
Is the Boston technology scene living in the past? - scottieh
http://namesake.com/conversation/906efafa-44f8-11e0-814c-12313f014066
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anmol
disclosure: we're a three person startup in Cambridge, and just spent the last
week in the valley.

There are both pro/cons of the startup ecosystem in Boston.

\-- Its harder to raise funding in Boston compared to SV. In addition, a big
part of the funding discussion is timeline to revenues, which is just
completely ignored at this stage in the valley.

\-- Given this higher bar, the startups that do rise in the Boston ecosystem
are of generally higher quality. I was at the launch conference last week, and
several companies in the demo pit were honestly just "me-too" class projects.
GreenGoose (at Launch) was an example of a Boston startup.

\-- Nonethless for consumer web/mobile, Boston startups tend to be inferior to
the valley ones. The reasons for this are multifold. (a) The angel/adviser
community seems less comfortable funding companies that don't have a clear
path to revenues. (b) The entrepreneurs themselves are not the best at
designing products / UX etc. (c) The better Boston consumer web/mobile
companies move west anyways

\-- Given the less "bubble" ness in Boston, hiring top-notch engineers from
MIT, Harvard, Olin or other good technical schools is a real option for
startups. I'm hearing horror stories on the west coast+ NYC of companies that
are funded and can't find the right engineers.

~~~
bigiain
"In addition, a big part of the funding discussion is timeline to revenues,
which is just completely ignored at this stage in the valley."

I'd be curious to see a long/medium term study on that - I wonder if the
discipline of having thought out a "timeline to revenue" might prove to be a
net positive to the odds of success.

While everybody can point at Twitter and Facebook as classic examples of
"success" (at least in terms of market valuation) without early (or even
current) clear plans of how exactly they're planning to make a profit from
what they're doing - a "gut feel" suggests that startups with plans that
include something like "we've found demographic X of size Y who're prepared to
pay $Z/year for a service solving a problem we'll have in place by Q2 next
year" are probably more likely to end up profitable that the team who've
worked out a cloud-scalable-agile-web2.0-ruby-on-crack method of stealing all
the underwear...

~~~
anmol
Consider an example of the revenue focus:

\-- The valley has Dropbox (a Boston company with an awesome product that
moved west)

\-- People here cite Carbonite (which apparently makes a lot of $$ and is
heading to IPO, but no tech person seems to use it, and they market to the
Glenn Beck audience)

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rdamico
I raised two angel rounds for Crocodoc -- one in Boston, and one in SV. In
Boston I wore business attire to every meeting and was generally asked for a
5-year pro formas. In SV I wore flip flops to coffee shops where I showed off
prototypes and talked up our vision to bring down Adobe.

I love Boston, but most of the investors there are so conservative when it
comes to web startups that it makes me cringe. There are of course some
fantastic investors (e.g. Dharmesh Shah) and exciting new initiatives (e.g.
Mass Challenge), but I hope for its own sake that Boston picks up the pace and
slows the massive influx of entrepreneurs leaving there for SV.

(For reference I lived in Boston for ~6 years and now SV for ~1 year.)

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nobody_nowhere
Definitely less consumer-focused than the west coast, but off the top of my
head: Performable, Hubspot, DataXu, Quattro, Millenial, Enpocket, ThirdScreen,
Jumptap, Nexage, Akamai, iRobot, Constant Contact, SCVNGR, Neteeza, Carbonite,
Brightcove, Skyhook... what am I missing? They all seem to be pretty right now
(or recentish exits).

~~~
nobody_nowhere
emc, mathworks, nuance, avid, ITA, unica, sermo, aislebuyer, endeca,
tripadvisor... reddit (started in somerville), and i'm skipping the entire
biotech sector -- i think we're just more hardcore out here due to the shitty
weather ;)

~~~
toponium
180 days of gray a year

~~~
nobody_nowhere
and personalities to match.

~~~
nobody_nowhere
oh, come on downvoter, you know it's true

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bconway
I think many of the people posting in defense of Boston are doing so without
the benefit of history. In fact, the lack of any references to 128 pretty much
guarantees it. Here's a little story:

In the mid-70s and 80s, if you wanted to do something new, you went to 128 or
Silicon Valley. The 128 ring was huge, and you couldn't walk 20 feet without
seeing a company that was building hardware, selling successfully, and making
a lot of money. However, as the economy took bumps over the following decades,
the sector contracted and consolidated. But it wasn't staying here, everything
consolidated on the west coast.

