Uncovering the Startup Scene of Boston and San Francisco with Aaltoes
In December 2023, Aaltoes visited Boston and San Francisco to learn about the cities’ thriving startup ecosystems. During the trip, we met with 45 founders, ecosystem players, university faculties, and others in the entrepreneurial scene to learn how the best startups in the world are built. The trip was inspirational and the execution level is definitely different on the other side of the Atlantic.
Overviews of the Startup Scenes in Boston and San Francisco
Boston is a thriving startup scene, its strengths being the concentration of top talent and focus on top-notch research. The city is home to 65 universities including Harvard and MIT. Successful startups often require smart people, students and graduates of top universities are the thriving force for innovation. Startups in the fields of hardware and biotech are especially strong in Boston. If a bomb were to be dropped on Innovation Square, it’s said that over half of the world’s biotech talent would be wiped out. In addition to science-based startups, the recent increase in venture capital has led to more startups developing and staying in Boston rather than leaving for San Francisco.
It’s said that the best startups, Venture Capital funds, and accelerators in the world are concentrated in San Francisco. Out of 5 million people in the Bay Area, 2 million are tech talent, which creates a good environment for startups. Over 20% of venture capital money in the world is concentrated in one neighborhood in Palo Alto. Stanford offers top-tier entrepreneurship programs, attracting entrepreneurial talent to the area. Being the concentration of the most motivated and talented founders in the world, SF provides a unique environment for building companies.
During the trip, we met with founders who lived in their offices. The level of commitment to the startups by founders in SF is something different compared to Finland. The attitude is that whatever you do, it has to convert to growing your business.
Entrepreneurship Education
To learn how the best universities teach entrepreneurship, we visited Stanford and MIT and learned about their entrepreneurship programs.
MIT has various venture programs for different kinds of entrepreneurs. They offer programs for students founding their first companies, topics related to deep tech, and many others.
In teaching, MIT has an emphasis on the academic and practical aspects of entrepreneurship. From their point of view, effective entrepreneurship educators need real-world experience.
“We don’t build companies, we build entrepreneurs”
was the slogan MIT used when describing their entrepreneurship education. It means that even though the students wouldn’t end up entrepreneurs, they would still be more entrepreneurial wherever they go.
At Stanford, we met with an alumnus and teaching assistant at the Mayfield Fellows program. The Mayfield Fellows program is a prestigious, year-long initiative focusing on teaching entrepreneurship, and leadership, including an internship in a startup in Stanford. It’s highly selective, offering only 12 slots annually. The way they manage the application is interesting, as the program alumni are part of deciding the candidates.
The curriculum emphasizes leadership development before entrepreneurship, integrating guest lectures from VCs and founders, and practical case studies. They have visited lecturers quite often and have a super tight-knit community towards the cohort and alumni. Taking an internship during the summer is the core of the program. Participants have to apply for the job themselves but the school helps them a lot. The requirement for the internship is that the candidates have a C-level mentor in the company.
Community building
During the trip, we met many (especially tech) communities. Some quotes of experiences about community building are below.
- When organizing hackathons for the best coders, they have a clear selling point for the participants to attend their events. Cerebral Valley, for example, collaborates with the biggest AI players to get access to the newest APIs and other tools their participants can use.
- Some big tech communities have started by only being a simple google sheet of the most interesting events in the Bay Area
- Community doesn’t scale and you can’t monetize it
- In general, the advice we heard often regarding networking and getting to the right tables was to build interesting stuff and you will get there. Your background doesn’t matter, it’s more about what you have done and what value you can bring to the people around you. “Start being present & do cool shit” and you will get into the circles in SF.
Biotech
In the USA, We also met with many biotech companies, including Andromeda Surgical and Ginko Bioworks.
Andromeda Surgical is a pioneering firm focusing on enhancing AI in robotics for surgical applications. To make surgery more consistent, error-free, and more efficient. By knowing the current trends in healthcare and its regulatory environment the combination of AI and complex surgical robotics and procedures is significant and Andromedical Surgical wants to stay at the forefront of this development.
AI and the healthcare industry are still quite far from being the perfect match (which can be a big challenge, especially for startups), but more and more players in the industry are contributing to the change. However, AI is part of many medical technologies already today and it’s important to understand the implementations and restrictions set by the FDA — e.g. incrementally improving the AI so it’s not too big of a step at once, or training the AI algorithm should be done in batches, not by continuous learning. As Nick, co-founder of Andromeda, said, lobbying is needed to bring AI and healthcare closer together.
Another interesting consideration is the integration of new, advanced technologies with hospitals’ own, usually more outdated ecosystems. The new tech should be compatible with the existing processes without disrupting the ongoing patient care process.
With different countries and medical data, it’s crucial to emphasize the importance of diverse data sets reflecting the different demographics and geographics, since there can be some differences between races, age groups, body weight, etc.
Interesting Quotes From the Trip
Principles of X Moonshot Factory:
Aim big: aim for 10X, not 10% improvement: easier to make something 10 times better rather than making an incremental 10% improvement
Tackle the monkey first: tackle the hardest part of the problem first, helps you learn faster to go after the most challenging part of the problem
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10’000 ways that won’t work.” — Thomas Edison
Other insights:
There is a line between startups and corporations. On the extreme with startups, you have risk and fear. On the extreme with corporations, you have frustration, you might not be getting promoted, work with people you don’t like, etc. You choose what’s better or worse: fear or frustration.
“If you’re building an AI company in the US and you’re not in SF, I don’t think you’re serious.”
It’s not about being the number one, it’s about being the number one by a lot.
“Some founders’ ambition is like the sun, they try to heat everything up. But the best founders narrow it down to a laser beam that narrows it down to a specific niche.”
Good people graduate, great people don’t.
Growth growth growth: building a unicorn startup is about having a 6%+ (preferably 8–10%) weekly growth rate. This isn’t easy, but it’s necessary, and therefore a good detail to take into account if you’re considering whether you really want to found a tech-startup. What this growth means for example is writing and publishing that article TODAY or making that website TODAY instead of it taking a week or, even worse, a month.
Written by Meri Heikkinen & Laura Vettenranta, edited by Patricia Sarkkinen