What do Mark Zuckerburg, Brad Feld, and Paul Graham all have in common? Yep, they are all wildly successful and they all earned their startup stripes in the Boston area. As a New Englander myself, I know that you have to say Boston area, because these founders actually made their marks in Cambridge, the city to the northwest of Boston proper. Cambridge is home to MIT and Harvard, where some of the greatest minds in the world can be found studying on any given day. Don’t ask Brad Feld how he liked Boston. He’ll correct you. For the rest of this post, I’m going to refer to Cambridge as part of the Boston area, since the entrepreneurial community doesn’t end at the border of Boston and Cambridge. The Boston area is the startup hub to the northeast that frequently gets overshadowed by it’s neighbor to the south New York, is plotting a comeback thanks to a new startup school. Intelligent.ly, modeled after the successful startup school General Assembly in New York, offers four weekly classes that cost between $20 and $50. The events will be hosted at 500 Harrison Ave, home to BzzAgent, Smarterer, Swap, and more. Intelligent.ly was founded by Sarah Hodges and Dave Balter. Sarah is the Director of Marketing at Boston-based RunKeeper, while Dave is the CEO of BzzAgent and the co-founder and Exec Chair of Smarterer. Together, they have assembled an impressive Board of Directors, including: Christopher O’Donnell – the Director of Product Management at Hubspot. Mike Troiano – a Principal of Holland-Mark, a Boston-based strategic marketing firm. Aaron White – Co-Founder and CTO of Boundless Learning. The coming soon page of the school’s website lists a sampling of classes with the instructors. Some of these classes include: Fundraising for Geniuses: The Opposite of Fundraising for Dummies… Instructor: Steve Cagnetta – Founder and Principal, Company Counsel, LLC From Content to Customer Instructor: Joe Chernov – VP of Content Marketing, Eloqua Retention Marketing Basics Instructor: Rebecca Van Nederynen – Consumer Product Marketing Manager, Carbonite Introduction to NoSQL with MongoDB Instructor: Aaron White – Co-Founder and CTO of Boundless Learning. Online Competitive Research Instructor: Jay Neely – Marketing Architect, Social Strategist Overall, the classes look useful and the startup neighbors in the building should help orchestrate planned serendipity for entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts. General Assembly in New York has proven that a format like this can be wildly successful for all parties involved.
