Jon Pierce

All things considered, Boston’s a pretty great place to do a startup. Its concentration of world class schools pretty much assures us of that. But every day I hear from entrepreneurs frustrated in their efforts to find seed capital here. Now, it’s fair to ask whether that’s more a reflection of Boston being short on seed capital or good startups. The answer, of course, is both. But really, it’s a cycle, and seed capital is a necessary input (talent is another, but we have that in spades, albeit with a few areas of relative deficiency: great designers and product leaders).

With abundant seed capital, entrepreneurs are free to test ideas. Many will fail miserably, to be sure, but a few will succeed gloriously, and with that success will spawn dozens or hundreds more entrepreneurs and angel investors. We’ve seen this play out in Silicon Valley several times over: Google, eBay and PayPal, to name a few. I have no doubt that it can happen here. But for it to happen, we need more abundant - and more risk tolerant - seed capital.

The road from Boston to Silicon Valley is littered with stories of successful companies who might have called Boston home under the right conditions. We all know about Facebook, but more recently, companies like Dropbox, Xobni and WePay were all founded by bright young entrepreneurs educated in Boston. For Boston to be successful, we need to create an environment where companies such as these can succeed here, and while more abundant seed capital might not be a sufficient condition, it is a necessary one.