Startups in Boston?

Scott Kirsner writes in the Globe today about how Boston can't keep companies like Facebook from heading to Silicon Valley, with an argument that basically says that local VC's aren't daring enough to fund them (with an added measure that Silicon Valley is attractive in and of itself.

It was interesting to read this article in tandem with today's NYTBR article on how Alfred A. Knopf rejected many famous books over the years. If renowned editors trying to evaluate something relatively cut-and-dried like the quality of a history book are often wrong, it's not surprising that VC's are often wrong on something as tenuous as evaluating a brand-new Web 2.0 company.

The difference between Boston and the Valley may be simply the depth of the bench. In the publishing world, "The Diary of Anne Frank" could be shopped around to 15 publishers before one took the risk. In the Valley VC world, that could happen to. In Boston, you'd run out of options before then.