I'd frequent the Kendall area when I lived in Boston 3.5 years ago. The thing that bugged me most about it was the lack of street-level places to sit down and work. There was one Starbucks and nothing else, besides semi-fast food restaurants which aren't good laptop environments.
Beautiful new high-rises were going up everywhere. There's a neat "secret" park on top of one of the buildings (Cambridge Center Roof Garden). Extremely easy to cycle around, and by far the best pedestrian-friendly traffic controls in the entire state.
However, unless you worked in one of the office buildings, or could enter MIT legally, there were few places for "outsiders" to wonder in, hang out, and hack. Is this still the case, or has it since become more welcoming to laptop nomads?
Yeah, it's way better now. Voltage and Tatte are very friendly for hackers, and Starbucks, Cosi, or ABP aren't bad either. The entire ground floor of the MIT Stata Center is open to the public (literally 24/7) with ultra fast WiFi. If you need dedicated desks, Dogpatch or the Cambridge Innovation Center have you covered.
Unfortunately Google has invaded much of the roof garden with a recent renovation.
My favorite is Dwelltime on Broadway. Close enough to Central to get to quickly, yet away from much of the hustle+bustle and suits. They shut off the internet from 11-3p, which is great for a productive boost in the middle of the day. :)
One thing I liked about MIT (over Harvard, whose closed-ness I did not like) when I was visiting Cambridge is that large swathes of MIT are open to the public. The Stata center (the CS center) is open with free WiFi. Many MIT libraries are also open to the public (varies). The MIT food court is also open. Heck, I wandered around several dorms without being carded/checked, though that probably only worked because I look (and am) young and was wearing a hoodie + backpack (and most of the dorms require carding in, I believe).
In general, it's amazing to see the difference that slight "UI" improvements like this can make. For instance, the Cambridge crosswalk signals count down the time left to finish crossing. This may seem like a trivial nicety, but just across the river I feel like I'm rolling the dice every time I step into an intersection where I didn't specifically see the walk symbol come on. Will the light turn green while I'm in front of traffic? Or will I be doing a goofy half-run only to find out I had another minute or two to cross leisurely?
Still the place to be in Boston/Cambridge for start-ups, certainly, but it is hardly "the" place compared to San Francisco and the valley. The lack of funding, even compared to New York, has been a real problem for the ecosystem. Why did Facebook, Dropbox, and many others start in Cambridge and leave?
I'm convinced part of Cambridge's challenge ahead lies in zoning. As someone who has lived in Cambridge the past five years, I've watched sections of Kendall Square (and even parts of Central, really) go from post military/industrial ghost towns to places where you'd want to go out to dinner and drinks afterwards.
But we've still got a long way to go. Pockets of warehouse owners are holding on tight to their empty, broken-windowed buildings knowing that they're sitting on a gold mine whose value only goes up with each new biomedical company or silicon valley branch office that moves in next door. So the result is this odd landscape of new buildings next to run-down two story structures.
We need to rezone for mixed use and people with an interest in Boston should rally together and buy out the warehouse hold-outs to build the kind of living/working spaces conducive to early-stage companies.
Another serious problem is the parasitic real estate developers and agents that are driving up the costs of space in the area. Yes, there's a lot of demand, but square footage is now competitive with SF, and it's not ... ahem .. SF.
Massachusetts is consistently the second-highest ranked state in the nation for VC investment, and has been for the past 28 years (source: NVCA Yearbook). Assuming I haven't F-ed up these calculations, MA has invested an average of 146% more than NY over the past 10 years.
The challenge for startups here has been in finding:
a) seed funding, and
b) funding for consumer web businesses
Both areas have seen significant improvements since five or even three years ago. Since YCombinator left Boston in 2009, Spark Capital (one of the main consumer web & seed-stage VCs here) has raised two additional funds of over $800 million. NextView Ventures raised its first fund in 2012 to invest in seed stage deals, and both New Atlantic Ventures & .406 Ventures raised new funds in 2008 to do the same.
Boston/Cambridge is certainly still far from the amounts of funding in Silicon Valley, but we're far ahead of anyone else, particularly when you factor in population.
Boston has been the second biggest VC market (counting the Bay Area as one) but every report I've seen shows New York has tied or surpassed Boston over the past few years.
"Still, for Massachusetts to fall behind New York in VC financings is noteworthy, said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. New York had already been leading Massachusetts in VC for tech — including Internet, mobile, software, hardware and electronics — since the second quarter of 2010. But due in large part to health care VC activity in Massachusetts, the state had remained ahead of New York in overall VC until the third quarter."
I wish NVCA made a full breakdown of the data available. New York did top MA in "internet-related investments" in 2012, but that's not an accurate depiction of tech investment. MA has strong robotics, hardware, and medical devices industries that contribute to the ecosystem here.
In your last link, they're talking about funds raised by VCs, not dollars invested. NY firms did have a good year in 2011 -- $4 billion raised to MA's $2.5 -- but in 2012 MA firms raised twice as much as NY firms, and MA firms have raised $1.5+ billion in Q1 of 2013 alone.
