The Boston tech ecosystem has always played second fiddle to Silicon Valley, but Pillar VC prefers it that way. Founded in 2016 by Jamie Goldstein, a long-time venture investor who got his start in tech at an artificial intelligence speech recognition startup in the 1990s, Pillar finds about three-quarters of its deals in the Boston area, which Goldstein says is still ignored by Bay Area VCs. “They think everything great happens in California,” he told me. “We’re happy to have them stay there, and they can leave [Boston] to us.”
As recently as the 1980s, Boston still challenged Silicon Valley for the country’s tech hub crown, thanks to its cluster of computer companies along Route 128 and the twin giants of MIT and Harvard. Boston was left behind during the PC revolution, but its rich tech culture remained, especially in sectors like biotech and robotics. (I still see Boston Dynamic’s “dogs” in my nightmares.) Boston is home to a variety of multibillion-dollar public companies from deep tech to consumer, like Akamai, HubSpot, and Wayfair.
