What’s the Matter with Boston Tech?
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recode.net
AIM (entrenched industry lobbying firm) seems happy about it, anyway: http://blog.aimnet.org/aim-issueconnect/topic/non-compete-ag...
http://www.aimnet.org/employer-issues-center/Non_Compete_Agr...
"Proponents often cite California as a warmer, magical place because it bans non-compete agreements. We note however that; California allows non-competes in certain business circumstances and many California-based companies use non-competes in those circumstances. Many California based companies use non-compete agreements in other states where they operate, including Massachusetts." Nice...
Let's see who's represented on their board: Intel, IBM, EMC, GE, Raytheon, Microsoft, Harpoon Brewery? http://www.aimnet.org/about-aim/board.cfm
We (Boomerang) moved to San Francisco after going 0/34 with Boston investors. It took less than 30 days to have our full round complete after we got here, and that was in 2010, before the seed market even started to feel frothy.
All the Boston talk about how "a good company can get funded here just as well as it can in San Francisco; they just fund a lot of crappy companies out there" is nonsense. Over half of those 34 Boston investors have paid us for Boomerang.
The ideal company for a Boston tech investor is one gunning to be the #6 company in an already-established market, run by a 45-year-old dude who graduated from HBS then worked for a 55-year-old VC's former company for a few years. If you don't fit that profile, you need to be rich enough to not need funding, you need to have a way to get yourself to $5m in revenue without outside funding, or you need to move.
There were a lot of young, energetic founders working on exciting stuff alongside us back in 2010-2011. I can think of one or two who still are. Some of the rest moved. Most shut down their companies and went to work for a 45-year-old HBS graduate building the 6th most successful company in some already-well-established vertical.
Besides the founders of Kayak and Runkeeper, everyone else interviewed worked for a co-working space (tim row), a university (Abby Fichtner), a consulting group (Michael Davies), or a large company like Microsoft (Annmarie Levins).
I like Clover/Chipotle, Sebastian's is too expensive and co-op food court is still shut-down :(
Are there any cool meetup's to check out at Microsoft NERD center or at CIC? Or any ideas about the hack/reduce, enterprise data science hacker-space vs. the one in central square which seems to be more DIY. Also any cool talk series/clubs I should check out at MIT, the only one I know is the 2600 meetup and also their computational biology talks at STATA.
And has anyone been to the Kendall Sq. ice rink or any art-house film meetup's at Kendall Sq. Cinema or other recreational stuff nearby?
EDIT: re: original post, I agree largely with the author's impression of the local scene not heavily invested in "progressive consumer-tech" and want to keep it that way! The Bay Area isn't for everybody and it isn't certainly for me, so I hope that not every city try to emulate that and try to find their niche.
> The Bay Area isn't for everybody and it isn't certainly for me, so I hope that not every city try to emulate that and try to find their niche.
Good point.
There's definitely a lot of meetups around here, I used to go to a lot more of them than I do now. Unfortunately, it can be hard to get people to come from Cambridge into Boston and vice-versa.
I'm talking about stuff in January at Akamai's office in Kendall -- http://www.meetup.com/desktop-linux-users-group/events/21749...
As for meetups...what kind of things interest you?
I got a season pass for kayak rentals a few years back. Kind of fun to eat a sandwich on the river. I also like to take a lunch to the ice rink for the Berklee summer concerts.
The local IEEE and ACM chapters sponsor a fair number of talks. I saw Bruce Schneier after work earlier this year.
Welcome to the neighborhood.
Also, check out Aceituna.
Friendly Toast/Cambridge Brewing Company is a nice spot. Area IV could be awesome. Flour and Miracle of Science are the best.
Definite second to all of your other suggestions as well. I'm glad to see HNers by and large seem to have good taste in Kendall area food joints.
Other places I haven't seen mentioned:
-- Squeaky Beaker
-- Boca Grande
-- Take-out from Similans
Also, what happened to the MIT food court and when is it coming back? I want terrible Chinese food again.
Oh, and how could I forget Helmand? So good! Afghani food is like a cross between Indian and Middle Eastern, judging by them.
