No. What he really ought to be thinking about is housing. In Boston—like Silicon Valley—virtually no one can afford housing: http://www.wbur.org/2009/10/26/housing-report (for Boston) and http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... (for Silicon Valley). Part of the way Boston needs to compete is through housing policy, and especially allowing much denser development that will help alleviate the extreme housing shortage. Bars are nice, and I'm not opposed to them, but the biggest weakness of many areas that are appealing to tech people, and people in their 20s and 30s more generally, is the cost of housing, which has largely become a consumer good.
We need to take a look at things where Boston is substantially different from the Valley. We can't change the weather and make Boston sunny year round, but we can provide an atmosphere that is more friendly to recent-grads.
See the second link:
Meanwhile, San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the United States—added just 418 new housing units in 2011, the fewest since 1993. What’s more, 149 existing units were removed, leading to a nearly nonexistent increase in housing supply.
Farther south in Menlo Park, Facebook raised billions of dollars in an IPO, instantly putting millions of dollars in the hands of early employees and investors. But as Trulia’s economist Jed Kolko notes, the surge of cash will create losers, by bidding up the cost of local housing. “If Facebook were in Texas or North Carolina,” he observes, “developers would have been building new homes in anticipation of this day,” but in Silicon Valley—as in San Francisco and Marin County farther north—it’s essentially impossible for new construction to meet rising demand for living space. So some of the people living in the area who didn’t just reap a financial windfall are poised to be priced out of their homes as high rents get even higher.
Silicon Valley has largely become zero-sum, population-wise (see also Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City on this subject).
These are the real pain points for living in Boston as a 20-something:
The T is miserable, always. The weather is miserable, 9 months per year. The attitude is cynical, usually. Massholes are real. Prices are high. We spend too much time comparing ourselves with NYC.
Otherwise, Boston is excellent. The city is clean. People are educated. Some are even attractive. The bike sharing is great.
Bar closing time is not a real issue. It's just a symptom of an old-fashioned, stuck in its ways, puritanical city.
But I'd say bar closing time is a real issue. I hate having to end my nights at 2, especially if I have to cab it back anyway because the T isn't running.
Actually, that's what I'd say the biggest issue with Boston is--the T service. Not only does it suck when it is running, it doesn't even run when I need it the most. The MBTA is very poorly-managed and many hundreds of millions of dollars in debt (very few actual improvements to the system are done because of this; it will take the MBTA until ~2050 to pay back all its debts under the current structure assuming it incurs no other expenditures)
As for a break from codeing or whatever, I get on my bike and ride. Builds me up instead of tearing me down, physically and emotionally.
I'm just not sure the bar-hopping sort is whom I want to meet/hire/work with. Probably makes me puritanical and staid; but I get things done. The best developers I know get things done; none of them frequent/even care about the nightclub scene.
In fact the nerdy, knowledgable deep-think architect/designer crowd I hang with would look absolutely ridiculous in a nightclub.
So I'm thinking, no, its not a lack of clubs that keeps a city from being a tech hub. Its more likely an accident of history, not yet reaching critical mass, some missing tax incentive or something like that.
2. Get nonlocal VCs and Angels to come to Boston to make deals, and show the locals how it's done.
3. Encourage school to offer indefinite stop out programs. Too many students stash their ideas and suspend their leave of absence lest they lose financial aide or have to reapply to college.
If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?".
To me the Boston business ethos is anti-youth and of an 'old guard' mentality. Your either young, stupid and in college or your in 'business clothes' going to do 'real work' (aka climbing a corporate ladder).
There are definitely some very good groups and things going on for the younger builder crowd but its a long ways from overriding the general stigma that exists in the city. Creating a place where creative young people want to live and have fun would require a number of changes in general city culture to really have an impact.
All that said, I hate how early Boston shuts down, not just the bars but this city as a whole seems to be built around a early to rise, early to sleep mentality.
"If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?"."
This is purely personal experience, but every single one of my friends when I was living in Allston was, at least, getting money from their parents monthly, and none had any kind of full-time work to speak of. FWIW.
I'm not saying its a bad assumption to make, and that is the difficult part of the problem to solve. Given the college population of Boston its a completely reasonable assumption to make that a casually dressed 20-25 year old is in college. On the same note in SV its statistically reasonable to assume a casually dressed 20-25 year old is doing something interesting. None the less, that assumption creates an additional barrier to communication in Boston. First you've got to get past the initial visual presumption to get the conversation started, and then often spend some time vetting that your not a member of the presumed 'college kid' crowd. As a result there is a much larger barrier to getting down to the interesting parts of a conversation in Boston that I don't feel exists nearly as much in SV.
Part of it is just that SV has an advantage in that the young people that go there have already demonstrated some level of drive by simply being there.
People who work hard and play hard and can live anywhere will choose the places that maximize fun/convenience to cost. It's not a one-dimensional continuum, either - places like Berlin have cheap cost of living _and_ a fantastic nightlife, but government bureaucracy makes it more inconvenient for small businesses here.
It's funny how these pockets of win always seem to work out by chance and circumstance.
In another decade, governments will be playing this game with tax laws for information workers, too. Naturally, the ratio of gross/net income is just as important to the final value of this "happiness equation" as the cost of living, or gross salary.
In Boston, though, even when I had a car, I didn't feel like I was hanging out in better places than when I was riding the T everywhere I went.
Again, just an anecdote, but one shared by several friends.
