You think that the brilliant minds and VCs are only here on the West Coast. The issue is the VCs, not the talent. All it takes is a couple of VCs moving to Boston, weather be damned, and the talent–and there’s a lot of it–there are 40+ colleges, and MIT is 1/3 EE/CS graduates with a lot of people from other majors becoming software engineers anyways. Plenty of CEO/CFOs there too.
We’ve had friends come to CA and go back because of housing/family, and I have one friend who is a CEO/founder who intends to move back after his company goes public.
How many VCs does it take to say “f- it” to CA to get Boston’s startup scene going hot? That’s the question.
Also, note that many of the major companies here have a presence in Boston. Why bother if there isn’t talent there that they can’t get here? Google, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle.
Boston has other issues besides the weather.
Locally known as Massholes. They are just not very optimistic or friendly. Maybe it is the inferiority complex vis a vis NYC… My dad is from there. Could not wait to escape 70 years ago. I have a bunch of relatives there. None make a effort to talk to the California side of the family. The whole east coast has issues. Atlanta is a much more progressive place.
Boston might have a problem of over education. Too many scholars and professors make the city short of the entrepreneurship which requires certain level of ignorance. Too much knowledge can make people stay on a state of no decision, no action and over analysis. That’s called paralysis.
Enlightening article, please refer the link below to read the full article. Written by someone at Stanford University, so please fire all shots in his/her direction.
California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent.
In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 – a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.
In sum, California has no margin for error.
Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.
No more. Californians may have once derided the state’s 1 percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.
That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.
Easy to solve. Do away with prop 13. And up the highest state tax rate to 20%. Most of those 1%ers are in SFBA, they can’t leave their high paying jobs
It’s time for the middle class and the poor to pay tax in that case. Increase gas tax by 10x, increase sales tax by 3x. That would do wonders to limit government spending. Yellow Vest will level Sacramento
