Boston-area startups are on pace to overtake NYC venture totals

I would think software engineers are still very much needed in almost every biotech startup :)

I'm a bioinformatics scientist. Salaries are notoriously horrible in this field and I get paid better than most wet lab scientists who have more education and experience than me.

I think biotech may be exacerbating inequality more than most industries, as the profits are most definitely not going to the employees like they do in other STEM fields.

You likely made a 2x salary decision as long as you’re a ground level employee in either field.

Boston also has lower mobility for tech workers, because in California non-competes are unenforceable but in Massachusetts they are.

Interesting. Anecdotally, I've heard of many tech companies that are from that area, which seems to confirm what you say.

I would say that that sentiment is mostly in SV employees, not the capital managers.

I'm in Dallas, and I've noticed something similar here.

Most of the tech industry in Dallas is telecom. There are many, many reasons why I categorically refuse to ever move to SV, and one of them is that I love telecom and can't stand web/social/mobile. I'm saddened and disappointed that the biggest tech hub in the country, the part of the country whose name is synonymous with the tech industry, is just a collection of web/social/mobile developers who don't work on anything I consider interesting. SV just has this narrow definition of tech that really puts me off. OK, to be fair, there are a few telecom companies in SV, but they don't dominate the industry like they do in Dallas.

My career goals are to work in B2B telecom for the rest of my life and never ever do web/social/mobile, so I need to avoid SV.

Endpoints news [0], fierce biotech [1], stat news [2] are a few good newswraps i follow

I'm also working on a database tracking biotech VC activity. Still in alpha but you can take a look here [3]

[0] https://endpts.com/

[1] https://www.fiercebiotech.com/

[2] https://www.statnews.com/

[3] https://bio-vc-tracker.herokuapp.com/

> Beijing is likely far ahead

I don't think that's true. China is doing some amazing things in biotech, and they have perhaps the best young drug discovery talent base in the world, but most VC and innovative startups are in the US for now.

Most of the Chinese VC investment has been in Series B or later stage rounds in US-based companies (some UK / EU as well). Most Series A rounds are led by US biotech VCs, and these VCs seed most of the funded startups as well. There are some large Series A rounds led by Chinese VCs (mostly Sequoia China), but not as many as by US VCs [0] -- disclosure: i created this database, it's still in alpha

There have been a few mega-rounds for Chinese biotechs recently, but it seems like a lot of those are aimed at developing Chinese versions of drugs originally developed in the west. There are exceptions of course, like Legend

Don't mean to knock China's biotech scene, but Beijing does not seem "far ahead" to me

[0] https://bio-vc-tracker.herokuapp.com/trends

I think NYC has more scientists (not just NYU and Columbia but Weill Cornell, Mt Sinai, Rockefeller etc), and may even have more NIH funding than MA (could be wrong on this though)

One reason is that there are just a ton of experienced entrepreneurs in Boston and few in NYC. One VC said that in NYC you could shoot a shotgun and not hit an experienced entrepreneur but in Boston you could shoot a water pistol and hit a dozen. Not sure why that's the case tho, maybe bostons legacy as a tech hub, more early stage VC, and more entrepreneurial culture at MIT / Harvard

There is a huge concentration of academics, VCs, startups and big pharma outposts within walking distance of each other in Kendall square. In NYC it's harder to get around, and even in the Bay Area you have several biotech clusters in Berkeley, mission bay, SSF, and the valley

We have Harvard, MIT, plus, the Broad institute (and others), the network of Harvard teaching hospitals (Brigham & Women's, Boston Children's, Mass General, Dana Farbar), with their surrounding cluster of commercial and non-commercial labs, plus the VC infrastructure.

They hanged a nice photo of him eating pizza: https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02223/Fr...

It was almost as if PG and Jessica set out to prove the Boston/NYC status quo of VC wrong. If you wanted funding around here pre-2005, you had to be an experienced exec w/ a strong team of MBA's and senior engineers. Once YC + FB left and saw huge success, there was a scramble to figure out what went wrong.

Check out this meetup that a local VC set up back in 2005 [1]. Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Reddit's co-founders (Along with many other notables!) attended. All of them left for the West Coast.

[1]http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/2005/11/boston_web_inn...

That explains their recent advertising push!

Boston-founded by an HBS-grad engineer who made early units himself, and bootstrapped until raising from Sequoia's growth fund. An amazing story that got almost no coverage in the tech press.

I think it has more to do with the fact that 3 of the 5 most important companies in tech are headquartered there have a combined $2.3T in market cap whereas Boston's biggest tech co's, TripAdvisor, Akamai, and Wayfair, have a combined market cap of ~$30B.

Thank you for the insight. I tried to do some research before my post but exact details of what the New Hampshire / Boston breakdown are is a little hard to find.

Pillpack moved out of Davis last year, into a new office also in somerville.

https://www.americaninno.com/boston/office-envy/office-envy-...

