I refer again to the excellent Xconomy with the post Paul Graham on Why Boston Should Worry About Its Future as a Tech Hub—Says Region Focuses On Ideas, Not Startups

I had to react so I posted my own comment on their site, which I copy here:

There is no doubt Paul is right (unfortunately). I do not care about Boston too much but about the ROW. The debate, I think, was definitely closed when AnnaLee Saxenian published Regional Advantage (I think in 94). She had predicted before that SV would suffer from too much activity: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing.” She admits she was wrong at a conference in Stockholm in 1998! So what?

SV is the only place on earth where the right environment for start-ups exists. Read again Paul’s essays on his web site www.paulgraham.com. One important element is that Fairchild gave birth to hundreds of start-ups and this is well documented. The start-up culture emerged at that time. I am so passionate about the subject that I have published my own book and [this] blog (”Start-up, what we may still learn from Silicon Valley”). But if you do not like self-promotion, you may also want to read Junfu Zhang’s extremely detailed work: “High-Tech Start-Ups and Industry Dynamics in Silicon Valley” that you can find online I think and where you will discover the different dynamics at work there (vs. Boston again)…

Boston is by far nb2, no doubt, but we, the nb3 and below, should be worried that even Boston does not manage to compete with SV…