This company should be in Massachusetts

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — By all rights, Felix Wong and his company should be in Massachusetts.

Wong, 33, was born in Quincy, graduated from Braintree High School, and spent a decade living in Cambridge, where he earned two degrees from Harvard and worked as a post-doc at MIT. His parents still live in Massachusetts, and he now leads a startup in biotech, an industry Boston has owned for the better part of two decades.

But on a recent Wednesday, Wong was in sunny Silicon Valley, walking in the shade of the jacaranda trees near the hiking trail outside his office and reflecting on the creative spirit of California.

“There’s some crazy experiments that we’re currently running at Integrated that I probably would not have thought about when I was in Boston,” said Wong, referring to the startup whose name was emblazoned on his vest.

Wong considered a career on the East Coast. But as he started trying to turn his lab research into funding for a new venture, he encountered a common problem: Investors in Boston were not biting. They seemed more reluctant to take a risk on young talent than their counterparts on the West Coast.

“To start a big company in Boston, you want at least half your head to be gray,” Wong said. “You really have to cater to this entrenched way of doing things.”

Wong’s company is one small data point — what scientists like him would call an “n of 1″ — in the larger scatterplot of the local economy. But it shows that Massachusetts, with its ever-rising costs, high taxes, and sometimes unfriendly business climate, is losing ground to rivals across the country, even in some of its most prized industries.

Biotechs are just the kind of company Boston wants, and tech founders with local ties are just the kind of people it is positioned to retain. As artificial intelligence transforms virtually every scientific field, investors and founders believe Boston is in a prime position to compete where the new technology meets biomedicine — which is right where Wong’s tech-powered longevity company, Integrated Biosciences, sits.

For many biotech startups, Boston used to feel essential. Yet for Wong, neither East Coast scientific greatness nor his local upbringing was enough to keep his company here, where Boston could directly benefit from the jobs it has created, the money it has raised, and the treatments it may discover. And for a region struggling through the Trump administration’s attacks on “eds and meds,” a region whose economic future likely runs through biotech, health care, and life sciences, that’s a big problem.

Wong’s story is the type that Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, CEO of the industry group MassBio, hates to hear.

“He’s the exact phenotype of entrepreneur-founder that we built here … and we want to keep here,” she said. The number of 26- to 34-year-olds leaving Massachusetts is the highest on record, data show; “we should all be hugely concerned about” that outmigration, she said.

Along with the broader industry, Boston’s biotech sector has struggled in recent years with layoffs, vacant lab space, competition with China, and a downturn in venture capital investments. Massachusetts has recovered more slowly from the pandemic than other states with major startup economies, and by some metrics, biotech here lost ground to California last year. The share of US funding received by Massachusetts-headquartered biopharma companies ticked down about 2 percentage points, while California’s share grew about 2 percentage points.

For Wong and his co-founder, Max Wilson, the draw of California was simple. They needed money, space, and equipment, and one of their first major investments came with a free workspace in a lab in San Carlos.

“The first big check you get has an outsized influence on where you have the company,” Wilson said. “Felix and I would have been open to being in Boston, but we just couldn’t get any money out there.”

So in 2022, Wong and Wilson launched Integrated Biosciences in Silicon Valley, where the weather was fine, the investors were friendly, and, thanks to funding from their early backers, the plastics and reagents in the lab were “all you can eat.” The company has since grown to more than a dozen people in over 5,000 square feet of office and lab space, and it has attracted Tony Wu, who helped build xAI’s Grok, to its scientific advisory board.

Adding up salaries, lab chemicals, equipment, and other expenses, Wong estimates the company puts $2 million into the local economy every year on average. That’s $2 million a year not coming here.

There have been some bright spots for biotech in Boston lately, with proceeds from IPOs on their way to passing levels last seen in 2020 and 2021. But Burlin O’Connell said she fears too many of those dollars are going to established companies, not early-stage innovators. She said MassBio is working on improving incubator programs to help young companies launch here much the way Integrated Biosciences did in California.

“The early-stage biotech ecosystem is the secret sauce of Massachusetts. … It is what has made us the envy of the world,” she said. “We’ve got to work to keep them here. We can’t just assume that they’re going to stay here.”

The tech and innovation rivalry between Boston and San Francisco has a decades-long history. Blame it on policies as esoteric as noncompete clauses, or the stuffy Ivy League credential culture in Boston that rewards experience over bold ideas; call it the fault of unimaginative government leaders, or a cultural spirit that dates back to the Gold Rush and “go West, young man.” Whatever the causes, that other progressive city by the sea has us beat when it comes to innovation, and the gulf is only growing with AI.

