Here is my problem with Boston: 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 you…
(I used to live in Allston, currently living in the "greater Boston area".) "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 si…
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.