Here at ChubbyBrain, we recently added over 300 American business incubators and tenant companies to our database. We also presented some national metrics on incubators. Now we will periodically take a deeper look into the incubators and portfolio companies  of individual states.

Today, we’re looking at Delaware.  Delaware has 3 incubators and 50 incubating companies, both well below the averages of 8.3 incubators and 110 companies.  Out of the 50 companies, 26 were scalable and added to ChubbyBrain (Note: Our focus on ChubbyBrain is primarily on scalable companies  so consulting, retail or service companies that may be in these incubators are not included in our database or the remainder of this analysis). This gives Delaware a scalability ratio of 52%, slightly above the average of 44%.

We recently added over 300 American business incubators and tenant companies to our investor database. Additionally, we presented some national data trends on incubators. We’ll periodically be turning to individual states to take a deeper look at their incubators and portfolio companies.

Let’s take a look into the robust incubator economy of Ohio. With 339 companies in incubation across 24 different incubators, Ohio more than triples the national average of 110 companies per incubator and nearly triples the national average of 8.3 incubators per state, too. This leads Ohio to have a company to incubator ratio of 14.1, suggesting that incubators are relatively large in the state. However, of the 339 tenant companies, only 105, or roughly 31%%, were considered scalable and thus added to our database. (Note: Our focus at ChubbyBrain is primarily on scalable companies. Thus, consulting, retail, and service companies that may be in these incubators are not included in our database or the remainder of this analysis). Ohio’s scalability ratio of 31% is much lower than the national average of 44%, suggesting that Ohio incubators hold many small service and retail-oriented businesses as well.

This analysis by the ChubbyBrain team originally appeared on Fast Company here as part of their recently launched Getting Funded content area.  Fast Company & ChubbyBrain also issued a 44 page Q3 Venture Capital activity report which you can view and download for free here.

In the middle of a venture capital funding slump, you might think that early stage investments would be the hardest hit–VC dollars would be siphoned away from early-stage deals and poured into existing portfolio companies (conventionally Series B, C, D, etc. deals). In other words, money attracts money.

You’d have good reason for this belief.  Overall venture capital investment funding levels are significantly lower on a year-over-year basis ($6.1B in Q3 2009 versus $7.2B in Q3 2008, according to ChubbyBrain). The absolute amount of money flowing to these early stage ventures is less than it has been.

But consider the case of the Q3 2009 ChubbyBrain venture capital deal (For a comprehensive view into Q3 venture capital activity, download the 44-page Fast Company-ChubbyBrain Q3 VC Activity report here). Plus, the funding data shows that early stage investing is still definitely happening. In fact, 29% of all deals done by venture capital firms in Q3 fall into the early stage category (typically but not always seed and Series A deals - note that we’ve excluded Series A deals which were not into early stage companies for this analysis).

Since we hold ourselves to a high standard in terms of the data and methodological rigor we employ, we are very passionate about the need to report venture capital data & activity accurately.   (see our recent blog post on this here)

Surprisingly, we never saw any conversation about this in the past, but we’re glad that with some gentle cajoling, we are starting to see the incumbents in this space finally talk about their methodologies and definitions. 

Here are some of the recent highlights and discussions around venture capital definitions and methodology that have surfaced recently (in chronological order):

Yesterday, we talked about ChubbyBrain’s better processes & technology leading to a more accurate read on quarterly venture capital activity.  In that post, we attributed the disparity between our numbers and those of Dow Jones VentureSource to a combination of (1) methodological and (2) definitional differences, with the former more dramatically driving the delta than the latter.  Our analysis, however, zeroed in on the methodological differences, as ChubbyBrain’s definitions for what to include/exclude in the venture funding report fairly closely matched those of VentureSource…

…or so we thought before before hearing from the folks at PwC MoneyTree.  In a VentureBeat article from yesterday, Anthony Ha writes about the Dow Jones VentureSource methodology as follows:

In Q2 2009, we congratulated Dow Jones on taking a full five additional days merely to confirm our VC funding numbers. We’ve also drawn attention to the absurd historical disparities between Dow Jones’ and Thomson’s figures, asking some inconvenient questions about a topic which these two data giants prefer to ignore. In short, we’ve never been shy about shining a critical light on the traditional and historically unchallenged providers of venture capital information.

It’s now Q3 2009, and Dow Jones has once again released its funding numbers several days after ChubbyBrain. Some things don’t change. Except this time the two figures paint divergent stories on the health of the venture capital asset class (we posted $6.1B and Dow Jones $5.1B). This makes for an excellent opportunity to explain what drives the differences between our approach and theirs.

As part of our previously detailed partnership with Fast Company, we issued a detailed 44 page report on the Q3 2009 venture landscape earlier today.  The report offers a data-driven perspective into the innovation economy, specifically venture capital funding in Q3 2009.  In addition to aggregate statistics on venture funding, it offers several analytical views into the data based on geography, sector and stage of company to name a few.

We are proud to announce a just launched partnership with Fast Company, a premiere business magazine focused on innovative people and ideas.  Fast Company will be leveraging ChubbyBrain’s large data set on startups and investors to provide their readers analytical, data-driven insights into the startup and investment worlds.  This content will be featured as part of their recently launched “Getting Funded” content.

With our Q3 2009 venture capital activity report out, we wanted to say a quick thank you to the folks, who we are proud to call ”Friends of Chubby”, who offered insightful commentary and insights on the data that we provided to them about the quarter’s VC performance.  Below are some of the writeups we’ve seen which we encourage you to take a look at for additional perspectives on what the numbers mean. 

Given persistent levels of misinformation and/or confusion about venture capital data (learn more here), we encourage you to review our methodology and definitions to better understand the numbers presented in our Q3 2009 venture capital activity data and commentary.

When thinking about the top US cities for venture capital, Silicon Valley - the high-tech center in and around the San Francisco Bay Area - immediately comes to mind. Yet as we mentioned in last quarter’s report, the Valley is comprised of 20+ smaller cities which don’t necessarily fair as well when broken down and evaluated individually.

In Q2 2009, this individual city approach put New York on top of ChubbyBrain’s “urban league table,” both in terms of deals and investment dollars. In Q3, the city that never sleeps seems to have been caught taking a quick nap: in terms of deals, NY lost the top spot to San Francisco; and in terms of funding, it dropped to the number five position, trailing San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Diego, and Sunnyvale. In general, California’s uncontested domination in all things VC is once again very apparent in this city by city view, with eight of the top 10 cities that saw the most deals in Q3 residing in the sunshine state.