You don’t have to look hard for companies that germinated at Harvard or MIT, but took root on the West Coast before becoming wildly successful. Cursor, an AI coding company that is set to be acquired for $60 billion by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, was founded by four MIT dropouts; Lightmatter, one of Boston’s leading AI hardware companies, relocated to Silicon Valley in 2024; and, oh yeah, there’s that little Harvard startup known today as Meta.

Eric Paley, the longtime venture capitalist who is now Massachusetts’ economic secretary, said he worries most about losing young founders who think they have to move to Silicon Valley to launch their big ideas. Part of his job is to sell them on the reasons to stay.

To leave for “the short-term benefit of a free lab bench,” Paley said, could prove to be “a little shortsighted.”

Lily Lyman, a partner at the Boston-based investment firm Underscore VC who lived in Silicon Valley for years, said that fewer Boston investors “are playing the sort of ground game, fast, modern, look-at-the-upside style of venture.” She is optimistic about Boston’s tech future but said the region needs “to blend East Coast pragmatism with West Coast optimism.”

Julia Moore, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist who supports companies in both Boston and the Bay Area, said Silicon Valley “does the failure innovation side better — takes more risks.” It also offers a more “porous network,” she said, where ideas and people more easily travel between companies.

Lately, Paley and other political and business leaders here have been working to boost the Massachusetts tech scene. Governor Maura Healey set aside $100 million to build a so-called AI Hub, and private companies, led by health-tracking company Whoop, have banded together as the Massachusetts AI Coalition to support startups and founders.

The stakes are high, some leaders said.

“Are we still going to be an innovation economy?” asked Jason Kelly, CEO of Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks. “We might not be an innovation economy if we keep going down this road.”

Kelly believes an open regulatory environment, not lifestyle factors, will make Massachusetts the tech leader it should be. He envisions grand experiments — allowing humanoid robot displays on Boston Common for a few hours on weekends, for example, or piloting the first autonomous public transit.

If Boston has the most advantageous regulations, he reasons, no one will care about the 4 p.m. sunsets and the months of gray slush. Even capital shouldn’t be an issue, he said – funds can travel from the West Coast, or anywhere, more easily than ever.

“Fly over there in a plane and meet them and get money and bring it back in a bag to Boston,” he advised.

Some entrepreneurs are working to boost the city’s support network.

“Boston does have all these incredible raw ingredients to build category-defining companies,” said Nathan Spielberg, the Boston-based co-founder of Tamarin AI, a business software company. The question, he said, is “how do we retain people?”

Spielberg is trying to do that in his own hyperlocal way, through group dinners and a new podcast, an effort called Build 617. He pointed to a favorite local phrase: Boston is poised to lead “where bits meet atoms” — where computation intersects with the physical world.

That’s an apt description for Integrated, where Wong and Wilson are using tech to search for the fountain of youth.

The company is working to develop treatments that might target aging, but also to create technological platforms that will help identify such treatments. In earlier research, Wong used a specially trained AI model to parse millions of hypothetical chemical compounds and predict which ones might work as antibiotics. When he tested those compounds in mice and saw they were effective, Wong knew he’d found a potentially game-changing methodology.

Now, his team is applying the same approach to a fresh set of compounds that could treat aging-related disease, and they may ultimately sell or license the technology itself. (It’s a rapidly growing field: Anthropic just launched “Claude Science,” an AI drug discovery program.)

That AI-powered approach — known as “tech bio” — is reflected in their headquarters, which is half lab, half traditional office. The two spaces are separated by a big glass wall with dry-erase marker all over it, tracing the outlines of chemical compounds, business strategy flowcharts, and bygone brainstorms (“hair,” “fat,” “cytokines”). At a table in the back, two guys both named Alex are playing a game of chess, a clock beside them to keep time. The kitchen is stocked with Sapporo, kombucha, and Trader Joe’s finest, including the state-of-matter-defying Root Beer Float pieces.

Their decision to set up in California is playing out well so far. Wong plans to double his staff in the next couple years, and the company is expanding this fall into an office space nearly three times as large. Wong is working on another major fund-raising round. He’s already beginning to sound more like a Silicon Valley native: A proposed PR strategy “creates optionality that we could leverage”; and it is essential to get “alpha on problems.”

In Silicon Valley, Wong and his wife can hike along miles of bayside trails and enjoy the vibey Palo Alto restaurants also favored by the likes of the Zuckerberg clan. His commute to work is a zippy eight-minute drive down the 101, past billboards advertising AI companies, in his hybrid BMW. Sometimes he likes to crack the sunroof.

Wilson, another East Coaster-turned-Californian, was settling in at his desk with his morning Monster Energy drink, flavor Ruby Red. For him, it’s easy to explain what’s better about operating on the West Coast.

“Other than everything?” he joked.

Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.