Silicon Valley’s reputation as the hub for the world’s most progressive innovators is slipping.

Accusations of sexism, sexual misconduct and the marginalization of women have tarnished the Valley’s shiny reputation, says Silicon Valley consultant Angela Ruth in Entrepreneur.

On top of that, Silicon Valley’s success has lead to exorbitant real estate prices which is, in turn, driving away talent.

The good news is that a lot of smaller markets have the talent and investment potential to someday challenge for the tech throne.

Tech talent is flocking to these seven smaller — and more affordable — U.S. markets, according to Entrepreneur:

Salt Lake City, Utah

• Startup ecosystem worth $12B
• Ranked No. 1 in innovation and entrepreneurship by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Tampa, Florida

• Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment is pumping $2B into the city to prepare it for growth

Huntsville, Alabama

• 309 percent growth in tech jobs over the past year
• Nearly 17 percent of the workforce is employed in a science, tech, engineering or math-related job

St. Louis, Missouri

• Home of the Ameren Accelerator, which aims to help drive innovation in the energy industry

Seattle, Washington

• Seeing big growth in space startups

Phoenix, Arizona

• 188 percent growth in tech jobs in the last year

Albany, New York

• 161 percent growth in tech jobs over the past year
• Universities supply a well educated talent pool

The Toronto Women’s Entrepreneurship Forum 2017 took a disruptive approach to the entrepreneurial conference model. Instead of talking heads doling out advice, #TWEF17 was about women entrepreneurs entering into a conversation.

SheEO founder Vicki Saunders has a direct explanation for #TWEF17’s invigorating approach. “Why repeat old approaches in a completely disrupted world? It’s time for new approaches, from large-scale economic ones to even in the way we run conferences. We’re creating an open, generous environment, one that isn’t telling entrepreneurs what they need to do: it’s building a conversation.”

Part of that conversation was the remarkable mid-conference #RadicalGenerosity session, where women entrepreneurs approached the mic to explain what their enterprise needed: And hands all over the room shot up to offer the exact help that each speaker was asking for.

“At most conferences, you’ve got the experts onstage, and then someone in the audience asks a question or makes a point that resonates perfectly with you—then you never get a chance to speak to that person,” says Saunders. “Our #RadicalGenerosity session addresses that. We find that female entrepreneurs often keep their businesses smaller because they don’t ask for help, they don’t put themselves out there.” The session (and SheEO’s upcoming app) creates a safe space for contact between women who can help each other.

The standing-room only success of the event points to another exciting aspect of Toronto Women’s Entrepreneurship Forum 2017: the city itself. “Toronto right now is so exciting for entrepreneurs,” says Saunders. “It’s a city that gives you permission to get out there and go for it. And for women entrepreneurs, who start businesses at twice the pace of men, we’re saying that there’s no need to replicate what guys are doing: what women are doing is working.”

The tech sector is taking off on Canada’s West Coast and accumulating a growing number of accolades. Vancouver recently passed Toronto as Canada’s top startup ecosystem, according to Startup Genome, and the city’s global influence is growing.

The strength of B.C.’s tech sector is no accident. There are three big advantages of doing business in B.C., according to Ernst & Young’s B.C. technology sector leader Richard Mockett:

1) A ‘Really Strong’ Ecosystem

“[BC has] some of the world’s leading companies…spending a lot of time and money in B.C., establishing real, sizeable operations,” says Mockett.

Those companies introduce a lot of talent, money and innovation to the region.

2) Socio-Economic Benefits

“There’s some favourable government initiatives and policies that enable new businesses,” says Mockett. “There’s a really strong focus on diversity and inclusiveness, which is so fundamental when you’re working in an industry that is based on new ways of thinking and doing things.

“There’s also world class education organizations and a deep talent pool which is just going to get deeper and broader in the short term.”

3) Collaborative Opportunities Between B.C. and Washington State

“There’s synergies between both province and state there to really grow a technology supercluster (The Cascadia Innovation Corridor) that could compete with the other big technology clusters around the world,” says Mockett.

