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Comment by mrgordon | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

I would assume that most of this is biotech investment, however, which is sort of outside the purview of the HN community.

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.

http://mashable.com/2013/02/21/top-cities-startups/

http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/stats-and-the-city/2011/te...

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/tech-venture-...

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2011/10/13/mass-drops...

From the last link, dated October 2011:

"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!

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