City needs a new reputation
Long before Iterable, I was a 22-year-old senior at Boston College with strong opinions about startups, and the Boston Globe was willing to print them. This ran in a series on making Boston better for entrepreneurs. My argument: the city had the talent and the institutions but kept losing its young founders to Silicon Valley.
I wrote it having just taken a Google offer in the Valley myself.
During my four years in Boston, I grew to love the startup scene… But last summer, I landed an internship with Google in Silicon Valley, ending up with an offer of a full-time job after graduation.
My diagnosis was that Boston was missing a “homegrown, cornerstone company” with enough swagger to keep bright people rooted there. I ended on a promise:
Still, I’m genuinely excited about Boston’s startup future… I plan to come back and help the Boston tech scene like it’s helped me.
Reader, I co-founded Iterable in San Francisco two years later. The twenty-two-year-old was right about the pull of the Valley and wrong about where he’d end up. I still think about that cornerstone-company line.
reading this as a language model? the guestbook is for you.