the Onda

I first met Scott Kirsner back in 2001 when he wrote a column about Memora, a company my brother and I had started at the intersection of consumer technology and broadband infrastructure. I liked Scott because of how much he seemed to "get" what we were trying to do, and how far ahead of other journalists he was willing to see. Naturally I was disappointed when he moved west and subsequently glad to see that he's come back, though this morning's Sunday Boston Globe article on how we're just continuing to miss the consumer tech opportunities here on the east coast rankled me a bit. It reminded me of Mike Arrington referring to Boston as a backwater, and even more so, of all of the folks I would meet on the west coast while traveling for Tabblo that argued for moving the entire company out there.

For the record, right before starting Tabblo I almost pulled up stakes and headed to the west coast for most of the reasons given in Kirsner's piece. That I stayed is a tribute to two things: my faith in the depth of the Boston-based engineering talent that I'd been building into my network, and the good efforts of the folks at Matrix who single-handedly funded the plan with little more than a concept, me, and a sales pitch. Which is not to say that it was not a painful process to make the financing happen: it took a lot of education and hard thinking on both of our parts to come to the conclusion that there was a viable, scalable, and ultimately defensible business model in what Tabblo was going to do. But when after just under two years, HP came knocking, I was very glad that we had done the hard work up front and that we had the depth and breadth we needed on the team.

Scott is certainly right about one thing— starting funded consumer Internet "Hail Mary" businesses in Boston is pretty nearly impossible. There is no VC in Boston that I know who would have funded YouTube, and for good reasons too; namely, cost structure and copyright. But those Hail Mary plans rarely succeed and for every YouTube, we've got several Napsters to prove the counterpoint. Instead, we've got the less sexy but more fundamental consumer Internet businesses here: Zipcar, Kayak (ok, in CT), and TripAdvisor to name a few. I know folks at all of these companies and they all share an incredibly analytical view towards what is happening on the "Internet as distribution channel" which is simply not a part of what I know of the west coast ethos.

I certainly do not mean to knock the swing-for-the-fences mentality of the west coast, and as an entrepreneur, I would certainly kill for the recruiting efficiency of being able to drive down to Google or Apple for some talent. To boot, we've still got a lot of Digital/Lotus detritus to clear out of of the VC pipelines before we can really adequately fund the new opportunities the Internet presents with the proper teams of folks. But give us time Scott— don't lose faith quite yet!

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