A Guide to the Boston Tech “Collapse” Everyone Is Arguing About

Sadly, I had to pause my regularly scheduled CES snark today to write about something that actually matters.

Every few years—on a cycle as reliable as a Green Line slowdown or a venture capitalist discovering urban policy—Boston gets declared dead as a technology city. Not “struggling.” Not “in transition.” Dead. Finished. A cautionary tale with brick sidewalks.

This past couple days on X, the declaration arrived again. Boston, we were told, lost the tech war. The center of gravity moved west. The network collapsed. The patient is terminal.

And yet, somehow, Boston keeps waking up, putting on a fleece vest, and going back to work on problems that stubbornly refuse to be solved by vibes alone.

The Post That Started the Pile-On

If there was a moment that truly set off this latest round of Boston tech introspection, it wasn’t a dunk, a chart, or a victory lap from the coasts. It was a note of concern from Brian Halligan, someone who has actually built a generational technology company in Massachusetts and understands both its constraints and its advantages.

Halligan didn’t frame his post as a manifesto or a takedown. He framed it as worry. Worry that biotech momentum in Massachusetts isn’t what it was a few years ago. Worry that only one of the top 50 AI companies calls the state home. Worry that federal research funding cuts are hitting MIT, Harvard, and WHOI at exactly the wrong moment. Worry that the Millionaire’s Tax may be working in the short term, but is quietly encouraging high earners to prepare Florida exit plans. Worry about empty luxury condos, about Boston no longer being “cool” for young people, about a city that has become brutally expensive without always feeling dynamically alive.

What made Halligan’s post resonate wasn’t the list itself—none of this is shocking to anyone who lives here—but the tone. This wasn’t an outsider diagnosing decline from a distance. This was someone who built a global software company in Massachusetts, stayed, and still believes the place is worth fighting for.

Will Manidis and the Autopsy Industrial Complex

A few days after Halligan's post, Will Manidis wrote about Boston as Exhibit A in a broader essay on the decline and fall of the American technology industry. His case was sweeping, data-heavy, and deliberately unsentimental. Two decades ago, Boston and San Francisco were peers in software. Today, San Francisco has produced roughly $14 trillion in enterprise value. Boston, by comparison, produced a rounding error.

Manidis walks through the history with the confidence of someone performing an autopsy with the chart already signed. Route 128 once rivaled Silicon Valley. DEC, Lotus, and Akamai were not footnotes; they were pillars. Then something broke. Talent left. Networks thinned. New York stepped in. The state tightened its grip. The ecosystem, starved of trust and upside, began feeding on itself.

His explanation centers on three forces aligning at exactly the wrong time: a regulatory environment that treated business as a revenue source first and an innovation engine second, an elite culture too entangled to discipline its own bad actors, and a belief that inputs—great universities, lab space, prestige—were sufficient substitutes for outcomes.

There’s real gravity to this argument. Anyone who’s built or funded companies in Massachusetts over the last decade recognizes pieces of it immediately. Taxes matter. Trust matters. Networks matter more than buildings. And once those networks thin out, they are brutally hard to reconstitute.

But Manidis doesn’t just argue that Boston struggled. He argues that it cannot recover, and that its fate foreshadows what will eventually happen to San Francisco and the broader U.S. tech ecosystem once regulators and voters turn fully hostile.

That’s where the story stops being diagnostic and starts being deterministic.

Brian Halligan: Fix the Pipes, Don’t Burn the City

The most meaningful rebuttal didn’t arrive as a dunk or a counter-thread. It came from Brian Halligan, and it landed the way serious interventions usually do: calmly, publicly, and with skin in the game.

Through a series of X posts, Halligan has been explicit about what worries him—biotech losing altitude, Massachusetts barely registering on AI leaderboards, research funding cuts hitting the state’s crown-jewel institutions, and a tax structure that may be stabilizing public goods while quietly pushing mobile wealth toward Florida. He’s also been unsparing about the lived reality of Boston for people in their twenties: too expensive, not fun enough, and bleeding talent in the exact window between graduation and suburb-bound family life.

