Yesterday Doug Banks of Mass High Tech posted a great response to the Greylock leaving Boston autopsy found on Xconomy.  Suffice it to say, there's plenty of debate over the health of Boston's entrepreneur ecosystem and many are tired of the Silicon Valley vs. Boston debate and hate.  As Doug Banks wrote, "Does New England still have work to do? Of course we do." I totally agree, which is why I'd like to highlight 3 things we can do better in Boston.

Starting and growing companies that become or have the potential to become huge, is a goal of several initiatives and members of the entrepreneurial community in the Boston area. The reasoning behind this is the premise that huge companies provide a proving ground and talent resource that feeds the local start-up economy.

 So let's do a little research to observe this effect and see the companies that can be traced back to a local behemoth in our area. Since EMC is the 800 pound gorilla in our woods, that should be a great place to start.

At the Angel Bootcamp last week, Boston investors, aspiring investors, and entrepreneurs had a great opportunity to discuss how to improve the ecosystem for early-stage companies in Boston. One of the most powerful suggestions came from Jean Hammond, who said that we need to do a better job of mixing together investors and entrepreneurs.
 
We saw last week that there is no shortage of angel investors in Boston, and there definitely are plenty of entrepreneurs looking to connect with them. How can we make it so that more of these connections get made in Boston? Essentially, as Jean said, we need more startup parties. 
 
She’s right, but even more important, we need to make sure that the startup parties that we already have are helping the ecosystem. To do that, we need to work together to overcome the culture of secrecy that divides us, keeps us from meeting each other, and makes our startup culture weaker.

Entrepreneurship is cool again. HBO has a TV show. Government is embracing it on the city, state and national stages.  Colleges are launching new programs to further embrace entrepreneurship and to help their students create new businesses. The final frontier is upon us now: High School students.  As we reach down to them to excite them about startups, let's do the right thing: Encourage them to get technical degrees in College.

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve highlighted initiatives underway by members of the Boston entrepreneur community trying to make this a better place to start a company. These solution are coming from people both young and old and everything in between.  I’m excited for these efforts and believe they will all contribute to an improved ecosystem, but there is more to be done. I’d like to highlight some issues that still need work:

 Last week I wrote about how young entrepreneurs are working to solve many of the challenges and shortcomings in the community.  We’re not the only ones working hard on these issues, so I'd like to highlight some of those problems and those finding solutions for them:

There are many challenges facing the startup community, especially for young entrepreneurs. It would be easy to sit around and complain about the status quo, but many of us are working towards solutions.  I'd like to highlight some of those problems and those finding solutions for them:

In all the discussions about changing the culture in Massachusetts to better promote a healthy entrepreneur ecosystem, a major player has been consistently ignored: Large Corporations.  The role of these organizations on local economies is obvious, and yet when considering how to help startups, they're often forgotten.

Why are some metropolitan areas so much more entrepreneurial than others?  Silicon Valley seems almost magically entrepreneurial with a new startup on every street corner, but in declining Rust Belt cities such start-ups are far and few between. 
 

As the Boston entrepreneurial community works to fix many of it's issues that have been identified recently, one of the early and important changes are mindsets.  Often, the most important early step in bringing about change is to change how you look at an issue.  I'd like to change one of those mindsets here.