3 Cities That Have Found the Secret Sauce for Startup Success These cities have a steady influx of educated budding professionals.

What do Austin, Atlanta and San Diego have in common? They're among the youngest large metro areas in the U.S., and they have some of the highest startup densities in the nation.

Coincidence? Not at all.

"We seem more likely to develop a startup when there are more young people around," says Paige Ouimet, an assistant professor of finance at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School. Ouimet, who cowrote a paper on the relationship between the ages of businesses, their employees and growth published in 2011 with the help of the U.S. Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, adds, "The startups that start with more young people employed have higher growth rates and are more likely to get VC support."