Demographic of Business of Software 2011 US Attendees

Last week I attended my first Business of Software 2011 Conference.  I was lucky (or insane) enough to also be 1 of 5 Lightning Talk Speakers (15 slides, 30s per slide, 7 minutes and 30s in total).  I'll blog next week on my key learning's but what I thought interesting was the Demographic distribution of the US attendees. So let me try and explain why I think the heat map below is the way it is.

So explaining the large number of attendees from Massachusetts is easy.  First of course that's where the conference is held.  Second Boston is a hot bed of software startup activity.  Third a good number of Hubspot attendees were there.  The same principle holds true for New York, just substitute Fogcreek Software for Hubspot.

What is hard to explain is the swathe that cuts through the heartland from East to West.  My simple hypothesis is that would be entrepreneurs headed West to seek fame and fortune in Silicon Valley ran out of money on the long drive and settled down somewhere along the way.

Anyway the top 6 attending states were:

Massachusetts

New York

California

Illinois

Michigan

North Carolina

In my next Blog post I'll give the same perspective Worldwide, and then I'll somehow try to digest the insane amount of information I consumed at the conference into some key nuggets of wisdom.