What Makes Boston's Start-Up Scene Special? | Hacker News Reader

What Makes Boston's Start-Up Scene Special?

venturefizz.com

7 pointsventurefizz4 comments

I'll tell you what is and is not special about Boston (I live in Boston). This is the city with the VC community that told Facebook - no thanks, take your app somewhere else. If Facebook had been founded in Boston the entire landscape here would have been different. Instead, we see most of our brightest students go to the valley by default. So the "old" money in Boston is not special and neither is the "old boy's club" often associated with older cities.

What is special about it? Top educational institutions, history of success, and the will (tbd) to compete with the valley.

Additionally a lot of the VC figures for Boston count in biotech numbers (as they should) but this often makes it look like we are floating in cash here- which isn't the case. YC also skipped town, which was unfortunate. Thankfully we've got TechStars now handling similar here.

What I think makes Boston special is that we've got some of the brightest students in a very geographically dense area, a great tech community (betahouse, WebInnovators, Sprout Labs), some decent local tech publications (Xconomy, Mass High Tech), coffee shops willing to deal with hordes of laptop users, etc.

Plus while it is expensive here- it isn't so ungodly expensive like having an office in Manhattan. I'm guessing New Work City's (coworking spot in NYC) rent is probably 2-4x that of betahouse in Cambridge. Stuff like that makes startups a bit easier here.

Boston VCs should give young hungry startups a chance.

A team of 2-3 brilliant early 20's building the next google is the dream of the valley.

Hopefully some of the successful Boston founders cultivate the talent here and come up with a nice (PR) Boston story.

One of my advisors told me that the difference between the MIT style and the Stanford style of startups is:

* MIT style is cover your test sheet so no one copies you.

* Stanford style is go out with your competition and share information so you are both stronger.

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