Feedonomics

Yesterday I visited Betahouse in Central Square, Cambridge for an event they called DevHouse. It was basically an open house/hackathon to introduce people to their co-working location for start-ups in the Boston area. It was a nice group of people who have lots of good ideas. What I didn’t see were any other people my age. This is what I usually find at Boston tech events. Yes, there are Boomers who are still involved in tech here, but they almost all identify themselves as angels. That’s fine, but we have plenty of money already in this town. What we need are experienced software guys using that experience to make new software, and new companies along with it. What I suggested to the people at Betahouse is that they create some no payment, entrepreneur in residence positions for old farts like myself. I got back into the game, but it took a full year of blogging to do so. It is hard for people my age to admit that we just don’t have the chops any more to make software. So we dabble with Ruby and build some toy Ajax apps. What we really need to do is work directly with people with current skills on a real project. I eventually decided I needed to do another start-up as a way of getting current.

I’m not saying that the people at Betahouse need an old guy to teach them how to make software. What they would benefit from is watching us learn and change. I went through this with Twitter over the last two months. I started out thinking it was a joke, but have now learned a tremendous amount. Mostly I learned how many of my ways of building software are now wrong for today’s users. I have a completely new perspective on what to build and how to build it. It is not just as simple as fast and frequent releases. The way users today engage with software, or rather don’t engage, is completely different. Anyone who grew up with client based, productivity tools like VisiCalc and 123 has a lot of relearning to do.

I have always had a fondness for the Central Square neighborhood that Betahouse is in. I first went there in 1982 to meet Mitch Kapor in a one room office where he was thinking through what would become 123 and Lotus, one of Boston’s biggest software employers in the Eighties and early Nineties. Lightning struck there 25 years ago. I’d love to see it happen again.

Thanks to Brian Del Vecchio for the invitation. I’ll be back, Brian, and maybe I’ll bring along some other greybeards.

There is a lot of hand-wringing right now about a NY Times article on the Silicon Valley treadmill that keeps even millionaires slaving away. It’s interesting to compare this to a recent Boston Globe article that rightly compared the local tech scene to a ghost town. The real story here is that millionaire baby boomers in the Valley are still creating new companies and new jobs, while their peers in the Boston area aren’t. The Times seems to feel the Valley phenomemon is obviously negative, and solely based on envy for their billionaire neighbors. Why don’t these millionaires stop running? Well, why should they? Why should a fifty year old retire when she can still contribute to society?

I can’t speak authoritatively about the motivations of Valley millionaires, but I do know what goes through the mind of a Boston tech millionaire, because I am one. That’s not an exclusive club. We don’t have many billionaires here, but there are plenty of people who like me cashed out enough during the dotcom to pay off their house, and afford to send their kids to college without taking loans. Does that make me rich? Hardly, but I could afford to live an upper-middle class lifestyle for the rest of my days. So why don’t I retire, like the NY Times suggests?

I tried retiring, but that was deadly dull. Then I tried being an angel investor, and what I saw was roomfuls of people who looked just like me pretending to be financial types when they were really CEOs, CTOs, and COOs. These were the baby boomer entrepreneurs who built Boston into a software powerhouse in the Eighties and captured a fair amount of the dotcom gold in the Nineties. The big difference on the East Coast is that we have lives outside the tech industry. We had kids in high school, and this was our last chance to spend time with them before they left for school. We had other interests that led us to go back to school, or start that restaurant we always wanted. In the Valley, being a software person is what you are, not just what you do. I finally decided that being a software guy is what I am also, and that starting software companies is the only time I really feel alive. I hope my peers come to the same realization, or else this town won’t get back into the software world for a long time. As for me, I’m going to become bi-coastal. I can alternate between living a real life in the East and spending time with people my age who still want to get things done out West.

When I wrote last week that “the business section of the Globe hasn’t caught on to trendy buzzwords like social networking,” it seemed like an exaggeration. Today’s business section had an article on how far behind we are, and said that we were missing out on ’so-called “social networking” tools, like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.’ That’s right. Not only does social networking merit quotes, it is “so-called.” The phrase Web 2.0 doesn’t appear in the text of the article until after the jump, and then it too is in quotes. That’s it. I’m moving to the Valley.