I thought I read Liberty Mutual actually started a major layoff of their IT people the seacoast area (shortly after they advertised many IT job openings). Even people outside of IT were affected. I know of a business analyst who was given the option to take a code boot camp, or lose their job. From what I heard, many people in IT were given this option.

Much to the chagrin of anyone who lives on the free side of the NH line

And if you go by the NECTA definition instead of the CBSA, Nashua is part of the Metropolitan NECTA which is a much tighter definition than a Combined NECTA/SA.

http://zaidan-x.org:8192/necta/71650

(edit: I do apologize for the HTTP link. I've been meaning to set up Let's Encrypt for a while, but I haven't gotten around to it)

Boston long had and still has many computer industry companies outside the city, especially in the Western suburbs. Maybe 25 years or so ago, there was essentially no tech of note within the city limits. It was mostly along Toute 128 and 495.

The route 128 and 495 corridor is where people with cars find tech jobs. A lot of established tech companies in that area. EMC, Bose, iRobot, a bunch more I drive by all the time that I can't remember off the top of my head.

Doesn't have to be middle of night. But you definitely can't do it that quickly during rush hour. Also depends on where exactly you're going and just how deep in the city it is, since the in-the-city traffic can really slow down your trip.

Yeah that was also back when Southwest wasn't at Logan but wanted to advertise that they had the lowest fairs "in the Boston area".

Can you elaborate on why you see socially-conservative politics as being unattractive to people with money?

(I don't know if you're right or wrong, I'm just trying to learn something.)

Large Midwestern cities like Minneapolis and Chicago are quite liberal and have a lot of rich people who could fund startups. We actually do have a lot of tech in these places, but generally only because large companies are in these places and they need a lot of engineering.

The startup culture is not here of course, but the reasons are not the ones you list.

It's a great place to start a family. Housing is a lot cheaper, and the people are hard workers.

There's a lot of really smart people in the Midwest who will dedicate themselves to your cause because they have a family to take care of. The midwest will probably never be competitive for top AI talent, but it already has some of the hardest working, and most loyal talent.

Most companies don't need genius, they just need someone with a lot of grit. The Midwest has vast swaths of folks with grit.

As far as weather, the Midwest, Boston, and NYC are pretty much the same. Boston and the upper Midwest are cooler, of course.

If weather mattered all that much, the coast from LA to San Diego would be where you'd want to go.

Equating the US mid-west with socially-conservative populace is a gross generalization.

Why is flat terrain an negative trait?

Chicago has socially conservative populace and lower probability of meeting rich people ? hmmmmm

Another thing that works against Midwest is that when the world things of "America", Midwest is not what comes to mind. To build a large competitive tech hub, you need to be able to attract huge numbers of Indian and Chinese developers are you scale your company to 10,000 engineers. However, most Asians (and even Europeans) prefer to stay on the coast due to the storied past, Silicon Valley name recognition, socially liberal policies, huge diversity, access to ethnic food etc.

Because it's a massive waste of money. How much of that VC funding is disappearing due to high COL and high CODB?

So much for the Internet, eh?

I'd argue that it goes beyond tech, but all post industrial industries and ventures benefit from concentrations of talent and other agglomeration effects far more than they do from cheap land and quick availability of raw resources that industrial economies favored.

It's a shame, because if this ultimately ends up being true, even more of our economy than it already has will concentrate in fewer and fewer very expensive cities.

The property prices are largely driven by compensation increases. As long as there are more Apple/Google/Facebook engineers seeking houses than houses on the market, then there will be an incentive for housebuyers to bid up the price of available housing right up until it equals the extra money they earn from working at one of these Bay Area tech companies. Existing landowners will continue to capture basically all of these tech wage gains until the supply of housing exceeds the number of tech workers who want it.

The tech workers who are getting rich are the ones whose living situations resemble college students or service workers. They compete in the housing market for cheap apartment rentals with folks making maybe 1/5 as much, which holds down rents (well, sorta...rent is still insane, but only about 1/3 what a typical mortgage payment would be) and lets them bank the excess.

MA, particularly the Boston area has spent just shy of 400yr embracing micro-managerial busybody government at every level (several other New England states exist because living in MA was too onerous for various groups). Local governments have a lot of power. They use this power to implement self-serving bylaws and zoning rules that cause the cost of living to skyrocket relative to cities/towns that have more of a "you want to have an adult entertainment store two blocks from a high-school, ok fine, just don't forget to pay your taxes" attitude. It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone wants to zone the strip mall, the lumber supplier, the mechanic and the big box store out of existence or relegate them to some small commercial area. Every town thinks their a special snowflake that should be able to embody picturesque New England town in Yankee magazine. Well actions have consequences and all those things all have to go somewhere and if every town makes doing business (or at least the kind of business that doesn't fit their vision) hard and expensive those costs get passed on down.

You can still be a homeowner, buy good groceries and keep your fridge full of beer on a single entry level tech salary in MA. The catch is you just have to do it in one of those "bad" cities like Worcester, Fall River or Fitchburg.

I welcome the SF problems in the Boston area.. You reap what you sew.