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Maybe we just have to content ourselves with biotech instead of high tech
By adamg on Thu, 01/22/2009 - 9:36pm
Y Combinator, which provided initial funding for high-tech startups, is moving permanently to Silicon Valley. Co-founder Paul Graham writes it had more to do with that part of California being a better place to raise a kid than Cambridge - he's about to become a father. But he adds:
... I think it will be better for the startups we fund to all be in the Valley. We never tried to claim to the startups in the summer cycles that it was a net advantage to be in Boston. The most we could claim was that we could mitigate the disadvantages sufficiently well—for example, by flying everyone out to California to present to investors at our Mountain View office. But we did worry that the Boston groups were losing out. Boston just doesn't have the startup culture that the Valley does. It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge; nothing makes that clearer than alternating between them. ...
Via Tom Summit, who writes:
... It was annoying when TechCrunch "discovered" Y Combinator and Hacker News and claimed them as one of their own even though it originated in Boston. It is now even more annoying to think that it is now true.
Stay in MA tries to stem the tide.
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Comments
eh
I see the Stay in MA marketers are ALSO pandering to college students.
i'm not a college student.
i have a startup.
i guess i'm too OLD to start up a startup!
(on either coast)
chances are better out west, at least... since there are FAR MORE companies in the business of not funding startups there these days, than there are here.
see y'all
Take Heart
The pittance-for-sleepless-summer-locked-in-apartment-with-other-20-year-olds-in-exchange-for-ycombinator-getting-huge-chunk-in-your-startup was probably a good deal for many people who did it.
However, few people other than college students could afford to do that, and few people who actually had a great idea and knew what they are doing would consider it a good deal.
YC is for barely-legal students who say, "I want to slave for a few months, and I think I could make a site, but I have no experience in anything." So YC served a useful purpose, since perhaps some of these students would have gotten unemployable English degrees instead of taking a modest shot at post-dotcom payout. But I don't see YC moving as being a huge loss to Boston business.
Thinking optimistically, perhaps YC leaving will unclutter the space. Perhaps when angels and VCs get pitched to by techies now, it will tend to be more from the *determined* techies, who would've done it whether or not YC had been there evangelizing startups to the less-self-motivated. :)
(Full Disclosure: I know people doing startups in Boston, and in the past I have toyed with my own ideas, but I am not currently.)
Nattily attired
and I for one will take heart knowing that I will never, ever, ever sit down to write code in a chair that Paul Graham himself may have recently occupied, wearing only a towel.
zomg i made myself throw up a little thinking about that.
seriously, people, is this something to brag about? Does exhibitionism at work make the code better and the staff more motivated? Does blogging about exhibitionism make the meta-self more profound?
I'm Not Worried
Y Combinator generates a lot of buzz, but as far as I know, it doesn't actually invest much, and hasn't produced that much.
Y Combinator's most-touted success, Reddit, can be useful, but it was a Digg knockoff when everyone was talking about Digg's huge valuation, and when every techie knew that Digg knockoff software could be implemented in a weekend. YC didn't have to invest much, and they presumably got their disproportionately large standard cut when it sold.
Perhaps more people around Boston with deep pockets and engineering/science backgrounds should be thinking about angel investing locally.
And look what I read not long after posting that ....
$7.4 million for CloudSwitch, Which Aims to Make Cloud Computing Safe for the Enterprise:
Cloud Computing! Can't get much more hype-compliant than that. Unless, of course, they're talking about a Web 2.0 offering that works seamlessly atop SOA. Oh, wait, the post goes on to say the founders got the idea from looking at Amazon's Web Services and that they're trying to figure out how to manage services in the cloud. Sounds like SOA over Web 2.0!
So maybe there's still some life around here.
Not impressed with the
Not impressed with the article.
"California being a better place to raise a kid than Cambridge"
See, that's just so ridiculous to me. He left Cambridge for Palo Alto...but there are plenty of bland suburban towns around Boston just like Palo Alto. (And probably with far better public schools)
You can stay in Massachusetts without raising a family in Boston or Cambridge. Though, I see nothing wrong with raising a family in an urban environment.
Families in Cambridge
I wish more people would raise families in Cambridge. Seeing a father out walking and doing stuff with his young kids here is unusual enough as to be noticeable.
Boggles the mind
What's wrong with raising a child in Cambridge? I wish I were rich enough; I have to content myself with a cheaper neighborhood.
In Cambridge, your kid could grow up playing RPGs with MIT students, rollerblading on Mem Drive on Sundays, seeing movies at Kendall and the Brattle. He wouldn't need to be driven everywhere in order to have fun. What could possibly be a shortcoming of growing up in such an active, stimulating environment?
