Where tech start-ups find good homes

Boston: Harvard and MIT students get scooped up to work for firms in Boston and Cambridge, but there’s more. “We have over 100 colleges here and five of the top teaching hospitals,” says Douglas Cole, a partner at Flagship Ventures. The biggest local commercial websites are travel-related TripAdvisor and Kayak, which Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet notes have a combined market cap of more than $6 billion. Start-ups include online backup service Carbonite and ByteLight, an indoor GPS service. “The local angel investigating market has never been stronger,” and the venture investing market in aggressive, says Sabet, an early investor in Twitter.