If the potential of expanding your fintech startup’s vision to encompass the world was ever unclear, the $9 billion valuation of Stripe made it crystalline:

Massive Global Market Leads to High Valuation for Stripe

But how does a startup begin to think globally in the heavily-regulated financial arena? We asked MaRS Fintech Cluster director Dinaro Ly about the logistics of taking your fintech plans worldwide:

A “Global First Approach” For Growth Potential in Fintech

Rounding out our look at the worldwide market for fintech startups was our conversation with Tim Nixon of Payment Rails, which we started over on Facebook:

We concluded our Payment Rails conversation right here, finding out just how important partnerships with existing financial institutions worldwide are for a fintech startup:

Payment Rails Pushes Fintech Beyond Borders

Much of the coverage of Silicon Valley lately has focused on the gender gap in technology, and for good reason: The gap is growing, not shrinking, despite very public support of the issue by giants such as Intel.

Hiring practices are part of bridging this gap, but in an entrepreneur-driven industry, funding is another key part of the solution. According to Sahil Raina, assistant professor of finance at the University of Alberta School of Business, a deep-dive into the history of startup successes and failures reveals something of a surprise: The likelihood of female-led startups enjoying the same exit rates as that of male-led businesses is the same, but only when the female-led startup has been funded and guided by a VC with a female partner.

This isn’t news to Karla Friede, CEO of Nvoicepay.com, who recommends that fellow women entrepreneurs look for VCs with female partners: “The men at these firms are probably more comfortable working alongside women and their expectations for women’s roles are likely different,” she says. But Friede points out that women can tip the balance in their favour through other tactics too: 

• Make confident, not cautious statements in pitches
• Talk to VCs that already understand your niche
• Up the emotional connection by showing happy customers
• Show quantifiable results

The good news is that despite the ongoing gender gap problem, there are more supports for women-led tech companies than ever. “Nearly every week, there seems to be a new fund, a new network of innovative women, a new effort convening smart people to bring the venture world much needed diversity of thought,” says Joshua Henderson, an outspoken champion of women in the tech world. He has identified over 100 VCs, networks, and dedicated programs that exist specifically to help women entrepreneurs succeed.

Nuco co-founder and COO Kesem Frank and his team are passionate about blockchain’s potential: “We asked ourselves, do we believe this has the potential to change the world — spoiler alert, we do — and what do we want to do about it?”

Founded in mid-2016, Nuco is a Toronto-based startup that provides blockchain infrastructure for enterprise markets. The brainchild of three former Deloitte employees, Nuco is preparing to take on the international fintech scene.

We talked to Kesem Frank about Nuco’s roots and the company’s place in the future of digital infrastructure.

TechPORTFOLIO: Could you tell us a bit about how Nuco got started?

Kesem Frank: Nuco is actually the continuation of work we started over 24 months ago, with our other founders Matthew Spoke and Jin Tu. Pursuing the blockchain is a real opportunity domain for enterprise. But two years ago, it was much more focused around the community and public chains, stuff you would read about if you followed things like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But there was not a lot of consensus work — or even thought, to be honest — around distributed ledgers such as blockchain, and how they could play a more significant role in powering services and functionality in the enterprise sense.

That was the beginning of putting together the framework of why enterprise should care about this emerging domain.  

TechPORTFOLIO: If a layperson from outside of the fintech world asked you, “What is Nuco’s product?” how would you answer?

Kesem Frank: What Nuco does is significant — we believe even fundamental — but pretty simple. Our product is blockchain networks that are customized and dedicated per use case.

Nuco sets up a blockchain made for enterprise clients to be able to do truly peer-to-peer, transactions that don’t rely on intermediaries. Not just in the financial sense, but any interaction or communication between two stakeholders, and in real time.

As far as we’ve had a civilization, we’ve had a challenge as a species to be able to say who owns what. The approach for millennia has always been: write it down and put it somewhere secure.

The problem with databases in knowing who owns what — and you can put firewalls around them and try to segregate them from the outside world — is that it assumes we trust our counterparts. We’re forced to trust another party implicitly when we rely on their data.

Bitcoin is built on the blockchain. It answers how to move value from point A to point B without having to know my counterpart, without having to trust my counterpart, and without having to go through an intermediary. There’s no such thing as a Bitcoin bank, right? You can just move value directly.

TechPORTFOLIO: What’s your relationship to the London, Ontario startup scene?

Kesem Frank: We’re based in Toronto, but we have very good relations with Western University and the London region. We had a team of five MBAs from Western’s Ivey Business School who were part of a project with us for almost four months. We absolutely see London as a top-tier source of talent.