“ If people [in Boston] want to have things that are solid and defensible, that’s good. But you could reframe that slightly, and say that people want things that are certain and safe. Technology is not certain and safe. It involves high risks of failure, and things going wrong. To the extent that that’s culturally not acceptable, you wind up defaulting to things that are safe. The default would be to stay in school, get your PhD, do your post-doctoral work, work at an existing tech company, and spin out a product that is incrementally better and has incremental value. It’s likely that even in the cases where it works, it won’t be radically transformative. That’s my theory on why things have gone wrong in many places, including Boston. I think Silicon Valley is somewhat better on the willingness-to-take-risks dimension. But even Silicon Valley isn’t willing to take enough risks.
