Laura Keeley, on how Facebook got turned down by Boston venture capitalists:
Boston area firms missed out on the social networking boom in part because many didn’t grasp its significance, said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of Battery Ventures. He said the average angel investor in Boston is about 55 years old. In California, the average is 32, he said. “It became a generational issue,” he said. “To understand things like Facebook, you have to be 19 to 24 years old. If you’re 56, you don’t quite get it.”