There is No Bubble in Boston
This is from Nick Bilton, The New York Times‘ tech writer who moved from New York to San Francisco a year ago:
The money here is obscene. The newly minted rich are obsessed with outperforming their rivals. One industry party I attended had a jungle theme. This included a real, 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey that would pose for Instagram photos. A prominent Googler’s Christmas party in Palo Alto had mounds of snow in the yard to round out the festive spirit. It was 70 degrees outside. Sean Parker, a founder of Airtime, threw alavish, $1 million party that included models he hired to roam the room and a performance by Snoop Dogg.
Eat dinner with start-up founders and venture capitalists, and the conversation can quickly shift from industry banter about the latest billion-dollar acquisition to the type of private jet people own.
It’s not like that here in Boston, or at least it doesn’t feel like it to me. And that strikes me as a good thing.
Bilton is writing about the bubble that envelopes the Valley, and I’m proud to say I don’t think such a bubble exists here in Boston, in part because of the diversity of the city’s strengths. I certainly bump into more entrepreneurs than I did in my previous home of D.C., but I also bump into more doctors, nurses, and academics. If LA is movies, D.C. is government, and San Francisco is tech, Boston is some mix of medicine, science, tech and academia.
Perhaps I’m misguided, but I think this diversity helps us. Here’s Bilton again:
This is where a select group in the Valley are oblivious to the rest of the world, ensconced in their own protective bubble. In the rest of America, where the unemployment rate is stuck above 8 percent, people are struggling to cover their mortgages or to find jobs that won’t be replaced by technology or sent overseas. In Silicon Valley, some people are worrying about which multimillion-dollar home they can buy — there are only so many available, after all — or whether their handcrafted jeans subtly signal that the wearer is more attuned to aesthetics, like, say, Steve Jobs was.
I haven’t spent much time in the Valley so perhaps Bilton’s description is unfair. But I think Boston’s prowess in medicine and academics helps buttress against this sort of a bubble. It’s why Boston entrepreneurs take such pride in solving hard problems.
There’s undoubtedly still a lot about Silicon Valley that Boston still needs to work to replicate. But the bubble that Bilton describes isn’t one of them.
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/07/22/there-is-no-bubble-in-boston/