Right across the street from K-HOP there is a great Greek place Desfina[1] (more of a dinner option but they do serve lunch). If you are willing to walk a little Skampa[2] has excellent Roast Beef Sandwiches.
Kendall Square is ok if you are a young kid (in school or just out of school).
The Microsoft NERD Center IS a good place to host tech events/meetups.
Public transportation. I know that every city dweller thinks their city has poor public transportation options. Let me tell you, Boston has you beat. When we take into consideration the perceived importance of the city and how difficult it is to get from one side to another.
Insider's club. Unfortunately Boston still has a pretty strong insider's club that affects most aspects of business in town.
Racism. Boston has a bad history of racism. For a city that prides itself on being so progressive this is a black eye that I personally don't feel the city has gotten over.
Weather. I know that this point was dismissed in another comment but it just isn't about the winter. The two months of cold grey sky rain in the early Spring is curshingly depressing.
Lack of a true "anchor" tech company. There really is no large tech company that draws others in or produces talent. Many here think that Hubspot will be that company, that remains to be seen.
San Francisco envy. It is pretty pervasive here. We call it the Boston Brain Drain. The perception is that Boston is just a stepping stone on a developer's career. "I learn in Boston I work in SF!"
Cost of living. I realize that SF and NY are more expensive but Boston I suspect that you get more for your money in those cities. In Boston $3k/month will get you into a triplex in Somerville with no T access. Living in Boston is out of the question for many making below six figures. (also for many making above six figures)
Cost to run a business. I can count on my hand the number of neighborhoods in the city that have office space below $30/sq-ft. Nearly everything in the city is North of $40/sq-ft. And for that you get some run down Class B office space that was recently bought by a Class A property company that wants high-end Class B rates. And they are all pushing $1/sq-ft increase per year. With nearly $2/sq-ft utilities. Startups looking for private office space have a difficult time finding any in Boston.
All this to say that the medical industry does not have this same talent retention problem. What keeps the world's best doctors in Boston but pushes away the world's best software engineers? If Boston wants to make up ground on SF (and even NY at this point) I think starting with this question might lead to potential solutions.
It's curious you didn't lead with this paragraph since all but two of your points (lack of anchor and SF envy) are applicable to biotech/medicine - thus unlikely to be [significant] factors.
I'm a software engineer in Boston, and I know tons of people living comfortably with good T access for far less than that. I live in a nice building in Boston walking distance from my company's offices in Cambridge. I also tend to prefer the public transportation options to many of the places I've been and lived (New York very much excluded.)
In Boston $3k/month will get you into a triplex
in Somerville with no T access.
There's a whole lot of nice housing in walking distance to Davis Sq. (well, as of the '80s, but I don't gather that's changed), and there are some adjacent stations, but the vast bulk of Somerville is bus, car, bike, or (long) walk access to where you're likely to want to go.
Also, per Wikipedia:
"To settle a lawsuit with the Conservation Law Foundation to mitigate increased automobile emissions from the Big Dig, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts agreed to extend the Green Line north to Somerville and Medford, two suburbs currently under-served by the MBTA."
And per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(MBTA)#Plans they're going to drive a spur of the Green Line straight through the middle of Somerville (and on to Medford). Someday. Hmmm, and this list of recent accidents makes me question the wisdom of riding on the Green Line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(MBTA)#Incidents_an... (which I did regularly for a couple of years without that sort of worry).
Also, while Boston doesn't have a huge consumer success story, the startup and tech scene is thriving. Just spend a couple months going to meetup groups or other events like the CIC Venture Cafe and you will understand.
The problem as the author alludes to is not with starting companies, but growing them. More specifically, there is no doubt funding for consumer-based companies is easier in the bay area. It really bummed me out to see Technical Machines and Platiq move to the San Fran.
That said, I do think things can and will eventually change. Paul English and others have started to heavily invest in consumer based businesses in Boston. I believe like he does that other than the issues getting funding, there is no reason why consumer based businesses can't thrive here.
In Boston, you rub shoulders with a large population of well-heeled management consultants, bankers, and corporate lawyers whose annual bonus might be several multiples of your total compensation (this exists everywhere, of course, but the banking and management consulting industries are more conspicuous in the northeast). There's also a huge medical community and many doctors in the area. These constitute the high-status jobs, and unfortunately tech falls way lower on the social ladder.