But Halligan’s posture isn’t nostalgia or despair. It’s participation. He’s doing the unglamorous work of analysis—digging into where Boston actually shows up in AI rankings, breaking down the state’s life-cycle problem, and naming the cultural and economic frictions that drive people out. He’s also doing the more uncomfortable work of proposing fixes: pushing for a Y Combinator batch in Cambridge, calling for real housing construction, arguing that Boston needs to make itself fun again, and openly wrestling with tradeoffs like the Millionaire’s Tax—acknowledging its personal cost while defending its role in funding schools and finally fixing the T.

Most importantly, Halligan isn’t outsourcing responsibility. He’s organizing. He’s convening founders. He’s inviting the Governor into the conversation at his own home and asking who from the next generation of builders should be in the room. He’s advocating for more AI and climate companies in Massachusetts not as a slogan, but as a concrete strategy for the state’s next growth phase.

That distinction matters. Ecosystems don’t fail because people point out what’s broken. They fail when the people most capable of fixing things decide it’s someone else’s problem. Halligan’s intervention doesn’t deny Boston’s challenges—it rejects the idea that they’re inevitable, or that the only rational response is to leave.

Jason Kelly and the Case for Atoms Over Apps

Then came the response that reframed the entire debate, from Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. Kelly’s argument is not defensive. It’s corrective.

Boston didn’t fail at software, he argues. Boston made a different bet.

When personal computers overtook minicomputers in the 1980s, Boston lost that particular race. DEC and Wang didn’t survive the transition. Software gravity shifted west, and it never fully returned. But instead of chasing Silicon Valley on its own terrain, Boston reoriented toward industries built around atoms rather than code—biotech, robotics, energy, hardware, synthetic biology.

These industries move slower, cost more, and demand patience. They also change lives in ways GDP graphs struggle to capture. A SaaS product might optimize workflows. A biotech breakthrough gives someone’s parent two more years with their family. That distinction matters, even if it doesn’t show up cleanly in enterprise value tallies.

Kelly points out something the discourse often glosses over: if you want to build pure software, San Francisco has been the best place to do that for more than thirty years. Boston’s comparative advantage is elsewhere, and it’s intentional.

The Family City, the Long Game City

There’s another variable Kelly surfaces that rarely appears in tech capital debates: life design. Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville are among the most family-friendly urban environments in the country. Quiet streets, functional transit, elite schools, dense cultural institutions, and a social contract that prioritizes learning over spectacle.

That environment pairs unusually well with atoms-based companies, whose founders tend to be older, more patient, and more willing to trade speed for durability. Ginkgo itself was founded by PhDs with infants at demo day. That’s not an outlier here; it’s a pattern.

Boston is a city built for people who intend to stay long enough to see their work matter.

Regulation: Not Perfect, Not the Villain

One of the more convenient myths in the Boston-is-dead narrative is that Massachusetts is uniquely hostile to innovation. The historical record complicates that story. Cambridge was one of the first cities in the world to approve and regulate genetic engineering research in the 1970s, long before Europe found its footing. That regulatory certainty, combined with MIT and Harvard’s scientific depth, helped birth the modern biotech industry.

Local and state governance in Massachusetts is often pragmatic and functional, even if national politics feel misaligned. Boston’s challenge isn’t ideological hostility to technology so much as the difficulty of aligning long-cycle industries with short-cycle political incentives.

That problem is hard—but it is not terminal.

The Real Divide Isn’t Geography. It’s Time Horizon.

What this entire debate ultimately reveals is not Boston versus San Francisco, but short-term versus long-term thinking. Software rewards speed, scale, and liquidity. Atoms reward patience, rigor, and moral clarity.

Both matter. But only one category reliably earns public trust when the broader population starts asking why technology exists at all.

If the tech industry fails to articulate its value, it won’t be saved by another app. It will be defended by medicine, energy, food, climate resilience, and national security—domains where Boston already plays an outsized role.

So Is Boston Dead?

No.

Boston is inconvenient. It doesn’t demo cleanly. It doesn’t hype easily. It doesn’t promise fast exits. It builds slowly, seriously, and with consequences.

In a moment when technology’s social license is under real threat, that might be its greatest advantage.

Boston doesn’t need to win the tech discourse. It just needs to keep building the future everyone else eventually depends on.