Feedonomics

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.