I recently heard someone describe Boston as "racist San Francisco with worse weather".
One of my posts is already linked here, by mwhite, and my perception hasn't changed. I don't see progressivism in Boston companies. I see smart people but old thinking. Then again, the old thinking (reinvented using fratty Young Republican types who get funded) is invading the Valley.
I'm glad to see that Boston is taking on Real Technology. That's great. Honestly, if something can be run by Lucas Duplan or Evan Spiegel, it probably shouldn't be done and it certainly shouldn't be funded at the expense of something legitimate. All that said, one of my gripes with Real Technology (and with Boston) is that there tends to be a militant PhD Bigotry in it. I get that advanced degrees are more common than pigeons out there, but it's a bit irksome to be treated like a junior just because one doesn't have an doctoral degree.
I mean, look, I'm not without cognitive ability. If I weren't a public figure, I could lie and say I was a Stanford PhD in CS and would easily pull it off. Almost everyone would believe me (except for Stanford CS graduates, who could call me out on campus specifics or professors). I have zero interest in lying about my background or history; my point is that I'm smart enough that I could get away with it and hold up. So the lack of a credential shouldn't matter, yet I've had more than one Boston company (when interviewing with them, in the past) tell me that I wasn't a real data scientist or a real quant because I didn't have a PhD. Never mind that I am so much smarter than the person who set these little rules in place that I could claim that I invented the letter "Q" and they'd believe me.
Real Technology can afford PhD Bigotry now because there isn't much of it and (unlike the consumer web space, which is mostly stupid and product-driven but takes more chances on people) it can be picky, so long as it doesn't try to expand. But these academics and ex-academics need to realize that if they want to be relevant again instead of falling into another AI Winter, they've got to drop the pedigree bigotry.
Ok, that last rant has more to do with technology in general than with Boston. I guess I'm here to say that I'm very glad to see Boston's high valuation applied to substance getting it some press. I want Boston's tech scene to succeed. Anything that can compete with the Valley deserves unwavering support. In order to do so, however, it has got to enter the 21st century.
Oh yeah. I'm not even in The Valley, and I can smell it from here. It's also obvious in the way technology is evolving -- toward a complete inversion of the ideals behind the "personal computer."
Edit:
On Ph.D bigotry-- I also don't have an advanced degree. I was in Boston once discussing something with a Harvard Ph.D. We were discussing probability stuff related to machine learning. I said something was "probabilistic," and he replied (quite ardently) that no, in fact, it was "stochastic."
That's what I meant. Those mean roughly the same thing.
I didn't say anything of course, but I interpreted this as "I have a Ph.D from Harvard and you don't so STFU."
Next time I'll call them "little fuzzy puff balls in combinatorial space."
Perhaps it shows a lot about my own psychology at the time. Events that had nothing to do with the fellow I was talking to had biased me to interpret it that way.
People who say failure and hardship are good have never experienced them. It teaches you all the wrong things-- be conservative, be suspicious, be jaded, don't dream, assume the worst about people, ...
That was many years ago. It's been a long trip back from those days.
As negative as that sounds, I think different regions just have different ways individuals brand themselves to show value in their society.
Boston is really aristocratic. I think that's the best word. Pedigree, status, and ... Breeding?
Wow! Can I quote you on that?
Actually I think the situation is more complex. I do entertain the notion of hormesis to some extent-- it makes biological sense (I studied bio) and I can see examples of it subjectively.
Hardship seems to do both harm and good. The good it does is in the realm of toughness-- it builds up your immune system so to speak.
I once lost about four years of work and almost $100k to a con man type, and I am now positively allergic to those character traits. (Glib, superficially charming, fast talker, seems to be able to "accelerate" things...) I can smell them a thousand miles away. Yet immunity can overreact, and heuristics are not perfect. It's taken me years to perfect that heuristic so as not to yield a lot of false positives.
Yet this immunity came at a cost. Immediately after this event I'd switched from being someone who admires others' achievement to someone who resents it, and it's taken me years to work my way to back to being a positive-sum thinker again.
