Ever heard of Route 128? To my surprise, neither have any of my students at Duke or the entrepreneurs I’ve met in Silicon Valley. I’m surprised because it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center—a cluster of technology companies located along this freeway which partially rings the city. Starting in the 1960s and on through the 1980s, Route 128 was, if anything, more closely associated with tech than Silicon Valley. Today few young technology workers even know where Route 128 is located, let alone its importance in the tech world. Silicon Valley has simply left Boston’s tech center behind.
In the 1980’s the Silicon Valley and Route 128 looked very similar—a mix of large and small tech firms, world class universities, venture capital, and military funding. If you were betting on one you’d have been wise to bet on Route 128 because of its longer industrial history and proximity to a large number of high quality educational institutions (Harvard, Yale, Brown, MIT, Tufts, Amherst) and proximity to Bell Labs and other large corporate research centers. You remember Bell Labs, right? It’s where the transistor was invented. Now, aside from big biotech breakthroughs, Boston is a distant second nationally to Silicon Valley in technology entrepreneurship. So, what happened to Boston?
A young professor at UC-Berkeley wrote a book in 1994 which answers this question. At a time when Boston still thought it was the powerhouse of the tech industry, AnnaLee Saxenian declared Boston the loser in the tech race and explained why it would only fall further behind. This book was titled Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. It kicked off a firestorm of criticism from the Boston elite. Saxenian also alienated friends at her alma mater, MIT.
She noted that Silicon Valley had an amazing dynamism about it. There were extensive professional networks, job hopping was the norm, information was exchanged openly, and the culture encouraged risk taking. The Silicon Valley ecosystem supported entrepreneurial experimentation and collective learning. In other words, Silicon Valley was a very open network—a giant social networking site working in analog before the concept of such a thing even existed.
This organizational mechanism was in sharp contrast to that of Route 128. Dominated by large, vertically integrated, and secretive minicomputer producers such as DEC, Wang, Prime, and Data General. Technology, skill, and know-how were trapped within the boundaries of the large corporations.
The differences were evident at many levels: venture capitalists in Silicon Valley had deep roots in local networks and were far more nimble than their east coast counterparts; educational institutions and research labs in the West partnered with local startups as well as more established firms, while those in the East worked only with the largest corporations; and the meritocratic openness of Silicon Valley made it a magnet for non-traditional talent and immigrants.
By the mid-1990s the east had missed the shift from minicomputers to personal computers as the flexible Silicon Valley ecosystem sped ahead with innovation across a diversifying range of components and systems going from chips, routers, and application software to ecommerce and search engines. Today Silicon Valley is the leading location for cleantech venture activity, an area widely considered to be the next big value creation engine for the U.S. and the world.
Boston, however, is no slouch. The Route 128 community remains the second biggest in the U.S. in terms of venture funds committed. Boston has powerful research institutions, still, and lots of very strong companies. In some areas, such as biotech, Boston may even rival Silicon Valley. But overall, its pretty clear that the Valley has not only won but is racing further ahead.
Most entrepreneurs and engineers that come to Silicon Valley, come to experience this network and to embrace the culture it has created. That’s why I came, too. Network effects don’t just work for fax machines. But then again, most of them knew that intrinsically. University guys like me need to do a bunch of surveys to figure it out. They voted with their hearts and feet.
Note: This is an extract from another piece I wrote for the popular tech blogsite, TechCrunch. You can find the original post here: The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route 128 In The Dust
Yeah, I never really thought that Boston was a major place for tech. Always, people talked about Silicon Valley and how all the “smartest people” worked there and made the best new technology.
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How did Silicon Valley bury Route 128/Boston? It’s next to one of biggest centers for immigration, San Francisco. Lots of bright young Indians, Chinese and Eastern Europeans have been flocking to SV since the late 1960′s. The result? Over 50% of silicon valley firms were founded or co-founded by an immigrant (usually an Indian). 62% of engineering and computer science doctorates are earned by immigrants. Besides founders, you need lots of engineers–tens of thousands of them. Again, most of these engineers are either immigrants or their children. Look at UC Berkeley itself, for example.
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As comparative case studies, Boston vs Silicon Valley is useful in developing a winning strategy, as we understand why one entity fell behind while the other surged ahead.
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Never imagined Boston was once the hub of major tech events. Grew up reading and hearing about Silicon Valley.
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Interesting article, I’ve never heard about Boston. Newspaper headlines are always about Silicon Valley.
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I am glad i can’t stand boston
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Good on Boston though I doubt they really left the valley in the dust;).
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