon Valley has over other locations in developing a tech company are myriad: the area has the highest concentration of tech workers of any area in the U.S. (and perhaps the world), and the pool of talent available from California universities such as Stanford is incomparable.

While entrepreneurs must cope with high costs of living and business expenses, the opportunity to generate wealth more than offsets these difficulties. The Valley boasts the highest average tech salary at $114,184 and contains the highest number of millionaires and billionaires in the nation.

For opportunistic entrepreneurs hoping to relocate to California but concerned about high costs, the southern counties of Riverside and San Bernardino possess affordable housing prices and a competitive cost of living compared to LA and the Bay Area while still offering a comfortable climate and ready access to capital.

Only cities with over 50,000 inhabitants are reported in the results. Some data had to be interpolated to the county level and extrapolated to all the cities in the county. We concentrated on the following metrics to obtain our ranking: Cost of living, Best state for business, Unemployment, Kauffman index, and Universities.