“我开始担心马萨诸塞州了”：波士顿的科技和创新氛围是否正在萎缩？

【中美创新时报2026年1月28日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）波士顿过去二十多年来的优势产业——生命科学领域的投资和就业市场，在过去几年里一直十分糟糕。去年上半年，当地生物科技公司的风险投资下降了17%，降至2017年以来的最低水平。此外，联邦政府削减大学科研经费，也对科学发展和人才留存造成了沉重打击。《波士顿环球报》记者卡拉·米勒对此作了下述报道。

这篇文章发表在 X 网站上，时间刚过新年，正值学校开学和第一个完整 工作周开始前的平静时期。

但这引发了一场风暴，这是著名科技投资者、总部位于剑桥的软件公司 HubSpot 的联合创始人布莱恩·哈利根 (Brian Halligan) 几乎无法预料到的。

“我开始担心马萨诸塞州了，”哈利根在1月2日发帖说。然后，他列出了一系列具体细节。

他指出，“生物科技行业与几年前相比已经发生了翻天覆地的变化”，并提到福布斯人工智能50强榜单（该榜单列出了最热门的私营人工智能公司）中，只有一家位于马萨诸塞州。超过30家位于加利福尼亚州，例如OpenAI和Anthropic，而另一家波士顿地区的公司OpenEvidence最近也迁往了迈阿密，因此只剩下一家：人工智能音乐公司Suno。

哈利根继续说道：联邦拨款削减对本地科研造成了沉重打击。波士顿的生活成本极高。城里很多公寓都空置着。所谓的“百万富翁税”正迫使一些富裕居民迁往佛罗里达州和其他州。更糟糕的是：波士顿对年轻人来说“不够酷”。

谈到科技领域，麻省理工学院校友、风险投资家比拉尔·祖贝里（Bilal Zuberi）表示：“布莱恩说的完全正确。这确实是一个问题。”祖贝里曾在波士顿工作，现在居住在硅谷。

关于本地科技产业衰落的讨论由来已久，但全球人工智能的蓬勃发展（以及生物科技近期的下滑）使这一问题更加凸显。2025年，马萨诸塞州的初创企业共筹集了167亿美元的风险投资，比2024年增长了12% 。但其他州的表现更为出色：加利福尼亚州的增幅高达82%，德克萨斯州也增长了72%，与马萨诸塞州的差距正在缩小。

波士顿过去二十多年来的优势产业——生命科学领域的投资和就业市场，在过去几年里一直十分糟糕。去年上半年，当地生物科技公司的风险投资下降了17%，降至2017年以来的最低水平。此外，联邦政府削减大学科研经费，也对科学发展和人才留存造成了沉重打击。

企业家 威尔·马尼迪斯几乎立刻就看到了哈利根的帖子，这番话深深触动了他。在哈利根于2006年联合创立HubSpot大约十二年后，马尼迪斯在波士顿开始创建ScienceIO。他认为，到了2010年代末，创业环境已经显著恶化。

马尼迪斯喜欢波士顿，但他觉得公司需要更大的人才库才能取得成功。最终，他搬到了纽约，并在2024年以1.4亿美元的价格将ScienceIO出售给了Veradigm。

那一年，纽约州在吸引风险投资方面排名第二，超过了马萨诸塞州。（加利福尼亚州遥遥领先，而且在2025年第四季度，纽约市吸引的投资额几乎是波士顿地区的三倍。）

“如果你正在打造一家企业软件公司——或者任何类型的AI或软件公司——那么这台机器的基本输入就是愿意在数年内高强度工作的工程师，”马尼迪斯指出。

他在波士顿招募这些员工时发现了两个障碍。首先，许多工程师的伴侣是医生，一旦伴侣被分配到较远的医院，他们往往会选择离开。其次，马萨诸塞州有着“极其严格的竞业禁止和禁止招揽政策，这在全国其他地方都找不到”，这意味着离开一家公司的员工很难——或者说很难——迅速地加入一家从事类似工作的公司。（尽管竞业禁止条款已于2018年通过法律进行规范，但在马萨诸塞州仍然有效。）

