What's the Matter with Boston VCs? | Hacker News Reader

What's the Matter with Boston VCs?

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As a longtime Massachusetts / Boston resident, the culture of the city may have something to do with it.

Boston is, at its heart, a Puritan settlement. This has been used as a sleight against Boston, but I don't mean it that way. But it is a word that captures the essence of what I mean.

A superficial example shows itself to visitors immediately. Most people who visit Boston come away thinking the people are cold and unfriendly, especially if traveling from a very outgoing culture like you find in, say, California.

Having lived here, I can say, this is often true, Bostonians are not known for being welcoming of outsiders. But they are extremely loyal, honest, and dependable as a rule as well. If a Bostonian tells you they will be at your party next weekend, they probably will! I had some trouble adjusting to the fact that this isn't really assumed in other places (California...)

Another is the work ethic. Bostonians (as a rule) abhor flash and glamour. They prefer good old fashioned hard work. Leave the get rich quick schemes to New York, we will get rich slow.

I think that Boston needs to adjust to the pace that the tech world works at, and I think it will take some time. But, then again, the tech world will probably also benefit greatly when the deliberate wisdom of Boston again rises in the tech world.

And it will. Eventually.

To be fair, Cambridge, where I really live, has a culture of its own, and is often more reminiscent of Berkeley than Boston. But when you're talking about money, for the large part, you're also talking about Boston. Also, even in Cambridge, the focus is still definitely much more on academic achievement than entrepreneurial achievement.

I grew up in the North East and spent a good amount of time living in Boston. One thing I always noticed about Bostonians was that upon meeting anyone new one of the very first questions they ask is "where are you from" (and I also felt there was asterisk there: *in Massachusetts/NE). This may seem like a small thing but it speaks a lot to the main focus being "which direction did you come from" rather than "which direction are you going?" placing a lot more value on pedigree than entrepreneurship. I later moved out West and have never been asked this until knowing people much longer, and usually as a point of small talk.

and the second question is always "what do you do?" and, up until very recently, answering with "I work at a web startup" was met with extremely puzzled and questioning looks.

This is definitely true, and many people seem to assume that I'm either a grad student or working at a University and are surprised that I'm not.

Your last part is exceedingly true. Boston and Cambridge feel more than 364.4 Smoots apart quite often culturally.

I love that Smoots are in Wolfram Alpha. :)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+smoots+from+th...

Google understands Smoots as well.

I'm someone who didn't grow up in the Northeast. I worked and lived in Boston for a short time in 2005. I found Boston people to be awesome. Just very friendly and sincere.

I did find them to be a little more no-nonsense or cynical than average. That might explain some of this.

I must have grown up in a different part of the city than you frequent.

Families in my neighborhood were not hardworking, or honest. The vast majority of them were either petty criminals (most of my friends growing up stole cars or robbed liquor stores) or in organized crime (like my family). Everyone had a scheme, or an angle they were trying to play to get money quickly.

When I go home now, I never feel like I'm back there until I hear someone call someone else "fucking retarded" (never been more than a few hours).

I'm not disagreeing with your characterization of "salt of the earth Boston people", I'm just saying that like anywhere, people aren't all the same.

why should each city have the same skillset and specializations? that sounds pretty boring. is SF leading the way in bio and health-care innovations? what about open-source data-y stuff like Cornell's DuraSpace, MIT's SIMILE, Encyclopedia of Life, Brown's Racket (our own little INRIA this side the atlantic?!)..

i moved back to boston from TL after 3 years because all i could find for work in SF was the least-common-denominator/proprietary/centralized/consumer webapp startups that this article is apparently hoisting up as the end-all of aspirations. maybe i wasn't looking hard enough but it's a lot easier to find things i'm into in boston

It's a misconception that all YC startups are focused entirely on consumer web apps (and considering the YC company I'm a part of is mostly B2B shouldn't reinforce this notion). There are a bunch of amazing startups working on the hard technology problems you yourself prefer to work on. Storage, databases, application hosting, and more can all be found at YC.

New York hasn't shied away from hard technology problems either. 10gen invented MongoDB.

YC has a surprisingly large number of b2b startups which require real knowledge of a problem domain, using either the web or just computers/Internet as tools to solve the problem.

A smaller number of real infrastructure companies, but there are some.

As far as I know, not many non-computer/electronics tech (life sciences, cleantech, etc.).

Nail on the head. We have been back in Boston for about year and a half, got a bunch of free office space (MC, CM). One of the best responses from a VC- "You can clearly do well... but not within the revenue of >$200M which we would hope to see in a potential investment (happy if you prove us wrong though!)"

I'd love it if pg chimed in and explained why, after citing Cambridge as the best city in the world, they pulled up tent stakes. Did the author capture it fully?

This is what pg said at the time: http://ycombinator.com/ycca.html

I'm curious how much of it was "SFBA >>> Cambridge" vs. "we'd like to focus on a single place". There's a lot of benefit to being focused on a single location (not the least of which in personal life).

I think if Boston's VCs would have had their stuff together, its very possible that YC might not have abandoned Boston in the first place.

Also, many of the VCs are heavily invested in Biotech and other heavy-capital industries. Dollar for dollar they invest a great deal, but it doesn't generally go to consumer tech startups.

Now if you want to see an area with actual little high dollar investment happening, come visit me in Ohio sometime...

I think if Boston's VCs would have had their stuff together, its very possible that YC might not have abandoned Boston in the first place.

Doubtful--in the announcement, PG said:

But while Silicon Valley is a better place for startups than Boston, that isn’t why we chose it. If Cambridge seemed a better place to raise kids, we would have stayed there year round instead.

That's interesting. I haven't spent as much time in California, but I always figured Cambridge (especially if you have money) is a wonderful place to raise kids. A nice house near the Harvard Quad/Garden St and a good private school smooth out pretty much any bumps that I could foresee.

Agree. Grasshopper is just outside of Boston and out of last 75+ VC's and PE firms that have reached out to me, only 5 have been based in Boston with SF and NY leading the pack.

The author refers to pg's article on Cities and Ambition, and suggests that what is said about NY in the article is changing.

I don't think so. The banks will come back stronger than ever, it's just a matter of time, they always do. Other than that the mentality of people in the city has not changed. This so called engineering school which is expected to become top notch overnight, won't change things. If that were simply the case, Boston should never have seen it's decline as a tech mecca in the first place.

Also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2748869

They can't get out of the way of their own egos (imo).

A quick check of 10-year IRRs will tell you that this problem is not localized to Boston.

I don't mean their performance - I mean that relatively speaking I have found Boston VCs to be bigger assholes than CA or NY VCs.

For example, one Boston VC said our company was too soon and if there was any way to help let him know. So I did some research, found a co-investment he did with an angel I wanted to talk to, asked for intro, no response. The only other firm to do that ("can we help?" then no response) was a Seattle firm.

All CA firms have helped. Foundry Group (Boulder) has been the most helpful and set me up some meetings with some high profile CEOs even though they knew they wouldn't be investing.

In truth, I got what you originally meant and was expanding on it.

The fact that VCs can have such a low hit rate and such a low return rate, yet still have a job, is astounding to me.

I think the underlying problem is that there is an incestuous relationship between retirement funds and investors. Nothing else explains why the funds keep giving away 2+20%.

Gotcha. I think if you take the avg fund size divided by # of partners the avg partners gets $30-40mm of a fund. So management fees alone are in the millions for showing up to work. Seems a bit high with no track record. Maybe a better model for LPs would be 1.5-2% for yrs 0-5 (when most investments are usually made) and then 0-0.5%. What do I know...

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