It made me tougher, but it also made me more cynical and less open to new ideas. It makes you "wise," and after becoming wise I decided to set about trying to un-wisen myself so that I can dream again. Naivete is under-rated, wisdom over, and the ideal would be to try to take the good things from both sides of the divide.
So yeah, like most things in biology it is not simple. Biology is not a field of study for people who like absolutisms and totalistic models of things. It will disabuse you of those notions real fast if you study it with open eyes. Complex dynamical systems just don't work that way.
I think you'd be surprised at the scale of demand for good programming talent in Cambridge, regardless of degree. The vast majority of those PhDs still can't practically build apps, and the universities around there simply don't graduate very many of those people.
In my experience, practical development talent is immediately obvious to HBS graduates. You instantly become a partner everyone wants. I've had no trouble while an unknown student to work on essentially anything I want, whether its biotech or nonfiction interactive media or e-commerce or whatever. Everyone knows programmers are useful.
The difference is that Boston folks don't understand how to compensate these people. They get that developers are useful, but not that they're valuable.
The cliche in Boston (and for that matter, LA) is, "Make everything that's valuable in exchange for 7% of the business, while I celebrate my fundraising in Vegas." Twitter understands how to give its Director of Engineering the second largest options grant after the CEO. Some random co. in Boston does not.
The Boston business culture just does not reward technical or practical business talent. In actuality, LA and Boston have whole businesses dedicated around arbitraging talent. That could be talent agencies in Los Angeles or finance firms in Boston.
Arbitrage is rampant in Boston tech. Boston's tech scene is the most eager to take desperate international grad students, give them H1Bs and grind them to making pharmaceuticals or making back office finance code, paying them exceedingly nothing and enriching real partners. This is just as true with Valley public companies, but how many trendy young people like me or you have first hand experience with places like Intuit or Intel? Or put another way, public Valley companies get taken over by "fratty Young Republicans" and transfer that culture.
I think if Boston or LA's tech scene actually paid people commensurate to their value, those tech scenes wouldn't exist with their current levels of funding.
Sometimes I start reading the comment, and I read something too real, like "fratty Young Republican types who get funded", and I look in the upper right corner and, of course!
Wow, you really have an axe to grind with those two, don't you? Despite their issues, they became "public figures" by tapping into something people want, rather than by writing endless bitter diatribes about how the world is unfair for not recognizing their brilliance.
> Never mind that I am so much smarter than the person who set these little rules in place that I could claim that I invented the letter "Q" and they'd believe me.
You've very publicly defined yourself as a guy with a massive chip on his shoulder, who blames everyone but himself when he doesn't succeed. Good luck with that.
How is Clinkle "something people want"? Snapchat, sure. I'll give it that.
These unlikeable Joffreys are bad for the world and bad for our image as technologists. Thanks to them, people think of technology as a playground for reckless rich kids, not a slow and laborious and thoughtful process. That's going to lead to backlash like we haven't seen. (Vomiting on a bus isn't "backlash". We haven't see it yet.) I'd like to prevent that by having an honest dialogue with the public at large about what technology really is and what it should be doing. In order to get there, we have to toss away some distractions (and the midlife crisis sadsacks who fund unqualified frat boys to live vicariously through young sociopaths).
Obviously, these guys are envy flashpoints: they're young, not that bright, unlikeable, and insanely well-connected. (And Spiegel is rich. Duplan, maybe not.) I'm well aware of that. I don't pick them because of personal envy, but I am cognizant of this fact about them, because (a) it makes them useful when proving a point because of the visceral resentment they draw, and (b) because they're such a risk to our image as technologists. These are the ones we'll have to control and mute now before we lose the trust of the public. It was people like Spiegel and Duplan getting funded in the '90s that created the perception of us (all of us, even though those types were a minority) as being arrogant and immature, and that made the 2002-04 startup winter so brutal.
I don't think the douchebags are the problem. The insane, Gilded Age-level, verging-on-Medieval-level inequalities of income and wealth are the problem.
Extreme inequality produces douchebags because it enhances the importance of authority and favors promotion of those who'll uphold arbitrary authority (in order to enjoy a powerless but privileged status, hence the connection between the douchebag and what is sometimes called "white privilege") over those with actual talent.