马尼迪斯认为，我们看到的是波士顿科技生态系统的某种空心化，导致这座城市的人才远少于旧金山或纽约。

“我采访了很多刚从大学毕业的人——都是本地院校的毕业生，”Suno（马萨诸塞州唯一一家入选AI 50强的公司）的首席执行官迈克·舒尔曼说道。“现在比以往任何时候都更甚，人们都渴望搬到纽约和旧金山。”他表示，如果波士顿“真的想成为一个重要的科技中心，那么这个问题就必须解决。”

事实上，马萨诸塞州高科技委员会的一份报告发现，2010 年至 2023 年间，马萨诸塞州大学人工智能相关领域的毕业生中约有 40% 留在了该州，而加利福尼亚州、纽约州和德克萨斯州的同龄人中，估计有 80% 留在了该州。

十年前，舒尔曼认为波士顿是 “科技发展第二好的城市。而现在，我认为它连第三都排不上……我的感觉是它正在衰落。”他认为这种衰落是“可以扭转的”，并且他很感激哈利根“把这件不为人知的事情说了出来”。

“波士顿的创业者会告诉你，波士顿真的不是一个适合创业的地方，”加州风险投资家祖贝里说。“在那里，创业者只有在成功之后才会得到赏识。”

没有高估值的初创企业，波士顿就失去了能够填满办公室（空缺职位给波士顿的预算带来了沉重负担）和促进税收增长（目前，负担落在了房主身上）的公司。

“虽然我理解人们呼吁将波士顿重新打造为一个伟大的科技生态系统——我也很想搬回去，不用再去纽约，”马尼迪斯在1月6日发表于X网站的一篇文章中写道，“但我很难想象剩下的生态系统如何才能不彻底崩溃。”

波士顿风险投资公司First Star Ventures的创始人德鲁·沃尔普则更为乐观，但他深知形势严峻。“我认为，如果我们无法重振雄风，就存在着真正的风险，”沃尔普说道，他同时投资于科技和生物科技领域，“十年后，这里的生物科技产业将所剩无几，不再是世界中心。而且，大多数生物科技项目都将转移到中国或其他地方。”

沃尔普也认为，年轻人越来越难留在波士顿。其他地方的机会往往太有吸引力了（尽管纽约市和旧金山的住房市场竞争更加激烈）。

那么，波士顿究竟能做些什么来重振旗鼓呢？

沃尔普表示：“我认为这个生态系统往往非常看重出身。我们倾向于选择那些毕业于麻省理工或哈佛的创始人，他们包装精美，资历深厚。我认为这反而会造成不利影响。湾区做得好的一点就是不太看重出身。我认为这里有很多才华横溢的人，他们或许没有在哈佛获得博士学位，但他们做出了非常出色的研究，值得拥有一个放手一搏的机会。”

Rich Miner 于 2004 年在剑桥与人共同创立了 Android，并于 2005 年以 5000 万美元的价格将其出售给了 Google。他表示，长期以来人们一直认为东海岸的投资者是“清教徒式的波士顿人”，这使得他们“比西海岸的公司更加保守一些”。

米纳指出，马克·扎克伯格2004年搬到西海岸，反映了当时科技精英们大多集中在128号公路沿线的困境。“对扎克伯格来说，飞到洛根机场再飞往西海岸参加一些风险投资会议，可能比他费尽心思想办法在没有公共交通的情况下到达128号公路沿线要容易得多。而且人们也不会投资他。因为大家会想：‘你这小子干了什么？你可是哈佛毕业的，就搞了个约会软件？算了吧。’”

但身为连续创业者、投资过多家初创公司的迈纳认为，作为科技中心，波士顿在过去20年里似乎并没有“发生实质性的变化”。他相信这座城市正在做很多正确的事情。

不过，他仍然希望改善一项数据：“我们只能留住5%到10%的科技毕业生，而这些人正是那些适合创办初创公司的人。” 他说，为了促进波士顿的科技产业发展，必须提高这一比例。大量的实习机会可以让年轻的求职者“结识人脉，建立关系网，并意识到他们在这里也能筹集到资金。”

祖贝里表示，一些创业者告诉他，波士顿的风险投资公司给他们的报价只有硅谷公司的一半：“波士顿的风险投资家们看到这些报价只会嘲笑他们。”

他指出：“我们拥有一项重要的资源，却完全忽视了它。成千上万的孩子从全国各地，乃至世界各地涌入我们这里。而我们却对他们漠不关心，好像他们根本不存在似的。” 他说，这种忽视涵盖了从社交机会到创业聚会等方方面面。

