[baydinalex]

It's seed funding. The seed funding ecosystem is a vortex of death in Boston.

We (Boomerang) moved to San Francisco after going 0/34 with Boston investors. It took less than 30 days to have our full round complete after we got here, and that was in 2010, before the seed market even started to feel frothy.

All the Boston talk about how "a good company can get funded here just as well as it can in San Francisco; they just fund a lot of crappy companies out there" is nonsense. Over half of those 34 Boston investors have paid us for Boomerang.

The ideal company for a Boston tech investor is one gunning to be the #6 company in an already-established market, run by a 45-year-old dude who graduated from HBS then worked for a 55-year-old VC's former company for a few years. If you don't fit that profile, you need to be rich enough to not need funding, you need to have a way to get yourself to $5m in revenue without outside funding, or you need to move.

There were a lot of young, energetic founders working on exciting stuff alongside us back in 2010-2011. I can think of one or two who still are. Some of the rest moved. Most shut down their companies and went to work for a 45-year-old HBS graduate building the 6th most successful company in some already-well-established vertical.