When DEC became Compaq (became HP), it was a sad day. Not because DEC was
doing anything particularly cool (the writing had been on the wall for Alpha
and VMS for a while), but because it was the last 128 giant still standing.
Boston.com still writes articles about it to this day:

[http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2011/02/15...](http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2011/02/15/computer_makers_rise_fall_still_echo_in_mass/)

Sure, companies are still doing things in MA (Boston, specifically). But what
we have today are a few poster boys in the bio, chem, and robotics sectors
that make the evening news and let us feel good about what's coming out of MA.
I can almost guarantee that if you transplanted a 70s geek from Boston to the
SV of today, they'd feel right at home (minus the lack of wood-paneled station
wagons), but doing the reverse would yield nothing but utter horror. We are
still a booming tech sector, but it's simply not a place for innovation (no
offense to the other locals posting).

------
nl
I'm surprised no one has linked <http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html>
yet.

I'd have thought PG would be better qualified than most to compare the two.
This was written in 2007, when YC was still doing funding cycles in Boston.

Some key quotes:

 _And if, as nearly everyone who knows agrees, startups are better off in
Silicon Valley than Boston, then they're better off in Silicon Valley than
everywhere else too._

and

 _Silicon Valley investors are noticeably more aggressive than Boston ones.
Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded snatched by west coast
investors out from under the noses of Boston investors who saw them first but
acted too slowly._

and

 _Boston investors are probably more conservative than Silicon Valley
investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than
Boston ones. They don't understand startups as well._

and

 _If there was going to be a comeuppance for the west coast investors, the
bursting of the Bubble would have been it. But since then the west coast has
just pulled further ahead._

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ojbyrne
Boston doesn't have the same level of self-congratulation. Which to my mind,
is a good thing.

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jleyank
I thought there were concerns that the labor laws in MA were not as worker-
friendly as those in CA. Making it hard to move between companies/startups,
etc. Or, being (more) able to enforce non-competes.

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shaggy
As pointed out already, there is a thriving startup scene in the Boston area.
I think some of the "knocks" Vivek Wadhwa makes about SV being "more failure-
cherishing, more risk-taking, better capitalised" are either not good things
or not really true. First off more failure-cherishing winds up meaning that
more VC money is essentially wasted by people building things that have no
business model or aren't even remotely useful. Failure isn't always a bad
thing, but I wouldn't pride myself or the community I'm part of on being happy
to fail. Second more risk-taking means the same enourmous sums of VC money
wasted and it also means, in my opinion, that people are willing to overlook
or can't see glaring issues with proposed businesses and invest anyway.
Lastly, there are a large number of VCs here in the Boston area and I don't
see that changing anytime soon.

Three other points. One, if Boston were so bad for the startup scene or tech
in general then why is basically every big player here? Microsoft, google,
vmware, akamai, IBM, cisco, juniper, emc, netapp, the list goes on. These
companies aren't here because there isn't any talent or it's a bad place to
be. Two, many of the companies on the list are companies that have been around
for a while and are thriving, profitable and growing on their own. Last, and
as has been pointed out, there is a _huge_ biotech scene here, as well as a
large amount of government/defense research related work (irobot, raytheon,
mit, boston dynamics).

~~~
toponium
can add BBN Technologies

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wgrover
Biotech is strong in Boston. The combination of MIT, Harvard, and Mass General
Hospital is an extraordinarily fertile incubator for biotech.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Yeah, but for computer technology, the last contribution of Mass General
Hospital was MUMPS.

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localhost3000
What's the point? Is there more going on in Silicon Valley than here in
Boston? Yes, of course. Does that mean nothing interesting happens in Boston?
No, of course not.

For my money MIT is singularly the most interesting place on the planet (and I
didn't even go there). Spend a half hour walking around the Media Lab and tell
me Boston sucks. I dare you.

~~~
cema

      I dare you.
    

Boston sucks! (Cambridge rules.)

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d_r
I'd be curious to hear how many boostrappers are taking advantage of MA's
healthcare system (everyone's in a group.)