That said, those douchebags are promoted for a reason, which is their usefulness as stewards of an unfair, failing society who'll keep the secrets of the shit running it. This keeps them in power and enhances social inequality.
It's not about your cognitive ability. It's about the fact that Real Technology requires some underlying Real Science, and engaging with/in Real Science requires research experience, which means time spent in the grad-school salt mines.
If you don't like it, we can try to reform the tertiary education system for you, or you can go build apps ;-).
(Sorry for the butthurt, but as a natural academic, I like knowing there's at least one technology community where "I published three papers in NIPS/USENIX/POPL/$YOUR_FIELDS_CONFERENCE for my MSc/PhD/post-doc" actually gets more appreciation than, "I read an Android book and coded up something like Angry Birds, only more different.")
>But these academics and ex-academics need to realize that if they want to be relevant again instead of falling into another AI Winter, they've got to drop the pedigree bigotry.
Excuse me, but it's currently AI/ML Summer, and quite likely to remain such for a little while longer, possibly until the invention of artificial general intelligence (which is much closer than you think, but goes unnoticed because it's not humanoid).
I sort-of agree. I think that someone who wants to be a career scientist should go back and get a PhD-level education. That said, the opportunity cost (a million dollars at my age, and I'm only 31) is so severe that the social signal is that society doesn't value this skill set.
You don't need a graduate school experience to target ads or be a financial quant, but you should have a PhD in physics if you're going to be doing theoretical physics for 40 years.
That said, if there were truly a "talent shortage", people wouldn't have to put their careers on pause for 5 years to get the degree, because employers would bend over backward to help people through the process. In the 1970s, BA-level research positions existed and there was usually an expectation that, after 2 years or so in one, you'd go back to grad school on the company's dime (while working full-time in the summer) and they'd help you a great deal with admissions by making sure you had opportunities to publish (on the clock). You wouldn't be making a full developer salary (in today's terms, closer to 80k than 120k) because you'd be working part-time, but you'd be living well and progressing toward a degree. That is what you see in a talent shortage. In 2014, it's pretty rare for an employer to pay for graduate school because, well, there isn't a talent shortage relative to the work that employers will actually pay for. There's a talent surplus, which is why you see PhDs filling BA-level research positions.
I like knowing there's at least one technology community where "I published three papers in NIPS/USENIX/POPL/$YOUR_FIELDS_CONFERENCE for my MSc/PhD/post-doc" actually gets more appreciation than, "I read an Android book and coded up something like Angry Birds, only more different."
I agree. I've got no problem with what you're saying here.
Excuse me, but it's currently AI/ML Summer, and quite likely to remain such for a little while longer
I hope this isn't summer, because it still seems that a lot of of "data science" is business bullshit dressed up as being more interesting than it is. Cleaning data so it can be fed into an off-the-shelf SVM package isn't very interesting. That's a 40-degree day, to use Stringer Bell's terminology. Being optimistic about the very long term, I like to think of it as an AI March (which means there are a lot of 40-degree days out there).
Yeah, but targeted ads and financial quant-games don't actually constitute real innovation or advancement of... much anything. The fact that this sort of crap pays so very much better than doing actual research that genuinely advances mankind's fundamental capability to arrange the universe to our benefit is, to me at least, a low-level itch or irritant of moral indignation that I am unfortunately condemned to experience regularly due to growing up in the neoliberal era ;-).
>There's a talent surplus, which is why you see PhDs filling BA-level research positions.
In the life sciences, perhaps. In physics and mathematics, the PhDs go to finance. In computer sciences and some engineering fields, the PhDs can get jobs, even sometimes academic ones. I've interned for at least one Silicon Valley company started by a PhD in computing who published at USENIX (HEY GUYS WE SHOULD BRUSH UP THAT PAPER FROM LAST YEAR AND RESUBMIT HALP HALP MY PUBLICATION RECORD IS TOO SHORT!).
>I hope this isn't summer, because it still seems that a lot of of "data science" is business bullshit dressed up as being more interesting than it is. Cleaning data so it can be fed into an off-the-shelf SVM package isn't very interesting. That's a 40-degree day, to use Stringer Bell's terminology. Being optimistic about the very long term, I like to think of it as an AI March (which means there are a lot of 40-degree days out there).
