I moved to Boston in the fall of 2008 to work at The Steppingstone Foundation, a local non-profit focused on educational access. Since I was helping to build a new organization within the non-profit, I set out to meet more people in my field and build up my network. This was very difficult since Greenhorn Connect hadn’t been founded yet. Even finding groups of reform-minded educators was not as easy as I had imagined. I eventually stumbled upon Boston Leaders for the Future of Education (BLFE), an organization geared toward young professionals who were mostly educators passionate about public policy reform.

When you start a company, you are usually in one of two camps: a veteran who has worked at multiple startups and knows the monster challenge you're up against OR a first timer who has limited startup experience but an abundance of passion for the idea you want to solve. In both cases, there's always a lot to learn, but for the strength and vitality of an ecosystem, it's particularly important how we handle educating the first timers. 

In trying to decide what to write about today, I found myself torn between a number of topics. None of them jumped out for a full post, so instead, I decided to do shorter thoughts on all three topics.  

In the aftermath of the spat between Kirsner and Whadwhatever, it did leave me thinking about what the real challenges in our ecosystem still are and most importantly, what we can do to make it better.

So if you're interested in the topics of Everybody Codes, Startup Ass Kickings and Startup Knowledge sharing, read on...

I've been in the awesome Boston startup community for almost a year and a half now and have learned more than I could hope to measure.  At the same time, I've seen where quotes, and tweets both have a knack for occasionally capturing the essence of a key lesson I have learned.  For this reason, I've compiled a list of some of my favorite tweets, quotes and other brief lessons I have learned during this time...

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.