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Venture capitalist: Cambridge is not Boston, dammit
By adamg on Wed, 01/25/2012 - 9:37am
Brad Feld, managing director at the venture-capital firm Foundry Group, says it's past time for Cambridge tech types to embrace their inner Cambridgeness (or maybe even their inner Kendallness) and stop using "Boston" to refer to themselves:
In my world view, the entrepreneurs drive the startup community. Focus on entrepreneurial population density and entrepreneurial density – and make sure your geographic region is small. Over time, linking the critical mass together in a larger region (e.g. Silicon Valley or Boston) is fine, but the real power comes from the startup communities with the largest [entrepreneurial density] in small physical regions which are big enough to have critical mass.
Ed. note: He lost me a bit when, after making his Cambridge argument, he wrote that the 128 and 495 tech belts are part of Boston. Um, what?
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Comments
You know who beyond 128 cares?
Nobody. Quincy, Brookline, Newton, Cambridge... it's all "Boston." All some vendor or investor is going to see if a company identifies as "Cambridge" is a company being difficult.
Hits on one of my biggest peeves
Every summer, I end up helping some tourist who was told their hotel is in Boston. So I'll ask them, "What is the address"...well, that's when I realize they're actually staying in Chelsea, Peabody, and have even seen this for as far away as Chelmsford.
Even conferences do this. They'll tout, "The best widgets for you to see! They'll be shown in Boston". So, I'll look at their website, and somehow Worcester has become Boston. Even remember seeing Manchester, NH once listed as a Boston, MA event.
Your city is where the post office delivers your mail to. Imagine telling Amazon, "Oh, send my package to my apartment on Mass Ave. That's in Boston..."...or was it Arlington? Cambridge maybe? Eh, it's all Boston right?
Sorry you're peeved
But if you stopped to consider it for 10 or 15 seconds, you might realize that Chelsea, Peabody and even Chelmsford are actually quite close to downtown Boston, especially by the standards of sprawling American cities.
When people come to Boston, they want to book a hotel in the Boston area. They don't usually care about the actual name of the actual municipality where the property is located. They want to know if they will be close to the Freedom Trail and Quincy Market.
And as far as these things go, they are close. Certainly as close as you might be in a hotel in the City of Chicago or the City of Los Angeles, relative to the tourist attractions in those physically-large cities.
If you're looking for Boston-based accommodations, especially on a budget, it's a lot more useful and convenient to have hotels turn up in Peabody or Chelmsford (or even Manchester, gasp!) when you search on "Boston", rather than having to go through an atlas and identify every possible city and town name that might be close enough to suit your needs.
Or in other words, get used to it, or get used to being peeved.
hotels for tourists
If that's important to them, they certainly don't want to stay in Peabody or Chelmsford. (Cambridge would be fine, though.)
still pretty close from tourist perspectives
it's not a terribly long ride on the commuter rail to any of those places and the drive is also quite short.
Close is relative. If I was from California, I would say that within 45 minutes was perfectly reasonable
No commuter rail in Chelmsford or Peabody
and you can't exactly walk to Lowell or Salem (which do have commuter trains) from them.
Mefuh Square
There's a hotel that gets a lot of business and tourist traffic - we see large school tour groups at spring break, families in the summer, and business people throughout the year boarding the express buses. It is only about 5 miles (as the crow flies)and a short 10-15 minute ride down I-93 to get dropped off at Faneiul Hall.
How do you go from Chelsea
How do you go from Chelsea then to Peabody and Chelmsford to characterize them as "quite close". I'll definitely give you Chelsea but for the other two? I'd be willing to bet if you asked 100 people if Peabody and Chelmsford were "quite close" you'd get 95 people saying no, they are not.
It is annoying when companies list their location as Boston, when they are in fact not in Boston. They are more than welcome to list themselves as "Boston area" if they are inclined to, but companies should not lie about it.
I signed up for an IT training class and on the vendor's site the location said Boston. I was happy since I live in Boston and don't own a car. After registering for the class it turns out that they are actually located in Burlington! Not a big deal since my GF works in Burlington and I was able to hitch a ride but a company in Burlington should not list themselves as Boston.
