Some of SV's biggest tech companies and institutions started in Boston. Reddit was in Davis, Drew started Dropbox while he was still at Bit9, Zuckerberg was in his Harvard dorm with staff meetings at Pinocchio's pizza. Hell I used to live next to the original YC office in Cambridge.
The talent exodus and missed deals was a huge wake-up call for Boston VC's to take more risk, and I think we're finally seeing the results.
It was almost as if PG and Jessica set out to prove the Boston/NYC status quo of VC wrong. If you wanted funding around here pre-2005, you had to be an experienced exec w/ a strong team of MBA's and senior engineers. Once YC + FB left and saw huge success, there was a scramble to figure out what went wrong.
Check out this meetup that a local VC set up back in 2005 [1]. Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Reddit's co-founders (Along with many other notables!) attended. All of them left for the West Coast.
The talent exodus and missed deals was a huge wake-up call for Boston VC's to take more risk, and I think we're finally seeing the results.