a half-dozen co-working spaces around Boston, including upstarts like Dogpatch Labs, the startup workspace/incubator run by Polaris Venture Partners.
Pierce credits his young career in tech entrepreneurship to computer science classes he took at Harvard Extension School (he was a biochemistry major at Northeastern University), and “sneaking in the door” at Cambridge, MA-based Art Technology Group (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ARTG]]), right as the Internet bubble was imploding in 2000. He has since logged time as a software developer at a number of tech companies, including Maven Networks (before it was acquired by Yahoo) and Eons, before founding Betahouse and helping start The Awesome Foundation. His next steps, which he hasn’t told me about yet, are to focus on some new startup projects.
I asked Pierce what one piece of advice he’d give Boston-area tech entrepreneurs right now. “Be fearless,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to start a company. If you’re doing anything interesting, you’ll have lots of naysayers…It’s important to forge ahead and have confidence. Boston needs to be more confident, I think. We’ve got a lot of talent here.”
And count Pierce as one of the many techies around town who would like to see more angel investors getting involved in starting new companies. Fortunately, that seems to be the way things are heading (and not just around Boston), with more groups of angels and venture capitalists forming early-stage seed funds and the like. Pierce, for his part, has been spearheading grassroots efforts to bring more local angels into the fold, such as the Angel Boot Camp that took place at the beginning of this month.
“It’s great to see this trend of people building on success they’ve had as entrepreneurs, and investing that back into the community,” Pierce says. “Really it’s about building companies…Hopefully we’ll have more and more people moving down into the angel and seed stage.”