Couldn't agree with you more. Cambridge/Boston is experiencing something of a renaissance in tech that started a couple of years ago. It didn't really exist when the first social media tech built in Cambridge was born, but then quickly left to the west coast. Now that tech is building steam again here, we have to make sure that the parts of the ecosystem that haven't worked well (and funding is a big part of it), start to coalesce around that momentum that startups in the area are building. Another big problem is that recent infrastructure development has focused quite literally, on the 4 square block area that is Kendall Square proper, when really there should be plans to extend the great things that Kendall Square has built to a broader Cambridge
I got the feeling the article discusses the topic in the context of Boston/Cambridge startup scenery, not necessarily nation wide. As Boston is trying to define its own ecosystem, it needs to find a place where startups can grow. That place might be Kendall Square.
Yeah, Kendall Square has definitely filled that nitch for a while. There have been enough successful exits, particularly in biotech, that I don't think it's really any contest as far as the local area goes.
It seemed like the startup scene was going to expand to more of Boston and Cambridge for a while with YC doing one batch of startups there each year but they gave up on that. I was running a startup in Boston for a while and talked with the mayor about his vision to make the old port area a revitalized live-work space for startups but it seems to be happening very slowly if at all. Meanwhile, tons of promising startups keep pouring out of the area and NYC is becoming the #2 US startup hub.
I don't think the port is a viable location for a thriving community, unless Boston is willing to dedicate more than tax credits to stimulate growth. You have to take a bus! (silver line) And then walk past warehouse after warehouse!
I work in Kendall. I'm consistently impressed with the number of interesting companies doing interesting things. It is getting really developed (nice office buildings, nice luxury apartments, bars, restaurants) really fast- though it's still weirdly sterile. Nowhere to buy beer or even groceries outside of 7-eleven.
Just today I was at my gym (Bosse on third street) and overheard a guy complaining that he could rent a better apartment in Manhattan than in Kendall right now. The rent for the Watermark tower (corner of Third and Broadway) is around $3200 for a two-bedroom!!
What sold me on the Cambridge Innovation Center was the unlimited supply of FREE organic coffee, tea, peanut butter, butter butter, soy milk, milk milk, cereal, jams, etc. ;-)
Couple of guys were actually living there, crashing on couches in one of the upper floors, and then later, given das boot -- not sure if they were start-up co-founders or what, they certainly leaned on CiC 24/7 for around $250/month, cheapest rent in town.
>"Kendall Square institutions like Aceituna Cafe and Voltage Coffee"
These aren't really institutions so much as they are a restaurant and an overcutesy coffee shop that are only a couple years old each. Voltage opened in 2010, and it's some of the most overhyped espresso I've ever had. I think Acetuna might be a couple of years older, and it's a decent Lebanese lunch, priced for the pharma clientele ($20/plate).
Anyone know what the deal is with Aceituna Cafe? Parked outside there are always Mazaradis, Porches and other expensiveness cars, and they are differenct almost every day.
There are a bunch of apparently wealthy Middle Eastern kids who live in University Park. They and their friends drive your typical Maserati, Porsche, GT-R, Ferrari, etc.
The unique thing about Kendall Square is the sheer density of geeks in general and startups in particular. Other places have higher absolute numbers, but not in such a concentrated space.
Plus, from a tech worker's perspective it's fantastic to have so many potential employers all in one place. You don't have to disrupt your lifestyle to change jobs, which gives you some extra clout as an employee.
Errrm, but how many of these employers require their workers to sign non-competes? I have no idea, I left the Boston area in 1991 after Route 128 died, but they were not uncommon back then. I'm convinced their non-enforceablity in California is one reason for the Bay Area's wild and sustained success.
I know many, many people who have successfully job-hopped around Kendall Square with no adverse impact from noncompetes.
I suspect the reason is that the noncompetes are sufficiently narrow, and the software industry is a big, wide place. I don't know as much about the impact on biotech.
As someone who lives in Kendall Square and studies at MIT, I would say that, in spite of the amount of brains, Cambridge and the whole Boston area are a terrible place to live, with few opportunities for recreation and a horrible weather...
Cambridge is a wonderful place to live: extremely walkable, pretty architecture, good food, plenty to do, tolerant social atmosphere, very tech-friendly. Not sure if it's fair to call Cambridge/Boston a "terrible" place to live.
I would say that the weather and recreation opportunities aren't as good as in some other locations of the country, so you have a point there.
Kendall Square itself isn't the most residential area, but you're a subway stop away from a ton of nightlife & live music in Central Square. One stop further and Harvard Square has an active city events scene (Mayfair, Book Festival, Bastille Day) + a ton of shops & restaurants. Just over the river you have the Esplanade, with regular concerts, movie nights, and festivals. And that's all within a mile or so.
I want a Kendall Square in Delhi, India as well. Entrepreneurs are scattered all over, India is such a big country, yet here we are.
In Delhi, we have the IIT, but the Community Center just across it, is a place to get high on wrong skies. If only the VCs living in Delhi, would rather come out of the swanky embassies and foreign centers :/
If you could convince the large number of 'newly rich' industrialists to start investing in startups, you could make much more progress. As I see it, most of their money currently goes into Real estate: which is driving up property prices like crazy, but the money is not really doing any 'work'. Also, many of these gentlemen are located in small towns (Rajkot, Pune, Nagpur) rather than in the megapolis'
Beautiful new high-rises were going up everywhere. There's a neat "secret" park on top of one of the buildings (Cambridge Center Roof Garden). Extremely easy to cycle around, and by far the best pedestrian-friendly traffic controls in the entire state.
However, unless you worked in one of the office buildings, or could enter MIT legally, there were few places for "outsiders" to wonder in, hang out, and hack. Is this still the case, or has it since become more welcoming to laptop nomads?