I think you're looking at industry, while I'm looking at research (where I enjoy living). Neural Turing Machines (paper published out of DeepMind), for instance, can learn a general, arbitrary function on arbitrary-size data structures from input-output examples. That is a phenomenal advance in learning: generalized induction of functions, up to complexity limits. And then there's some of the stuff that gets published at, as I alluded to, NIPS.
I agree 100%. Our society has fucked-up priorities. Everything is based on the next quarter, not the next 50 years. Most of us are employed on semi-charismatic executives' private-sector political campaigns (sorry, I mean "careers") rather than advancing the state of the world.
I think you're looking at industry, while I'm looking at research (where I enjoy living).
Fair. But the low pay in research and extreme difficulty of getting in once you're out (PhD admissions get hard after 30; returning to academia if you leave after a PhD is nearly impossible) are indicators that our society's disinvestment in academia is continuing unabated.
Expanding industries take chances on people and train people up. Besieged and contracting industries (like academia) develop the pedigree bigotry and petty politicking.
Neural Turing Machines (paper published out of DeepMind), for instance, can learn a general, arbitrary function on arbitrary-size data structures from input-output examples. That is a phenomenal advance in learning: generalized induction of functions, up to complexity limits.
Yeah, there's a lot of great work that's being done. AI "winter" doesn't mean otherwise, and nor does this mediocre spring that (one hopes) is the precursor to something better. As I said, the current state is an acceptable March but, if this is summer, that's depressing.
It's not a lack of great work being done that's the problem. It's the fact that there's so little funding for it, and consequently so very few people are doing anything stimulating or important. There are always a few who can do great work in spite of the system, but we shouldn't have to bet our society on that.
It wasn't a lone hero that put people on the moon; it's was a large set of people working together (who weren't worrying about whether they'd be employable after 40, because they were taken care of). I don't think you can form that kind of an all-around strong team with academia and industry both in their current, degraded, resource-starved state.
Right now, you need top-0.25% talent and to sacrifice your life to get an academic or basic-research position. It'd be an improvement to get to a state where one of the two sufficed.
I share your indignation, but I suspect the relative difference in pay might not bother you so much if Professors and other people doing this sort of research had easy access to the middle class. I grew up in the 70s in San Francisco, and two of my friends dads were professors at SF State, one in Physics, and one in Communications. The physics professor owned a 4bedroom house in the inner sunset. The communications professor lived in West Portal. They had kids raised a family largely on one income, kept the old station wagon running. They weren't rich, but it was not a big problem being a professor.
When that's the case, when someone who manages to get a PhD has a strong chance at a good position where he or she can do good research without massive time pressure, and you can buy something like a 4br house in a nice place and raise a family, then it's easy (well, easier) not to worry about who is living in the mansions in Pacific Heights. You might grouse a bit, but you in the end, the professors probably wouldn't trade places with them.
To me, the moral indignation comes from a number of things: 1) elite PhD programs in the sciences often have attrition rates of 50%, 2) it's difficult to get (and keep!) a good job even if you make it through 3) the pay often isn't sufficient to buy a house or raise a family even if you're a winner on winner on winner (got into an elite program, completed program, got a tenure track job at a decent university) 4) congress's response to this is to declare a shortage of PhDs.
Well yes, of course.
>To me, the moral indignation comes from a number of things: 1) elite PhD programs in the sciences often have attrition rates of 50%, 2) it's difficult to get (and keep!) a good job even if you make it through 3) the pay often isn't sufficient to buy a house or raise a family even if you're a winner on winner on winner (got into an elite program, completed program, got a tenure track job at a decent university) 4) congress's response to this is to declare a shortage of PhDs.
Yes, exactly. Professional science is often compared to a monastery, but the difference is that monasteries are not allowed to induct people then throw out the bottom 85% of monks when they've already been at their devotions for seven years.
All other things being equal, we have better beer, more sunshine, a bay that doesn't turn to ice in winter, an airport you can fly in and out of reliably without the constant storm closings, faster public transport and of course California Girls (1) :)
There's a reason why most startups are here, the brightest minds want to live here, after going to school there and getting sick of all the above.
I will concede to you on every other point :)