The article sort of buries the real reason for this: the large amounts of biotech VC funding. Boston is the world-center of biotech startups and VC, and biotech VC funding is on pace to be $15-20B this year. As recently as 2013 __total__ VC activity was just $29B<p>The amount of money being invested (and made) in biotech today, and the level of technological advancement in the field, is disproportionately higher than mainstream awareness of the field
Some of SV's biggest tech companies and institutions started in Boston. Reddit was in Davis, Drew started Dropbox while he was still at Bit9, Zuckerberg was in his Harvard dorm with staff meetings at Pinocchio's pizza. Hell I used to live next to the original YC office in Cambridge.<p>The talent exodus and missed deals was a huge wake-up call for Boston VC's to take more risk, and I think we're finally seeing the results.
Boston has had at least one $1B+ tech IPO (not including bio) every year for the last decade. There have been as many High nine-figure, billion-plus acquisitions in the same period.<p>Boston doesn't get much in the way of national PR, but it's arguably the 2nd best city in tech, measured by liquidity over the last decade, in the country.<p>And not just in boring security/B2B areas. Wayfair is a top 10 ecommerce player. CarGurus has thoroughly beat TrueCar. DraftKings created its category.
Key word being Boston-"area"<p>I think Boston is often taken to be a very large geographic area. For example, PillPack (one of the flagship examples in this article) was actually founded -- and still headquartered I think -- in New Hampshire. But to put that in perspective, Manchester and Nashua New Hampshire (the two largest cities in the state) are both less than an hour drive from Boston.<p>To be fair PullPack does have a Boston presence as well but I feel I need to point it out because I don't think New Hampshire often gets enough credit. It has a disproportionately high tech population for a state its size.<p>I also don't think Boston gets enough credit. The shear amount of innovation and academia happening in Boston and Cambridge, MA is astounding.
As a Boston resident, but former midwesterner, I wish the story was "Midwest competitive with East and West Coast for venture totals". I think it's a real problem that venture capital is highly concentrated in just a few places.
I thought Boston and NY traded back and forth for #2. But looking at the latest MoneyTree report, it doesn't look that way at all (<a href="https://www.pwc.com/us/en/moneytree-report/MoneyTree%20Report%202018%20Q2%20-%20Final_F.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.pwc.com/us/en/moneytree-report/MoneyTree%20Repor...</a>)<p>Now that MT splits out SF and SV differently, you can see a secular split: the (mostly) consumer-facing online businesses in SF (5.6B) and NY (2.8B) take in a lot more money than the more technology-oriented businesses of SV (3.9B) and BOS (3B). I assume that's due to risk profile; wonder what the return rate is?
I'll be curious to see how Boston-area software-developer compensation changes over time.<p>My impression is that dev compensation in SF is higher than in Boston, but SF also has higher property prices AFAICT.
An interesting comparison would be comparison Boston to NYC without WeWork's massive funding. I think that single company has probably distorted NYC VC raise for the last couple of years.
I've been definitely seeing more and more startups popping up (or maybe I hear them in the news more) coming from Boston. But I'm not entirely sure if Tech Crunch's conclusion is sound. You can see from the past five year data graph that NYC's investment is quite high but all of sudden there is a dip this year. Boston-area startups is "overtaking" the pace of NYC not because of a boom in Boston but rather a dull in NYC.