Yesterday Doug Banks of Mass High Tech posted a great response to the Greylock leaving Boston autopsy found on Xconomy.  Suffice it to say, there's plenty of debate over the health of Boston's entrepreneur ecosystem and many are tired of the Silicon Valley vs. Boston debate and hate.  As Doug Banks wrote, "Does New England still have work to do? Of course we do." I totally agree, which is why I'd like to highlight 3 things we can do better in Boston.

3 Things We Can Do Better in Boston

1) More Learning Opportunities

They say MBAs are dead and that the best way to learn is by doing, but "they" may forget the pain and challenges of trying to do something the first time;  there's a fine line between "not knowing any better" leading to bold ideas and spinning your tires and wasting energy.

At oneforty, I have the amazing luxury of connections to Laura's impressive network which has led to phone calls and meetings with experienced startupers who have given invaluable feedback and best practices as I focus on oneforty's customer development and metrics.  While the time I've spent on my own has been valuable and led to some great progress, the conversations with these startupers has had a huge impact as they've helped me avoid quagmires like over-analysis and too much focus on raw numbers (and not enough on ratios).

So where do you get more learning opportunities? At events.  Many events have panel discussions or other educational information, but they often deliver little more content than your average blog post.  It's only at exceptional events like the Momentum Summit, MassChallenge's Hiring event with Paul English and the monthly Lean Startups Meetup (check out David Cancel's awesome slides from last Thursday) that you can walk away with numerous ideas that you can immediately apply to your startup. 

Bottom line: Networking events are great, and we certainly have a lot of them, but a few more that focus more on teaching what entrepreneurs in our ecosystem need to learn to succeed would benefit everyone.

2) Engage Students

You've probably heard this somewhere before and yes, there are many people working on this question from the state to MITX to right here at Greenhorn Connect. Our greatest advantage over any other place in the world is our students.  One third of the population are students and they're often talented and hungry; they just don't know they could contribute to the startup ecosystem.

Not sure what to do? Well, we've written about it before, so here's what we recommend:

-> How New England's Startup Ecosystem Can Improve it's Retention of Students in 5 Easy Steps

and we went straight to the students and asked them what's working, what's not and how they'd improve engagement with students:

-> Straight from the Source: What Students Said in the Startup Survey Part I - Themes

-> Straight from the Source: What Students Said in the Startup Survey Part II- Barriers and Proposed Solutions

Bottom Line: Every year is another opportunity to leverage a new influx of amazing talent. Let's not let the talent graduate without at least knowing what they could be a part of, or, even better, making them feel wanted and given real opportunities. 

3) More Thought Leadership

A handful of great local entrepreneurs have stood up to trumpet both the good things happening in Boston and ways we need to improve. I'm specifically thinking about all the things Bill Warner has done with his Build a Startup From the Heart talks and his many posts on his blog as well as Jeff Bussgang with his What Make's Boston's Startup Scene Special. David Cancel also has done a great job of late with his striking presentation at Angel Bootcamp. The point is though, we need more of this.

One of the striking things in the Greylock interview and in Doug Banks response post were the mention of the great consumer companies that are in Silicon Valley; we have great companies here too, but they seem to make less noise. Our local ecosystem should be better aware of of these companies and have opportunities to learn from them at events like the Momentum Summit. 

When respected and well known members of the community speak up, people listen. We need to leverage this when we need to make change and inspire people.  

We also need to be more open about successes; one of the interesting challenges I've encountered recently is understanding who has been most successful in implementing lean startups and customer development methodology in Boston.  Whether searching for people to talk to for my work at oneforty or talking with John Prendergast about who the next speaker will be at the Lean Startups meetup, it seems to be a major challenge identifying experts.  Think about your startup and the key areas you have questions in. Can you name 5 experts in Boston you'd want to talk to? I bet they exist, but we don't do a good job of highlighting them.  

Bottom Line: The strength and value of an ecosystem lies in the collective voice and mind that forms through communication across the community.  We're not leveraging the full strength of our region, because we're not surfacing enough of our knowledge and leaders.

These are issues many of you are aware of, but we still need to improve.  Every startup will be stronger if we are able to accomplish these.

Do you think these are key issues facing our ecosystem? How do you think we can best address them?

Photo Credit: wsuph003 on Flickr