Sunday, January 06, 2008
Why Silicon Valley and not Cambridge ?
With Stanford fueling the entrepreneurial spirit in Silicon Valley, leading to Sun, Yahoo, Google etc, I've always wondered why the MIT-Harvard duo didnot really make a bigger impact. MIT being the top Univ for technology and Harvard the top Univ for Business et al, should have transformed Cambridge as the home of Tech entrepreneurs. How did it miss out ??
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My theory for the revolving-door nature for Cambridge/Boston educational institutions is that people are drawn to the area purely for the education--Harvard, MIT, BC, BU, etc.--and the associated cachet. I've worked with both high school and college kids in the area. They come here from all over the country because these are the best schools they can get into, thinking that if they brave through four years (and four winters) they'll go back home and get back to their regularly-scheduled lives. They come purely for school and never really explore the cities around them. They never give serious consideration to come to a school and stay there afterwards.
An ancillary theory is that since Boston and its schools aren't very car friendly--and most of the students are--it's hard for them to think of school as other than this separate, temporary reality.
The West Coast, on the other hand, is more "livable" in relation to your typical suburban upbringing. It's an easier transition to go from being raised in suburbs to going to school in suburbs or flat, low-density cities, and then to work in suburbs.
New York is, as always, a total exception. It has the allure of a pure destination, particularly after graduation.
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