Here's a question that's likely to come up in any conversation about Boston and tech startups: What is Boston good at? As though Boston's collection of forward-thinking minds and stubborn entrepreneurs could be summed up in a kind of a Myers-Briggs test for a city.
These conversations tend to run along similar lines. You'll hear how we're not good at supporting consumer Web startups. It's true: Even Wayfair, the Boston consumer unicorn that reversed the curse of the Zuckerberg, bootstrapped to half a billion in annual revenue before VC's got involved. You'll hear that we are good at solving big problems. You'll also learn Bostonians are not good at tooting our own horn, so nobody knows what we're good at.
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(Here's a link if you can't see the survey, above.)
These generalizations can be helpful. Now that all the easy problems have been solved, we're going to need lots of different approaches to solve the really hard technological problems that are ahead. The most valuable and distinctive approaches will come from communities that understand what's unique about their particular bundle of skills.
Boston's State of Innovation event is coming up next month and we're looking at some of those questions on a series of panels with executives from some of the city's fastest-growing companies. We're also hosting workshops, led by General Assembly, teaching skills from social media to sales.
With those workshops in mind, we're putting a question to the community: If you could teach Boston one skill, what would it be? It could be something as specific as a programming language, or as general as social graces. Just use the poll above to tell us what it is and why you think Boston needs that skill. We'll pick the best answers for a follow-up post on the subject and randomly pick a few respondents for a free ticket to the event.
See you there.
