Subscribe to feed
Beautiful Evidence
The Art of the Start
The Bootstrapper's Bible (eBook)
The Business of Software
Guerrilla Marketing
Go Sox
I am an entrepreneur in Boston, and I have more than once had the opportunity - even the encouragement - to take my business and/or personage to another city (usually SF or Austin), usually to secure funding.
In Go West, Young Entrepreneur! Is The Valley Better For Software Startups? Dharmesh Shah discusses this idea:
As for the entrepreneurs themselves, I think many of them are not understanding the reality of the mindset here. Sure, you might have a game-changing, paradigm-shifting, belief-shattering idea for a consumer Internet play. But, you’re going to spend a couple of months finding the right people to talk to, another couple of months educating these right people and the last couple of months (if you make it that far) convincing them to invest. At the risk of alienating a lot of the people I know in the investment community (and even a few entrepreneurs), I’ll give you my sound-bite: Many software entrepreneurs may be better off moving to the west coast than dealing with the pain of trying to get funded on the east coast. There, I said it. I’m going to walk around for a little while now because I feel so traitorous. … pause… As much as I hated to do it, I think it needed to be said.
I agree - it’s hard to play by SF rules when playing in Boston. And it gets worse. Because we are 3000 miles away from the Valley, there is a perception that we can do “that, but in Boston.” It gets worse when we have parallel development, where something in the Valley and something in Boston are developed at the same time. Often the Californian effort will be better funded too, and so the Boston company, originally thinking itself ultra-innovative, starts on the back foot.
To win as entrepreneurs in Boston, we can’t play by SF rules. We need to exploit that which Boston has and SF does not. Use our differences to our advantage. A few things come to mind:
- Access to plentiful student labor (this can really change the cost dynamic)
- Public transportation and a compressed urban setting to get more efficiency out of our staff (much cheaper, shorter commute, especially for the above population)
- Shorter time difference across the pond, improving our ability to work with European markets
- Underwriting by multiple universities to bring down the brick and beam costs
- Large old money community that is itching to “be like those guys in California”
- Closer access to healthcare, financial, and other markets that are less sexy than media, but much larger and (potentially) more profitable.
Venture funded media company? Go west, young man. Looking to be different, take a strategic leap, go vertical, sell B-2-B? Welcome to the Hub.
The Sox can’t outspend the Yankees, so we have to be more strategic and fellow Eli Theo Epstein had to implement a different management plan to to succeed. That’s how we won the World Series, and a similar difference in tack will win for our entrepreneurs.