Friday, October 14, 2011

Blog

Finance Flash e-newsletter to relaunch as ‘Startups & Venture Capital’

By Kyle Alspach

My morning Thursday started with the New England Venture Network’s “angel breakfast,” a visit with a group of Boston-area angels and up-and-coming VC investors, put together by Fairhaven Capital principal Rudina Seseri. Over muffins and coffee, the 20 or so investors deliberated, in often-animated fashion, over some of the central questions facing the venture industry.

I headed from there to Cambridge to meet Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot. The company’s new breed of marketing software is getting huge traction, he told me, but is really just getting started. Halligan believes he and his team can turn HubSpot into an HP on the East Coast — a multi-billion-dollar company that exists for 100 years.

I finished the day at the opening of a new co-working space at the Cambridge Innovation Center — yet another expansion at the lively Kendall Square startup hub.

And even with all I saw, I knew it was just a sampling of the local startup and venture activity on this day.

At Mass High Tech and the Boston Business Journal, we’re inspired by what’s going on. And come Nov. 7, we’ll launch a new daily report, Startups & Venture Capital. If you’re already receiving MHT’s morning Finance Flash, you’ll get this instead starting that day. I’ll be the editor and will do a lot of the writing.

We aren’t here to do your PR, but we are here to tell a good story about innovative companies and, especially, the dynamic people behind them. So please get in touch if you have a suggestion for an article, or a story to tell yourself.

With the huge economic importance of innovation for Massachusetts (and the world), many wonder why West Coast blogs like TechCrunch are so much more widely read than Boston sites. The sentiment I heard on Thursday from the CIC’s founder and CEO, Tim Rowe, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Reporters in Boston must find ways to “expand the clicks” on local startup and venture stories, he said.

I agree, and I believe that means writing much more about the national significance of what’s going on in New England. It means showing readers in Silicon Valley, New York and Seattle that New England’s innovation scene is the real deal — that world-changing technology is being developed here every day.

And that, like HubSpot, these companies aren’t waiting for the first chance to move West.

If you’re an innovator, a supporter of innovation or just care about the local economy, we’d love for you to get engaged with us on this new report.

Because the world is (or at least should be) watching.