Friday, January 23, 2009

Paul Graham, Y Combinator exits Mass. for Silicon Valley

By Galen Moore

Massachusetts is losing another tech industry player to Silicon Valley. This time, the departing company isn’t another high-tech startup, it’s a venture investor: Paul Graham.

Seed investor Y Combinator will end its practice of splitting the year between Silicon Valley and Cambridge, co-founder Paul Graham wrote yesterday in a post to his investment firm’s website. The company formerly wintered in California, then returned to Cambridge each summer to work with its portfolio of early-stage startups in Massachusetts.

From now on, the startups funded by Y Combinator will all be in Silicon Valley, Graham said.

“The reason has nothing to do with startups,” Graham wrote in his post: It’s because (Y Combinator partner and Graham’s wife) Jessica Livingston and I … are expecting our first child any day now.” He said the couple originally envisioned continuing to alternate between coasts, but realized the prospect was not realistic. Palo Alto seemed like a better place to raise kids than Cambridge, Graham said.

However, Graham said the advantages of locating in Massachusetts are negligible for startups. “We never tried to claim to the startups in the summer cycles that it was a net advantage to be in Boston,” he said. “The most we could claim was that we could mitigate the disadvantages sufficiently well. ... Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does.”

Graham could not immediately be reached Friday.