Prompt's Blog

Prompt's Boston office is part of the fantastic Cambridge Innovation Center. In addition to the fully-stocked kitchens and the free bike share program, the CIC hosts over 175 start-ups and emerging companies, the largest collection of start-ups on the East Coast. We know we're surrounded by innovation within our building, a Silicon Valley in miniature, but the same is true outside the CIC walls.

The Boston Globe's Scott Kirsner recently posted his Red Line Tour of Innovation in Boston, mapping out all the places that make this subway line an epicenter of innovation. Kirsner lays out all of the places where innovators work, meet, and inspire, and more importantly, where visitors can see and experience it.

Near (or rather, on top of) the Harvard Square stop is the Out of Town News, where Paul Allen read the Popular Electronics article that inspired him to invest his future in computers (and convinced Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard).

A stop over at Central Square, you can find the Novartis research lab, where the Swiss company develops cancer treatments (as well as the always delightful Toscanini's).

Our Kendall Square backyard plays host to the MIT Media Lab, the Broad Institute DNAtrium, and the Akamai Network Operations Command Center.

Check out Kirsner's annotated map and the accompanying article and start exploring.

Labels: Cambridge, innovation, Kendall Square

Prompt Boston has settled in to the Cambridge Innovation Center, which the team here loves: we feel very welcomed, are excited. From our home on the 11th and 14th floors, we overlook the Charles River and have a great view of it and the sailboats floating by, with the skyscrapers of the financial district in the background. Also directly below us is the MIT campus, and we’re in the same building that Google began its Boston operations, and are housed amongst the likes of Linden Labs. The CIC even wrote a nice piece about us.

Remember to follow us on Twitter @promptboston to hear about how we’re settling in. Oh, and our new address for anyone who wants to send us housewarming cards, presents, etc. is One Broadway, Floor 14, Kendall Square, Cambridge MA, 02142. Just label them for the attention of ‘Mr. Gerber’.

Labels: Cambridge, Cambridge Innovation Center, MIT

Today, Greylock Venture Partners, a major early-stage VC firm, announced that it was moving its headquarters from Boston to the Bay Area. Its headquarters had been located in Waltham, MA, just a short (well, 30 minute without traffic) drive from Boston on 95. Being a former resident of Waltham myself, I can empathise with anyone wanting to move out. It's not very convenient to the city: there are no T-stops, any morning commute there is painful and there just isn't much around.

Microsoft even, who long dominated the skyline of Waltham's office buildings overlooking the highway, decided to trade in their shimmering transparent Prospect Hill building for granola-and-geeky Cambridge. A surprising amount of tech start-ups are located in Boston, and the epicenter is here in Cambridge, at the intersection of Harvard and MIT, fueled by the people who come out of those institutions with big ideas.

Greylock's new offices will be in Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, CA, and along with it, much of its back-office operations. The Valley has more enterprise software and consumer internet start-ups for them to fund, but the amount of VCs there is oversaturated. There are still plenty of big ideas lying around Boston. Perhaps Greylock didn't need to move all the way out to Silicon Valley, just down the road a little bit.

Labels: Bay Area, Cambridge, Greylock, start-ups, VCs, Waltham