Once again… rolling start. I showed up at 9:15am (thanks to the friggn’ Redline and Dan Grabowkus) and Karen was sitting with Victor and some new guy so I joined them.
Eventually about 15 people show up so we moved the meeting downstairs.
Albert Park, new associate at IncTank and therefore self-confessed VC, thought that the Boston area needed better co-ordination for the entrepreneurial scene. He thought the current landscape was too fragmented. Jay Neely ( who did yeoman’s work running the schedule grid at BarCampBoston3 with little (ok) absolutely no guidance ) seemed to concur that there seemed to be a need for more “co-ordination.”
We collectively beat up a little bit on Albert by pointing out that there were many recurring meetings in the Boston area that tried to service the needs of budding entreprenuers. Some of the meetings/events include (besides OpenCoffee Boston) Boston Software Startup (started by Shimon Rura and now run by Simon Michael Clay and Ray Deck), WebInnovators ( big mtge almost every other month run by David Beisel ), BarCampBoston (started by Shimon Rura), DevHouseBoston (started be Shimon Rura and now pretty much run by the boys at BetaHouse) and I know that Jay Neely can probably add some more. Dave Thompson was involved in a “Tech Dinner” that met every couple of months and was tres geeky. I personally know of a somewhat secret… invitation only… we just got funded and therefore can afford this very expensive restaurant…. kinda of meeting. On and on.
And there are many more… including the MIT Entreprise Forum, Harvard Law has a regular entrepreneurs mtge, BU used to have a very active group until Michael Rodov quit BU to pay more attention to his startup ( ZepFrog ), Babson has a group, Worcester PolyTech has something… get my point. On and on.
And this doesn’t even mention the cabal that is Paul Graham’s Ycombinator summer program where he actually convinces college age geeks from across the country to come to Cambridge for the summer; code their asses off so they can get angel money by the end of August.
Yes, Albert. You’re probably right. Somebody should at least compile a clickable list of entrepreneurial meetings in the greater Boston area.
The second major theme of the meeting was…. “it’s really tough to do a consumer oriented Web 2.0 startup in Boston because Boston area VC’s are just don’t get it.” Personally, I don’t know anyway to correct this. There are some VC’s in Boston who will do consumer plays. You can count them on one hand. Find out who they are… pitch them, if you can’t convince them… move your operation to the Bay area.
It was a great and fun meeting. It was still going strong when I left around 11:00 am.
Thanks for the update, Mike. One of these days, I hope to make it to a meeting. Wrt a clickable list of events, maybe a entrepreneurship subsection in Marks Guide? Marks Guide http://marksguide.com/ is by far the most comprehensive list that I have come across.
It would be great if you could attend an OpenCoffee since you’re in the thick of things with the startup and launch of Pixily. My initial take on Pixily is that it is a somewhat consumer oriented play… actually probably more targeted to the solo entrepreneur, small biz & professional market. In any case, the group would love to hear your take on the current Boston startup scene.
The Pixily blog is a good read for wannabe entrepreneurs http://blog.pixily.com/blog/ .
Mike – Another interesting point in the VC discussion was around the differences between local VC and west coast VC. It seems that a lot of west coast VC might have a lot of experience with startups (either because they made their money by starting one or they have invested in startups in the past) and are more tolerant (or at least more understanding) of the level of risk involved. Local VC might be more “old money” and evaluate risk around startups in a different way (making them less incline to invest in something they don’t understand as much).
What do you think?
Mike – David Bisceglia will be taking the throne of the BU eClub this fall and reviving it to its former glory. You can contact him at: davidb@bu.edu
On the West Coast vs. East Coast point, finding brilliant engineers and truly sophisticated investors is more or less attune to finding needles in the hay stack. You can do it, but the process won’t scale. Boston is a terrific place to start a great company but not the ideal place to grow a great company.