Boston tech is back, baby.
We might not be Silicon Valley, but who cares? The Boston area has incredible amounts of technical talent, business expertise, capital, culture, and new ideas. Over the past few years, those pieces of the innovation community seem to have meshed together into a more unified whole.
There are a whole host of reasons: a better-connected entrepreneurial community, more focus on startups, new education and accelerator programs, and more mentorship and networking at all levels of the business ladder. But mostly it’s just good old-fashioned hard work.
OK, so Boston lost its mojo after the heyday of DEC, Wang, and Route 128 (still awesome traffic, by the way). Giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Oracle, Twitter, and Microsoft aren’t based here—but they are here (or coming) in some form.
We still have powerhouse schools like MIT and Harvard; anchor public companies like EMC, iRobot, and TripAdvisor; and tier-one venture firms.
It’s more realistic now to ask: How can New England tech companies truly lead the world? Which fields and firms are the most promising? How can they succeed without getting bought out or moving west?
And so XSITE 2013, our fifth annual flagship conference, is dedicated to “Boston’s Tech Revival.” It’s all going down on Wednesday, June 19, at Babson College. We have started by identifying New England’s tech strengths to build around: education, healthtech, big data, marketing, security, hardware, robotics, e-commerce, and mobile software. (That’s a lot, but we can handle it.) And we’ve identified leaders in each of those fields.
Now I’m looking for themes and stories that you want to hear about. Things like how to get distribution as a startup; how to manage growth from angel rounds to VC; how to create a new market, or compete in an existing market, and get the timing right.
And, oh yeah, what playing on the famed MIT blackjack team has taught its alumni about bootstrapping and building companies (that will be a special panel). We want this day to be a rallying point for the New England innovation community.
I am working on the day’s program, but so far we have some notable speakers confirmed, including:
—Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai
—Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Xamarin
—Wayne Chang, Co-Founder of Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter)
—Jean Hammond, Co-Founder of LearnLaunch
—Diane Hessan, CEO of Communispace (acquired by Omnicom)
—Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio
—Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu
—Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent (acquired by Dunnhumby)
—David Berry, Partner, Flagship Ventures
—Bob Brennan, CEO of Veracode
—Neelan Choksi, President of Tasktop Technologies
—Semyon Dukach, Angel Investor
—Bob Frankston, Member of CommonAngels (co-creator of VisiCalc)
—Bill Kaplan, CEO of FreshAddress
—Roy Rodenstein, CEO of TrueLens
—Scott Savitz, Managing Partner, Data Point Capital
We are looking forward to seeing everyone June 19. Be ready.