Just my 2 cents
When job searching recently,
When job searching recently, this also drove me nuts. I would have someone contact me or forward me a job in "Boston" or "in the Boston area" (which I take to mean well inside of 128), and it would turn out to be out in West Buttcrack somewhere - Billerica, Holliston, Raynham, or someplace out near Worcester. Then they would try to sell the whole "reverse commute" thing - um no...40 miles of driving is still 40 miles of driving, and until you get outside of 128, there really is no "reverse commute". I live in Boston. If the job is up in Burlington or Marlborough, then tell me up front what city it's really in so we don't waste everyone's time.
They're somewhat close if you drive
I also spent a couple of years working for a hotel in the financial district. We had numerous people show up and ask us for the location of our parking lot. Which also annoyed me since no one else bothered to tell them, we had no parking.
How can you say get used to it? Why misrepresent where you are? Imagine someone telling you to catch your flight from Logan, when it was actually TF Green. Come on now, they're both in the "Boston area". So what's an hour drive?
Just tell people the truth.
Post office != city
Not quite, otherwise Allston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, etc. would be cities.
Not to mention.....
Chestnut HIll!
ETA: or, when I lived on the Brighton, Brookline line, but legally in Brighton, and my postal address was "brookline". I think Adam once lived in such an arrangement as well.
Aren't those neighborhoods?
Much like all of the neighborhoods on the island of Manhattan?
Not like Manhattan
Not quite the same; in NYC you do not address postal mail to "Greenwich Village, NY" or "Harlem, NY"; you address it to "New York, NY." But in Boston you do address mail to "Allston, MA", "Brighton, MA," "Jamaica Plain, MA" etc.
And don't get me started on the use of "LI" (for Long Island") as though it were a state: "Hauppauge, LI" I don't think the Post Office accepts that, but people still do it.
Correction - from an ex-New Yorker
Where I grew up in Whitestone, New York (in Queens, in NYC), the standard practice for addresses was the same as everywhere else in Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island and The Bronx. It was Whitestone, NY 11357. You would never dream of writing New York, NY 11357.
Perhaps it's a bit different for those who live in Manhattan, but I'm sure there are many who write their local "village" name in their NYC address.
Correction from an ex-Brooklynite
Queens is more like Boston outside Boston Proper in the way residents address envelopes.
Although Brooklynites also would never dream of using "New York, NY," neither would they use their neighborhood name. My envelopes always bore a return address of Brooklyn, NY 11230, not Midwood, NY, 11230. And then I'd get on the subway, where I could either head for Coney Island or "New York."
Correction from another ex-Brooklynite
You mean, "to the city".
More appropriately:
You got your weird geographic hangups in my startup-obsessessed narcissism!
No, YOU got YOUR startup-obsessed narcissism in my weird geographic hangups!
Cambridge Address Says
"I spend unnecessary amounts of money on rent".
Seriously.
My .org has been in Boston for a couple of years - we were driven out of Kendall Square a decade ago by escalating rents.
My husband works in high tech and is working near where I work after interviewing at several places that were located either directly downtown or just the other side of the Channel. The cost of leases in the Financial District and in the "Leather" or what ever district has dropped substantially below that of Kendall Square and it has been like that for a good while (my office moved in 2008).
Once again we are subjected to the shallow views
of some douchebag who moved from Boston to Colorado so he could get his medical weed card. He then sits around stoned and pontificates on how wonderful he is and how we all should listen to him because he knows how to make money!!
Tell me again how I should take geographic criticisms from a guy whose list of companies he's worked with reads like a bunch of cartoon characters?
I got two different senses
I got two different senses from the linked article. The first was that the community (at least, the parts he was visiting) were centered in Cambridge, not Boston - so to a degree, perhaps we should call the whole thing "Cambridge" instead. The second was that it's actually the communities on a much smaller scale that mattered, so identify with that (whether it's "Fort Point" or "Rte 128" or "Kendall Sq"). The two felt somewhat, though not totally/irreconcilably, in conflict with each other.
Cambridge
UK or MA?
Seriously, I have a friend who has lived and worked in both, and it gets confusing when talking about it.
There's a Boston, UK but nobody gets confused about it.
I was a bit confused at Heathrow by that
When I saw a group of kids who looked very British (or at least not American looking at least) with Boston shirts on. Was kind of confused by their accent, then I realized the shirts were for the UK version not ours.
Of COURSE he does
This is New England, which is still loathe to consider Boston its major city, let alone a metropolitan area of any kind.