I guess if at heart you're a suburban type who wants a gated drive-in drive-out lifestyle, and Stranger Danger is an abiding preoccupation, then you might want to live in suburban California instead of Cambridge. Maybe Mr. Graham is suffering from new-parent panic and Palo Alto seem safer for his little snowflake.
The weather might be a plus, because kids can go outside to play more of the year. On the other hand, 12 months of bad sledding. Do children even play outside in Palo Alto? Or are they all hyper-scheduled and taxied around? I'd guess the question of whether he moves to a crowded block with a park and lots of kids or to a super-rich, quiet area with big lawns tended by wetbacks will make more difference to the kids. I'm betting it's the latter.
um
For the record... I think that slang you slipped in at the end is considered offensive by many.
I'd normally email someone about this privately, so they'd have a chance to change it if they want, but this message was posted anonymously.
Mojaditos
Oh, excuse me. I meant paperwork-challenged Nouveau Americans. You know, like the ones on Mitt's lawn.
All better now!
Ain't it grand how changing the words you use makes problems disappear? I call it
Grammagic!
I'm sure we can work out a
I'm sure we can work out a compromise between the extremes of ethnic slur and over-the-top mock PC.
For That Matter...
... I could live without the "snowflake", but I'm just a white guy.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Fight Club
That was my favorite bit in the film. :)
Get over yourself.
You need to get over the urban vs suburban defense mechanism and yourself. Step off the high horse for a second. Your full of emotion, with no facts, but plenty of hyperbole and clearly have never visited or lived in the Bay Area.
"I guess if at heart you're a suburban type who wants a gated drive-in drive-out lifestyle, and Stranger Danger is an abiding preoccupation, then you might want to live in suburban California instead of Cambridge."
No kidding!
What exactly is the basis for his claim? I grew up in California, and am raising three kids in Boston. I'm rather impressed by the small class sizes offered by BPS. My kids have about 20 fellow students typically, whereas I usually was in classes with 35 or more. California public education is a funding basket case.
I really know nothing about this guy, but I'm extremely suspicious of his claimed basis for moving. It is most likely something else, far more personal, that he is reluctant to admit.
I Can Believe He Thinks That
I could easily see someone thinking that Palo Alto is a better place to raise kids than Newton is, whether or not that is actually rational given their beliefs about what qualities of a locale are good for kids.
Palo Alto has two of the top
Palo Alto has two of the top public high schools in the country: Gunn and Paly High. There are no public schools in Mass that would be considered "far better" by any stretch of the imagination.
Sure there are
I'll put Boston Latin up against those schools. 'Course, that would've required Mr. Coolio Startup Dude to actually live in Boston, which I gather he would have found rather distasteful, given that most Bostonians are not given to coding in the buff.
Coding in the Buff
Though it was hot when Doonebury's Kim did it:
http://lycheetime.blogspot.com/2006/10/doonesbury-...
(You might have to view the image file directly to see the fourth panel.)
Let them go
Here's why.
http://www.greatamericanjobsscam.com/
I moved from Boston to the
I moved from Boston to the Bay Area a year ago for work, and sadly it is true that the tech industry opportunities are a lot better here nowadays. Boston just never recovered after the dot com bust of the early 2000s. It's sad but almost everywhere I go around here I see/meet people who lived in Boston 5-10 years ago, even just walking down the street. It's like everyone got up and shifted.
Also, the commenters criticizing Palo Alto don't seem to know much about it. The local comparison would be Newton; it's an upper end, older suburb with a large, walkable downtown, hundreds of restaurants, and Stanford University. It has a top-tier public school system and is a fairly gorgeous place through and through; the catch of course is that you'll spend a fortune to live there (average home price is around $1.3m). Whatever your feelings about suburbs, Palo Alto would probably be a fairly exceptional place to grow up, especially since it's just urban enough to not feel isolating. It's definitely not a cookie-cutter mcmansion suburb.
Not Criticizing Palo Alto
Actually I'm quite familiar with Palo Alto -- two brothers and an uncle live in that area. The point is not to say that Palo Alto isn't a fine choice, but rather to say that it is an objectively odd statement to claim that California offers better child rearing options than Massachusetts. He need not stay in Cambridge if he wants a Newton. But there is already a Newton in Massachusetts. So what is he really saying?
Yeah, I agree with this
Yeah, I agree with this actually. Personally I think the Boston area and the Bay Area are two of the best places to raise kids in general. Relatively safe, plenty of culture, a good amount of diversity, and decent schools. I wouldn't say that the two are that far apart if you start comparing to other cities and regions of the US.