Boston Cooked the Golden Goose

Boston has Harvard. Boston has MIT. Boston produced the founders of 21 of the top 50 AI companies. And every single one of them got on a plane to San Francisco.

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It’s remarkable how badly Boston cooked the golden goose. All these Harvard and MIT kids straight on a plane to SF after graduation. SF should learn from this cautionary tale. https://t.co/pOh2hSJtJG

Peter Kazanjy @Kazanjy February 17, 2026

Peter Kazanjy isn’t exaggerating. Brian Halligan—co-founder of HubSpot, one of Boston’s biggest tech success stories—compiled the list himself. The founders of OpenAI, Perplexity, Cursor, Scale AI, Databricks, Pika, Suno, LangChain—all educated in Boston or Cambridge. All building in San Francisco.

The Most Expensive Brain Drain in History

These aren’t startups fighting for Series A. OpenAI is worth north of $500 billion. Databricks sits around $60 billion. Scale AI cleared $14 billion. Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, is pulling $500 million in annual revenue and owns 22% of the coding AI market.

Boston invested decades in educating these founders through the world’s most elite institutions. Harvard. MIT. Among best computer science programs on the planet. Then Boston watched them leave. Not for marginal gains—for the entire AI revolution.

The city that should own artificial intelligence doesn’t have a single company on the Forbes AI 50 headquartered there. The primordial soup produced the species. The species migrated west.

Why They All Fly West

SF isn’t just winning. SF is the only major tech hub with positive growth in company formation since 2022. According to a16z’s analysis of venture data, San Francisco company formation is UP 24%. Boston? Down 20%. Miami? Down 34%. NYC? Down 32%.

Three anchors created SF’s gravitational pull: Y Combinator back in person, OpenAI headquartered here, Anthropic headquartered here. International founders keep saying the same thing. Chris Saad, a serial entrepreneur from Australia who moved back to SF four months ago, put it simply: “If you want to make a blockbuster movie, you go to L.A., and if you want to build a blockbuster startup, you go to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.”

Over 50% of global AI venture funding flows to Bay Area companies—$27 billion last year alone. Nearly half of all Big Tech engineers live here. The density of talent, capital, and opportunity is unmatched anywhere on Earth.

The Cautionary Tale SF Must Learn

Boston didn’t lose to SF in education. MIT is still the best engineering school in the world. Harvard is still Harvard. Boston lost because it couldn’t convert intellectual production into company formation. The environment didn’t match the talent.

SF faces the same threat. An 800% gross receipts tax hike nearly passed. The Mission District almost banned new laboratories. Wealth tax proposals keep surfacing in Sacramento. Every one of these is a signal to founders: you are not welcome here.

I’ve said it before: if you create an environment where tech and innovation is not welcome, you will get less and less of it. California politicians need to understand that San Francisco is too important for American tech innovation to gamble on bad policy.

The founders Boston trained chose SF because SF chose them back. YC said “move here.” Venture capital said “build here.” The city said “we want you.” Policy matters. Culture matters. The moment that equation flips, the founders flip too.

Boston’s loss is SF’s gain—for now. But Austin, Miami, and a dozen other cities are watching. They’re building constitutional protections against wealth taxes. They’re rolling out red carpets. The founders of the next OpenAI are in school right now, somewhere. The question is where they’ll build.

SF won this round because we’re still the best place to build AI. Keep it that way. Fight every tax, every regulation, every policy that tells founders they’re not welcome. Or watch the next generation of Harvard and MIT grads fly somewhere else.