If you want to build a ranking of top startup cities, there are several ways to do it: number of tech startups per capita, number of total startups, amount of venture dollars, even percentage of businesses with a Facebook page. These measures focus on counting corporations and dollars, but those are results, not inputs.

The single biggest input that determines the success of a startup is the quality of its human capital. If you want to measure the quality of a startup ecosystem five years ago, count the number of companies it has today. If you want to predict the quality of a startup ecosystem five years from now, measure its human capital.

But how do you measure startup human capital?

Turns out, it’s not actually that hard. Meetups are where people in tech get together to network, talk shop, and learn from each other. If you go to Philly tech meetups, you can meet Josh Kopelman without needing to get through his spam filter. If you go to our AngularJS meetup, you can learn about an amazing javascript framework from some of its most active users.

Meetups are human capital factories. If you want to measure the human capital of a startup city, you measure its meetup activity.

We’ve done just that. Using Meetup’s public API, we’ve pulled data on every tech meetup in the entire world. In this post, we’ll share what we’ve learned and how your city stacks up.

A note on the data. For this analysis, we used Meetup’s publicly accessible API, downloaded the data for every global meetup in the technology category, and analyzed it in RJMetrics. If you’re interested in running analysis like this on your data, sign up for a free trial. While we focus on the US technology scene in this post, you can find meetups almost anywhere in the world on nearly any topic you could imagine.

Technologists Love To Meet Up

The tech industry has been meeting up forever. It was “hobbyists” like Hooke, Newton, and Wren, talking shop, drinking coffee and smoking opium in the Royal Society who ushered in The Enlightenment.

Historically, these gatherings of the geek-elite have been closely-knit groups of personal associations, but that started to change in 2001.

It’s significant that Meetup started in New York City and not Silicon Valley. The dot com collapse left many companies in the North East shuttering their doors, and without a strong core of established technology companies to turn to, thousands of technologists found themselves hunting for jobs. There was a need for community, and for a central organizing platform.

Meetup was born in this environment. Since 2002, Meetup has grown in lock-step with the tech scene. Today, the number of technology meetups is growing faster than ever (89% in 2013 alone!):

Top 20 International Cities

Globally, there are 16,155 technology meetups, claiming a membership of 3,734,033. (All membership data presented in this post is based on a sum of the count of members for each group. It does not represent a count of distinct members across all groups. If you are a member of five meetups, you show up as five memberships.) 2,521,402 of those memberships are within the US, or 67% of the total.

While it’s tempting to claim that this represents a dominant lead in the global tech scene, we don’t think the data supports this conclusion. Meetup is a US-based company, and its usage is therefore significantly slanted based on product decisions and go-to-market strategies that are inherently localized to the US.

While it’s not accurate to compare international cities to the US, there are interesting insights to be gleaned from international usage. Here are the top 20 international cities, ranked by total meetup membership:

City Total Membership Rank London, GB 210,148 1 Toronto, CA 73,476 2 Tel Aviv-Yafo, IL 63,699 3 Paris, FR 52,789 4 Vancouver, CA 52,366 5 Sydney, AU 47,152 6 Melbourne, AU 38,888 7 Bangalore, IN 37,963 8 Berlin, DE 32,652 9 Amsterdam, NL 30,902 10 Stockholm, SE 28,349 11 Oslo, NO 23,306 12 Pune, IN 16,690 13 Singapore, SG 16,612 14 Madrid, ES 15,947 15 Brisbane, AU 15,033 16 Hyderabad, IN 14,665 17 Auckland, NZ 13,115 18 Barcelona, ES 12,800 19 Budapest, HU 12,712 20