Which Location Has the Most Receptive Investors for Startups?

Listen up, entrepreneurs. This could be critical to the future of your startup.

When launching a new company, young entrepreneurs tend to require the same key ingredients: a smart founding team, a stellar group of employees, and more than enough capital to survive the early months/years. The first two are the sole responsibility of the person who first comes up with the idea for the business. The latter, however, is largely based on investors and their desire to support a fresh enterprise. Investors love the

of startups so much that they poured

in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone. “We found that anyone outside of the Bay Area was someone who was open-minded and willing to give Seismic our fair shot,” Greg Borrud, founder and CEO of Seismic Games, told Benzinga. “We probably got the best advice from people in the Bay Area. They had thought the most about the social gaming space but ultimately they seemed to have moved beyond social gaming. Most of our investors came from Los Angeles and Boston so we are big fans of those two regions.” Aside from Seismic Games' lead investors, Tom Matlack and DFJ Frontier, “our other 14 angels all come from Los Angeles and most of them have deep ties to the entertainment industry,” said Borrud. “We've always been fascinated by the cross-over potential between traditional gaming and the entertainment industry, so having all these angels as partners in the company has been great.” With the advent of social gaming, it seems that the game industry will always be in a constant state of evolution. “The industry has changed quite a bit,” said Borrud. “Games were once seen as a very niche pastime, but now everyone is playing games. As a result, a lot of new people have moved into the industry and really helped shape and refine it.” Borrud believes that most of the recent innovations have been in social and mobile gaming. “One of the biggest changes that we are most excited about is that games have changed from being a boxed product to more of a service,” he said. “We now have constant and meaningful conversations with our consumers and are able to adapt our product post-launch to satisfy the way they want to play the game as opposed to how we think they might play the game. We've come a long way from the ‘fire and forget' days of boxed products and it is the companies that nurture these relationships with their customers that will ultimately succeed.”