People love to complain about lists

Then they immediately check whether they're on them.

The annual rankings of startups, founders, agencies, restaurants, universities and cities (I did one about crisps once) are always met with the same response. The methodology is wrong. Somebody has been overlooked. Somebody else has been included who shouldn't be there. The whole thing is flawed.

Usually, they're right.

Most lists are lazy. The same names appear year after year because they're already well known. Visibility becomes confused with importance. Attention becomes confused with achievement. Before long, the ranking stops telling you what's happening and starts telling you who has the best PR firm.

Spend enough time around Yorkshire's technology sector and a strange contradiction emerges. On one hand, there is constant discussion about the need for more successful technology businesses. On the other, there are hundreds of technology businesses that most people have never heard of.

They are building software, exporting services, creating jobs, winning customers and growing revenues. Most operate far below the radar.

Now, not every business deserves recognition. Most don't. The market is a far better judge than any publication. The concern is that a region cannot properly understand itself if it only talks about the companies that are already famous. Some of the lists include companies that are over 10 years old, barely turn a profit and survive from funding rounds.... That's not a startup. It's cashflow vehicle for Director salaries.

Silicon 100 is an attempt to build a better map.

Not a definitive map. Not an objective map. No such thing exists. Any list of one hundred companies will involve judgement. The point is not perfection. The point is curiosity, discovery and presentation.

Those questions feel more useful than asking who generated the most attention this year. Who raised what?

The North has never struggled to produce ambitious people. It has often struggled to tell its own story.

Silicon 100 exists because those two things are connected. If we want more people to invest here, work here, build here and stay here, then we need a clearer picture of what is already happening.

Silicon 100 begins there. Yorkshire first and then other Northern regions.