Sydney and Melbourne have both dropped places in the just-released Global Startup Ecosystem Report by Startup Compass.
Who cares how Australia ranks in a global study of tech start-up ecosystems? You should. It's an indicator Australia may be failing to transition our economy from primary industry to information and technology.
We're making progress and, viewed from a solely Australian perspective, the progress looks good. But the very things that allow a team of entrepreneurs to build and scale a technology start-up business to a "unicorn" billion-dollar valuation in a few years also mean we're competing on a global scale. Or rather, as the report suggests, failing to compete. 
As Marc Andreesen wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, "software is eating the world". New businesses are rapidly and inexorably disrupting transport, professional services, retail, banking, hospitality and even mining and agriculture by using technology to outcompete. The 10 biggest companies by market value today are basically technology companies, oil and banks.
None of the technology companies is much more than 30 years old, which is about a fifth of the time required to build the banks in the list, a third of the time it took the oil companies and about half the time it took Warren Buffett to remodel Berkshire Hathaway. It's important for the future of Australia to rank in tech start-ups where we rank in building mining companies, banks and education - in the top 10 and aiming for the top five.
The 2015 report shows that while Sydney and Melbourne are building larger start-up ecosystems, our start-up industry is growing slower - and performing worse in terms of economic outcomes - than almost all other Western nations.
That's a problem because the best Australian tech start-up founders don't have to build billion-dollar companies here. Tech start-ups are uniquely easy to move to whichever nation has the most supportive economy to maximise their chances of success.
Moving a $30 million early-stage tech start-up from Australia to Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, London or Berlin is a relatively simple matter of arranging working visas, registering online for a Delaware C-corp and doing legals and banking. You don't have to apply for a banking licence, lease an office building or build a factory.
Most of the start-up's customers will be outside Australia, and many of its assets will exist wholly within the cloud, that amorphous layer of globally-distributed computing and storage that enables an Uber or an Atlassian to service customers globally at effectively the same cost of sale. The business can be managed from wherever the founders open their laptops and connect to Wi-Fi.
If you're prepared to take a risk as an entrepreneur and leave your previous career to take a stab at building a billion-dollar business in less than a decade, are Melbourne's liveability and Sydney's beaches really going to hold you back from moving somewhere you have a chance of getting a better investment valuation or faster growth?
It's not all bad news: we are getting better at creating new start-ups. The report says Sydney's seed investment activity grew 33 per cent over the past three years, but against Bangalore's 53 per cent growth this helps to explain why Sydney fell from 12th to 16th in the global rankings and why Melbourne dropped off altogether.
At the end of the start-up value chain, Sydney represents a puny 0.1 per cent of the estimated global exit events by value. Montreal sees three times that, Singapore eight times and Tel Aviv an extraordinary 65 times. In case you're thinking it's a question of scale, don't - Tel Aviv has a population of fewer than 500,000.
The report is encouraging about Australia's depth of experienced tech start-up founders and advisers, and about our growth in early-stage seed capital.
Australian banks and corporates are beginning to venture into a relatively small amount (in global terms) of start-up investment. Later this year you can expect to hear the first news of Australian superannuation funds participating in some of the more established early-stage tech funds here.
But what we're really lacking - and why we've fallen so far behind, so fast - is concrete support from government, which in other markets is offering tax concessions and investment in local tech start-up activity at a level that dwarfs support in Australia.
Australia's primary industries have thrived on a global scale for decades thanks to deep and broad subsidies, concessions and infrastructure investment. And although both the Australian government and opposition have promised further start-up support in the years to come, it pales in comparison to the efforts undertaken to lure our best and brightest overseas.
We don't need billions of dollars worth of ore loading facilities, rail lines or cheaper diesel. But we do need more of a helping hand.
Alan Jones is one of Australia's most experienced tech start-up founders and angel investors. He works as a start-up evangelist at BlueChilli Group, a tech start-up incubator, accelerator and venture fund.