I just attended a wonderful brunch at the Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill, welcoming Scott Kirsner, the Boston Globe, back to Beantown. Hosted by Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software, the entertainment portion of the event was a fireside chat with Scott, including questions from the audience. (Check on Dan Bricklin’s podcast log when he posts the session).

    - Update 9/11: Please look at Chris Herot’s blog too!

Scott challenged the crowd with the (it’s getting old by now) argument that Boston is falling farther and farther behind Silicon Valley, punctuated by his recent article on my hometown’s failure to retain Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, when we had the chance. I agree with nearly everything Scott says about Boston’s shortcomings, and I have to admit I was feeling a bit defensive about the area’s VC firms and our role in this situation.

Let’s face the facts. We are not silicon valley, we never have been and never will be. The Red Sox eventually won the World Series (hopefully again this year),but the tech economy is not the pennant race and Silicon Valley is not the Yankees. There is a volume and scale out there that we just don’t have and personally I am sick of looking in the rearview mirror for the multitude of historical reasons; let’s collectively agree that every of them is correct. Facebook didn’t happen in Boston. But EMC, Akamai, Genzyme, Netezza, Equalogic and a host of other world class companies did.

Instead of lamenting about what could have been, should of been, blah blah blah, let’s try to find ways we can be better. Forget about being as good as Silicon Valley; it just doesn’t matter. How about we concentrate on being as good as we can be?

I have a simple 3 step plan to fix everything (ha!).

1. 1.VC firms need to be risk takers again.  At the most basic level, venture capitalists raise money to take risks on innovative ideas - not to play it safe. IMO, we have largely been playing it safe since in Boston, if not forever, certainly since the bubble burst in 2000. There are signs this is changing - I am really excited by the ongoing efforts by General Catalyst, Spark, Highland and, self-servingly IDG Ventures Boston to break the myth that Boston doesn’t do consumer. We need more of it. We can’t get a hit if we don’t take any swings.
   

2. 
   

2. 2.Entrepreneurs need to be innovators. Enough of the hot box, social networking meets video blogging meets del.icio.us, and new new new enterprise information security application.  We need original thought, and I don’t think it necessarily has to come from a group of caffeinated  sophomores at BU - though I admit it often will!
   

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3. 3.We need an ongoing set of forums for widespread dialog to enable #1 and #2. Scott described this concept this morning over brunch and it is so absolutely on point. VC firms, law firms, big companies, geeks at large - please unite and host breakfasts, cocktail parties, cotillions, coronations - whatever it takes. And for g-dsakes, when we get together TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE DOING! Silicon Valley works in large part because the ecosystem is open and many exchanges of ideas occur in real time. We’ll do our part at IDG and know that others will as well.
   

Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, commented in Kirsner’s article, "So many of the Facebook employees have come from top Internet companies like Yahoo, eBay, and Google that the culture that has been built at Facebook is fundamentally more consumer Internet savvy than if it would've been built anywhere else on the planet" Who cares. I can’t invest my fund’s money in Facebook, so I don’t care. I want to find the next Facebook and the one after that, and so on and so on. Whine if you want to, I don’t have the time.