本月初启动的一项新计划旨在加强该市的科技网络，并计划在 2026 年举办一系列新的线下活动。该计划由波士顿科技公司 Whoop 牵头，并得到了其他公司和州政府的参与，有望让创业者感受到更多支持。

但挑战真实存在且迫在眉睫。虽然波士顿不可能成为硅谷，但任由人才流失、眼睁睁看着后起之秀迁走，并最终面临下一代伟大科技公司——以及大型雇主——将我们远远甩在身后的经济后果，是十分危险的。

题图：从滨河大道望去，剑桥肯德尔广场的建筑倒映在查尔斯河上。（图片来源：Lane Turner/Globe Staff）

附原英文报道：

‘I’m starting to worry about Massachusetts’: Is Boston’s tech and innovation scene withering?

By Kara Miller Globe Correspondent,Updated January 27, 2026

Buildings in Kendall Square in Cambridge are reflected on the Charles River as seen from the Esplanade.Lane Turner/Globe Staff

The post appeared on X just after New Year’s, in those quiet days before schools restarted and the first full workweek began.

But it started a firestorm, one that Brian Halligan — a prominent tech investor and cofounder of Cambridge-based software company HubSpot — could hardly have anticipated.

“I’m starting to worry about Massachusetts,” Halligan posted on Jan. 2. And then came his list of particulars.

“Biotech is way off from a few years ago,” he noted, along with the fact that just one of Forbes’s AI 50 — a list of the hottest, privately held artificial intelligence companies — is based in Massachusetts. More than 30 are in California, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and a second Boston-area company — OpenEvidence — recently decamped to Miami, leaving only one: AI music firm Suno.

Halligan continued: Federal funding cuts have been painful for local research. Boston is super expensive. Plenty of condos in the city stand empty. The so-called millionaires tax is pushing some affluent residents to Florida and other states. And the kicker: Boston is “not ‘cool’ for young folks.”

When it comes to the tech scene, “what Brian is saying is absolutely dead on,” says Bilal Zuberi, an MIT alum and venture capitalist who used to work in Boston but now lives in Silicon Valley. “There’s a real problem.”

The discussion of local tech’s decline has been brewing for years, but the global AI boom (and biotech’s recent dip) has brought it to a head. In 2025, Massachusetts startups raised $16.7 billion in venture capital, a 12 percent increase over 2024. But other states did much better: California’s total jumped 82 percent, and Texas rose 72 percent, closing the gap with Massachusetts.

The investment and job market for life sciences — Boston’s strength for over two decades — has been pretty terrible for the last couple of years. VC funding for local biotechs fell 17 percent in the first half of last year, to the lowest level since 2017. And the federal government’s funding cuts for research at universities has been tough for both science and talent retention.

Entrepreneur Will Manidis saw Halligan’s post almost immediately, and it hit a nerve. About a dozen years after Halligan cofounded HubSpot in 2006, Manidis started building ScienceIO in Boston. By the late 2010s, he argues, the environment for entrepreneurs had substantially deteriorated.

Manidis liked Boston, but he felt he needed a bigger talent pool to help his company succeed. He eventually left for New York and, in 2024, sold ScienceIO to Veradigm for $140 million.

That year, New York ranked above Massachusetts as the second-most-successful state in attracting venture capital funding. (California is ahead by leaps and bounds, and in the fourth quarter of 2025, New York City attracted nearly three times as much funding as the Boston area.)

“If you are building an enterprise software — or really any kind of AI or software — company, the fundamental input to that machine is engineers who are willing to work very intensely for a number of years,” Manidis notes.

And he found two hurdles to recruiting these workers in Boston. First, many engineers had partners who were doctors, and they tended to leave when their partner got matched with a faraway hospital. Second, Massachusetts had “incredibly aggressive non-compete and non-solicitation [policies] that are not mirrored anywhere else in the country,” meaning that workers who left a company couldn’t easily — or quickly — join a company doing similar work. (Though non-competes are now regulated by a 2018 law, they are still enforceable in Massachusetts.)

What we’ve seen, Manidis argues, is a kind of hollowing-out of the Boston tech ecosystem, leaving the city with far less talent than San Francisco or New York.

