Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.

View on HN

PG wrote this about a year before YC gave up doing the Boston program: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

To counter your arbitrary experience with my own, the Boston startup scene seems to be thriving.

Yeah, it does seem fairly healthy, but one has to admit that Boston would be a very different place today if Microsoft and Facebook (and YC) had stayed. At this point Kendall Square really is all about the biotech (aside from the research offices of big west coast firms like MS, Amazon, and Google.

Also troubling about Boston startups is the frequency with which the best get bought by SV companies. Seems to me that this also tends to limit local growth. So not bad at all, but not what might have been either.

You basically just said what I'm saying, but in a different way. If you're not biotech, you're not particularly interesting to the Boston VC community. Not to say that you can't start a company without VC. But if you need VC, the Boston non-biotech venture-backed startup ecosystem is dying a slow death.

>the startup scene

I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines, Iowa).

Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup scene".

I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most of its time. That mighy help settle the question.

I think it might suffer from confirmation bias. Say Dropbox started in Milwaukee, WI, but was convinced they needed to move to San Fransisco to be successful. Maybe they would have been successful in Milwaukee, too, but now we'll never know. So now they're contributing to the startup successes that come from SV, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SF was what made them successful. Maybe the reason the parent thinks Boston's startup scene is dying is because people who create startups are leaving to move to SF because they think they have to.

According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places to start a business: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-business/22...

Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10% in SF.

DropBox is an ironic example because it actually started in Boston. Drew had grown up knowing VCs in the Boston area; some had even told him "If you ever start a company, we'll fund you." DropBox did the YC Summer Founders program, which at the time was located in Boston, but all the Boston groups also did a demo-days out on the west coast because Silicon Valley VCs were better. Sequoia gave them a term sheet within a week; all those Boston VCs that Drew had known forever dragged their feet and were like "Is there any money in sharing files? There are literally dozens of competitors, and none of them are making serious money", and that is why DropBox is in San Francisco.

I grew up in the Boston area as well, thought I would stay there my whole life, and a lunch conversation with Drew was actually instrumental in changing my mind about moving to Silicon Valley. The reason is precisely that: the Boston business climate is so conservative that you really can't get resources unless you're working on something that has made money for other people. I actually don't think I'd start a company in the Bay Area now if I didn't already live here and have a wife with family here - there's usually a long period of learning your market before you have anything fundable, and it's better to spend that in a region where rent won't cost you a fortune. But the Bay Area remains the best place, bar none, to scale a business, and it's quite likely that if your nascent business has any serious growth potential, it'll be fodder for a Silicon Valley competitor with $100M in funding.

This is the most spot-on reply to my comment ever. YES. A thousand times YES. THIS is the problem with Boston. It's probably a fine place to start something. But an almost impossible task to get it funded and supported. This is why I think it's on the downward path. Boston VCs are ridiculous.

"The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem."

And some off then even work? like Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber etc.

Looking back to the time they where funded all these ideas look like sure lossers.

For what it's worth, Snapchat is out of LA.

Yes, there are local businesses everywhere. But there aren't startups (with the aim of fast growth through innovation, usually helped along by venture capital) everywhere.

The local scene matters. Most importantly, it affects the rate of people starting companies. If there are other startups around you, you can learn from them. You may not think things like accelerators, meetups, and startup-related college talks matter, but that stuff is really key for creating first-time founders.

As far as investors, it matters in angel + seed rounds, but matters far less past that (because you can fly to your investors). But having a way to access those early investors (when founders are still learning how to talk to investors, and trying to raise the money to run a company full-time) is very important.

I think it's probably a lot easier for a second-time founder to start a company outside of a "scene". But even in that case, having a larger talent pool is nice, and the convenience of being closer to investors.

All of the cities you mentioned (besides Des Moines, Iowa) have at least some sort of startup scene that I've heard of. It's a power-law distribution, but for most founders the value of moving from Des Moines to NYC, or from Boston to SV, is pretty compelling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com