This is true, but making a successful startup requires a lot more than building a quality initial product. Although successful companies can be founded virtually anywhere, the domain knowledge needed to grow and scale a technology startup is concentrated in certain geographies—especially Silicon Valley and San Francisco. In terms of tech entrepreneur social networks and institutional knowledge about investment, growth, scaling, etc., Boston is far behind the Bay Area, and the gap is growing every day.

This is a common enough claim that it could be considered "common knowledge," and I wouldn't be in a good position to refute it even if I could figure out what exactly the claim is.

Is the claim that it takes specific domain knowledge to convince people with money to invest in a business? That it takes specific domain knowledge to scale up a sw/hw infrastructure to handle top-tier web application workloads? That is takes specific domain knowledge to hire teams of engineers?

All of those things are true, of course, but in what way is any of that domain knowledge particularly concentrated in SV or the Bay Area?

The concentration of already-exited former-founders is higher, and that's real, but at the end of the day we're still talking about Software Businesses. Is the problem of converting value-laden software to revenue streams really all that exotic and complicated, such that only people in a particular social network have cracked it?

> the gap is growing every day

Again, a) by what metric, and b) even if true n-1 of the last n days, it's a big world out here and a lot of it writes code and attacks problems.

Cheers-

This might always be the case for East Coast startups. You start a business, you need investors that understand your business.

I hypothesize that if you start a tech business in Boston -- and succeed -- you're more likely to move someplace warmer, or cheaper, or back to your home state (or mother country), or to a place that has lots of startups in your field to invest your money because you understand their business. The East Coast has a lot of great talent. The scale of their new talent cultivation is likely unrivaled even by the Bay Area. It's just that Boston isn't home for many of its most successful.

"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."

We have tons of smart people; everybody knows that. And there’s a kind of a startup culture here. But, like a lot of things about Boston, it is its own thing. Once you leave the Kendall/MIT area of Cambridge or the Innovation District in Boston, you'd never know we had lots of startups in the area. I've been to San Francisco many times; the startup culture is everywhere there.

There’s the lingering feeling of losing Facebook and, more recently, Dropbox and Stripe—one Collision brother attended MIT; the other went to Harvard.

There’s a constant brain drain to other places, particuarly the west coast. I know of people who left Boston for weeks at a time to get funding and engineering talent in San Francisco. There’s quite a bit of that New England financial conservatism compared to the West Coast.

People often underestimate the little things: it’s hard to make friends outside of a startup or academic setting. I hear this constantly from people who are here for school or work, including startups. Even in Cambridge with MIT and Harvard, it’s hard getting real food after 10pm.

Need to stay late on a project? Sorry, public transportation stops at around 12:30 am; the MBTA is threatening to stop commuter rail service at 10pm during the week for those going to the suburbs.

Want to blow off some steam after a long day of pitches, meetings and coding? Massachusetts outlawed happy hour years ago. Most bars and clubs close at 1am in Cambridge and 2am in Boston. How about a six pack at the 7-Eleven? Sorry, we don't do that here. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Boston is my home; I’ll be right here when I do a startup. But it’s going to take a lot of work to get things to where they need to be. We might have to lose another household name before there’s a real sense of urgency about it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_metropolitan_Boston