“ I interview a lot of people coming fresh out of college — from the local schools,” says Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno (the only AI 50 company in Massachusetts). “And more so than ever, people are just dying to move to New York and SF.” He says that if Boston “is serious about being a serious hub for tech, that’s a problem that needs to get fixed.”

Indeed, a report by the Massachusetts High Technology Council found that about 40 percent of graduates from Massachusetts universities between 2010 and 2023 in AI-related fields stayed in the state, versus an estimated 80 percent of their peers in California, New York, and Texas.

A decade ago, Shulman thought Boston was “the second best city for tech. And now I don’t think it’s third. . . . My impression is that it’s in decline.” He believes that decline is “fixable,” and he’s grateful that Halligan “said the quiet part out loud.”

“The entrepreneurs in Boston will tell you that Boston is really not a fun place to build a company,” says Zuberi, the California VC. “Not a place where they’re appreciated until they become successful.”

Not having richly valued startups deprives the city of the sorts of companies that can fill offices (vacancies have proved tough on Boston’s budget) and rev up a tax base (right now, the burden is falling to home owners).

“While I am sympathetic to calls to reclaim Boston as a great technology ecosystem — I would love to move back and not deal with New York,” Manidis wrote in an essay posted to X on Jan. 6, “I struggle to see how the remaining ecosystem doesn’t enter complete free fall.”

Drew Volpe, the founder of Boston venture capital firm First Star Ventures, is more optimistic, but he knows there’s a lot on the line. “ I think there’s a real risk that if we don’t get our mojo back,” said Volpe, who invests in both tech and biotech, that “in a decade there’s very little biotech here, and it’s no longer the center of the world. And that most biotech programs are in China or other places.”

Volpe agrees that it’s gotten harder for young people to stay in Boston. The opportunities are often too compelling elsewhere (despite the fact that New York City and San Francisco have even more competitive housing markets).

So what — if anything — can Boston do to pick itself up?

Volpe offers this: “ I think this is an ecosystem that tends to really like pedigree. We tend to like founders who went to MIT or Harvard, are very packaged, and have the right credentials. And I think that hurts. I think one thing the Bay Area does well is worry less about pedigree. And I think there’s a lot of really talented people here who maybe didn’t get a PhD at Harvard, but have done really great research and deserve a chance to go take a big swing.”

Rich Miner, who cofounded Android in Cambridge in 2004 — and sold it to Google for $50 million in 2005 — says there has long been a belief that East Coast investors are “Puritan-Boston-based,” making them “a little bit more conservative than the West Coast firms.”

Mark Zuckerberg’s move to the West Coast in 2004, Miner notes, reflected the difficulty of navigating a tech elite who, at that time, were largely based on Route 128. ”It was probably easier for Zuckerberg to get to Logan and fly to the West Coast and take some VC meetings than it was for him to figure out how to get out to 128 with no mass transit. And people wouldn’t have funded him. Because it’s like: ‘What have you done, kid? You’re from Harvard with this dating app thing? Whatever.’ ”

But Miner, a serial entrepreneur who has invested in startups, argues that as a tech hub, Boston doesn’t appear to have “materially changed over the past 20 years.” He believes the city is doing a lot of the right things.

Still, there’s a stat he wants to improve: “We only retain somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the tech grads who are of the ilk that will do startups.” To boost its tech scene, he says, Boston needs to improve those numbers. Lots of internships would allow young workers to “meet people, they build a network. They realize they can raise money here.”

Zuberi says founders have told him that Boston-based venture capital firms have offered them half of what firms in Silicon Valley have offered: “Boston VCs would just laugh at them.”

“We have a significant resource that we completely ignore,” he notes. “We have an influx of hundreds of thousands of kids from not only around the country, but around the world. And we sort of treat them as: Yeah, whatever.” That neglect, he says, stretches from social opportunities to startup get-togethers.

A new initiative launched earlier this month seeks to fortify the city’s tech network, offering an array of new in-person events in 2026. Spearheaded by the Boston tech firm Whoop — and joined by other companies as well as the state — the initiative could be a step toward making founders feel more supported.

But the challenge is real and urgent. Though Boston can’t become Silicon Valley, it’s dangerous to let the talent pool thin out, watch up-and-comers relocate, and face the economic ramifications of having the next wave of great tech companies — and big employers — leave us behind.