As a Bostonian, I’d blame Bain capital and other east coast VC firms for the current state of the Boston tech scene. Firms largely lacked growth capital unless they adopted thesis driven strategies such as velocity sales. Chasing scale through cheap talent and cheap products doesn't really work in tech.
The winning employee strategy was to pivot into either SV based firms or biotech about a decade ago.
The non-competes don't help either, but that's more of a symptom of the observations you have (and I +1 them). There are a couple promising Boston area tech startups I've been following, but it is definetly a much weaker ecosystem compared to even 15 years ago.
The decline of Dell+EMC, Akamai, and VMWare+CarbonBlack also seemed to have play a role.
That said, there are good Boston area VCs like General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Fidelity Ventures, but at this point they've all basically moved to concentrate on identifying talent at Harvard+MIT who were already going to move West or to NYC.
I hoped Klaviyo would have had a significant impact, but it seemed fairly muted for the size of exit it was. Same with it's ancestor Hubspot.
You can add trip advisor, wayfair, kayak, and others to that list. There is probably a bias at this point that experienced employees who are good are unlikely to work for the prevailing wages at these companies unless they are unable to earn more at west coast firms.
I'm not denying that there are smart engineers and PMs at Akamai - especially those who were at the building stage of the company.
What I'm saying is you don't see the same kind of circulation between established companies, founding your own company, working for a startup, and/or becoming an Angel or VC like you would in the West Coast or increasingly in the NYC scene.
I feel like startup culture changed a lot after like 2011ish. Risk tolerance isn't really there among the employees anymore, but that's fine because early stage employees aren't getting compensated appropriately anymore anyway.
I felt like I got into this for the promise that coworkers would start new businesses and there would be all of this opportunity and none of that has materialized.
Granted, I worked with Tom Lehman before he founded Genius, but that's a pretty singular case. And another coworker from that job founded a chain of kickboxing gyms. I guess I have loads of ex coworkers who founded crypto scam shit over the years though, but the vast majority of people just moved up corporate ladders.
Maybe things would be different if I worked in SV, but my experience with tech in NY/DC has generally been that it's dominated by an extremely risk-averse group of the silver-spoon class on one side and get rich quick schemers on the other.
In the 2000s startup workers tended to do better financially and be better than their peers at large firms such as HP, Delll, Cisco and others. Even discounting equity, the compensation was higher. These individuals went on to start firms using the experience and money that they acquired.
If you contrast this with modern tech workers, while you can get the experience in multiple ways - you can only get the compensation at large firms. Few startups pay well enough to give employees financial freedom.
Add to this, many “startups” are simply small businesses that are pretending to grow and be tech focused.
> my experience with tech in NY/DC has generally been that it's dominated by an extremely risk-averse group of the silver-spoon class on one side and get rich quick schemers on the other
I'd agree to a certain extent with regards to the East Coast tech scene. It definetly feels much more immature than what you would see out West (Seattle and Austin have startup scenes similar in operational mindset to the Bay Area/SV scene).
The winning employee strategy was to pivot into either SV based firms or biotech about a decade ago.