Want your start-up to be successful? Choose a short name and move to these cities.

Want to launch a start-up? Consider moving to Silicon Valley, near a university -- and keep your companys name under three syllables.

Those are the takeaways of a new study published recently in Science from M.I.T. business professor Scott Stern and doctoral candidate Jorge Guzman, who studied the growth of 1.5 million new firms in sunny, disruptive California.

The early indicators ofstart-up success, they found, are fairly obvious: Firms that formally register, seek capital investment, establish patents and attract media coverage early tend to have higher growth potential. Proximity to prominent research institutions -- like Stanford, Caltech and the University of California Berkeley -- also boosted favorable outcomes.

This combination of factors turns out to be a very useful diagnostic for separating out the types of businesses that have a reasonable chance of growing, Stern said, versus those that are much less likely to grow.

But branding matters, too: Businesses that include the name of a founder tend to fare worse, the study found. And firms with short names -- Snapchat, Twitter, Tinder -- are 50 percent more likely to grow than those with long ones. (Budding entrepreneurs: You could always consult this Hipster Business Name Generator.)

The research sheds new light on where the highest-quality start-ups flourish. Thats useful for local, state and regional policymakers the authors wrote.

Start by playing to your areas strengths. Not everyone should try to be Silicon Valley. Theres no one-size-fits-all policy, Stern said. What we find across a wide body of research is: You want to focus on how to leverage your environment for facilitating economic performance. Identify whats unique and distinctive about a region. Extend that.

Stern and Guzmans California investigation examined a decade ofstart-up data. They used a roster of start-ups born between 2001 and 2011 from the states official business registry, identifying high-growth features in some firms and testing the results against others.

They also mapped out entrepreneurial hot spots -- the hottest being, unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley. Americas disruption factory spawns a disproportionate number of successful start-ups, crushing the lowest-ranked California cities by a factor of 90 and the median cities by a factor of 20.

As far as cities go, the San Francisco start-up scene ranked among the most prosperous.

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Want your start-up to be successful? Choose a short name and move to these cities.