chasing a $100 billion market opportunity can’t be wrong. In the last three years, there’s been $5 billion of acquisitions to purchase big-data companies [in the Boston area]. It’s also the driving force behind a next generation of infrastructure to support this data tsunami at the network, storage, and compute layers.”
Big data will “transform Boston,” Lynch insists. The field “plays into the sweet spot of the Boston tech community,” he says, which values “infrastructure instead of consumer and social networking.”
I could feel Lynch’s blood pressure rising as I pointed out various comments I’ve heard in the tech community that Boston won’t win in big data.
“We’ve seen the enemy and it’s that knucklehead, it’s the person conceding defeat,” Lynch says. That person deserves “an atomic knee drop,” he says (pro wrestling fan?), adding that the reason the Boston area hasn’t owned the last couple of tech revolutions—the PC, the Internet—is precisely “that kind of thinking.”
“This is a jump ball. We can own it if we choose to own it,” he says. “We have the talent, the universities, the venture capital, the angel investors, the presence of vendors. Amazon moved in, Oracle’s here, Google’s here.”
Now it’s up to the community to do the hard work and get it done, he says. “It’s Darwinism. How do you keep the circle of tech life going? Companies are born, they grow, they get consumed or they seed five of their own, and they die.”
