

Why Facebook went west and Boston lost out - byteCoder
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/09/09/why_facebook_went_west/?page=full

======
pg
Kirsner didn't explicitly mention this, but notice here that it wasn't another
VC that invested in the deal Battery passed up, but an angel. Angels are a lot
bolder than VCs.

The big difference between Silicon Valley and Boston in my experience is that
the valley has more and much bolder angels. The VCs in the two places are
similar. Boston VCs have a bit less testosterone than valley VCs, but it's not
a huge difference. The real difference is the angels. And unfortunately for
Boston, angels are the deciding factor in how big a tech hub a city becomes.

~~~
nanijoe
Which brings me to a question I have always wanted to ask... If a startup
already has Angel funding, is there any additional advantage to be derived
from moving out west?

~~~
breck
Advantages: more hackers, more angels(you can always get more funding,
right?), more partnership opportunities, warmer weather, not everyone wheres a
Red Sox hat, Arnold will be your governor.

Disadvantages: more expensive, have to build a new network, expensive to
move(both time and money), Arnold will be your governor.

------
axod
Is anyone else _really_ _really_ bored with facebook and all the news
stories/hype/hyperbole surrounding it?

~~~
paul
No.

If you don't think it's interesting, then maybe you aren't paying close enough
attention. Anyone involved with consumer web should be watching FB.

~~~
axod
People are incredibly fickle. Wasn't myspace around this 'hype' status last
year? What website will be next year? Probably not facebook.

~~~
paul
Myspace is still huge (and growing), but Facebook appears to be much smarter
and their platform is very important (especially to other startups).

~~~
pageman
plus you can't make a Myspace app :)

------
tyler
I think theres a far more subtle reason... because the weather _sucks_ here.

------
mynameishere
I read this far:

 _an online phenomenon worth up to $6 billion_

Whatever. Until the next thing.

~~~
pg
Whatever FB is worth, it would have been a very big deal by Boston standards
to have them here.

~~~
aston
I suspect even had Facebook gotten early funding from someone in Boston, they
would've moved out to the Valley (or at least the west coast) for the same
reasons many YC companies do. This is mostly a story about Battery losing a
potentially good payoff, not a story about Boston losing its one chance to
have a young software startup stick around.

~~~
pg
It would depend on how much they raised. YC companies are unusually mobile.
Most haven't raised enough to hire anyone, and it's employees that tie you
down. Few companies move after they have 20 people, unless they get bought. So
if FB had raised enough to hire that many people in Boston, odds are they'd
still be here.

------
aston
I think I probably would've passed on giving The Facebook money at a $15
million valuation during that first year. The article notes that the user base
was in the small thousands, so not so much evidence that it had any traction.
And there were certainly competitors as well (some of whom actually had a
better feature set). Not to mention the whole uncertainty of deriving revenue
from the site, an issue Facebook's still dealing with today.

edit: I missed the latter part of the article. It indicates that Thiel chipped
in in half of Zuckerberg's "minimum," for well short of his proposed valuation
to Battery.

~~~
steve
I don't know what numbers they had bothered to graph up but it seems to me
that the evidence of traction was very strong from very early on.

~~~
neilc
1000-2000 users and a $15 million valuation? That seems pretty overpriced to
me: even if you could see a positive future, FB's success outside the Ivy
league crowd was no means guaranteed.

It's worth noting that Peter Thiel later put in $500,000 for 10% of the
company, which would value FB at around $5 million, and that was a few months
later.

------
sethg
I found the article disappointing; the headline and lead promised a story
about why, in general, the Valley is attracting startups away from Boston, but
the article was a story about Facebook in particular.

