The Relationship of Deal Makers to Firm Birth

In the 80s, we had a whole set of theories where if we brought all the technologies together, entrepreneurship would happen. And it was fascinating to me that when I looked at it, Silicon Valley created almost 5,000 firms over a 20-year period; Boston created about half that. The presence of deal makers was actually more correlated to firm birth than the frequency of the availability of entrepreneurs and investors. These are people who have three or more equity positions in entrepreneurial firms.