Startups want a jump-start.

• Position: Charlotte

Nabeel Hyatt had an idea for a new company--two of them, in fact. It was summer 2001, and he was vice president of strategic partnerships at lnternetsoccer.com, a Charlotte startup that provided soccer news and merchandise. He had stayed on after its acquisition but was itching to try something different. As he mulled the possibilities, one thing he knew for sure: Whatever he started wouldn't be in the Queen City. "It just seemed very obvious to me that Charlotte wasn't a city that valued startups," Hyatt, now 34, says. "There was very little support."

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So he focused on Boston and San Francisco, both of which had a strong community of angel investors, engineers and project managers wanting to work with startups. After landing in Cambridge, Mass., he started a couple of businesses before launching Conduit Labs Inc., a game developer for social-networking websites, in 2007. In August, he sold it to San Francisco-based Zynga Inc., which has developed FarmVille and other online games. He's now head of the Boston unit of a company valued at $5 billion. "It's unfortunate that I had to leave [Charlotte] because I met some really good people."

Hyatt isn't the only one frustrated with a lack of support in Charlotte, says Mac Lackey, his boss at lnternetsoccer.com (Making Goals, March 2000) and now managing partner of Charlotte-based BlackHawk Capital Management LLC, which focuses on early-stage companies. "We lose really good entrepreneurs to other cities that are better aligned, or we have people sitting in a financial-services job uptown who just don't know how to stick the shovel in the ground and get started."

He says there should be a public-private...