China Edition
Boston Venture Connect
Thursday, October 22 CIC Cambridge
About the event
An afternoon connecting two startup ecosystems.
Boston Venture Connect — China Edition brings Chinese founders and the Boston venture community together in the heart of Kendall Square, on the second afternoon of International Week. Program details will be announced closer to the date.
Program & room to be announced
Kendall Square
The most innovative square mile on the planet.
In 2009, the Boston Consulting Group gave Kendall Square its enduring title — the most innovative square mile on the planet, the blocks within a ten-minute walk of the Kendall/MIT station. Today, Moderna, Biogen and Takeda share these streets with research teams from Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, and the investment keeps compounding.
The milestones run deep. MIT's Instrumentation Lab built the guidance computer that flew Apollo to the Moon, and ELIZA — the world's first chatbot — was written a few blocks away. RSA encryption was born here, the W3C and the Human Genome Project's decisive work followed, and the Broad Institute first edited human cells with CRISPR. In 2020, Moderna designed its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine here in a matter of days. The next milestone is being written now, in CSAIL and the AI labs down the street.
- 1966 ELIZA
- 1969 Apollo guidance
- 1977 RSA
- 1990s W3C & Human Genome
- 2013 CRISPR
- 2020 mRNA vaccine
Cambridge Innovation Center
Boston's first stop.
In 1999, MIT graduate Tim Rowe founded the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square, pioneering the shared innovation space more than a decade before WeWork. CIC now operates over 1.5 million square feet of offices, labs and event space across North America, Europe and Asia — and its flagship Cambridge campus holds the highest density of startups under one roof in the United States. More than a thousand companies have started here, together raising over $17 billion.
For many familiar names, CIC was the first stop into Boston. The Android team that landed here after Google's 2005 acquisition grew into a campus of roughly 2,300 people; HubSpot was founded in a single CIC office; Facebook opened its first Boston office here with seven engineers. Apple's Siri team and Shell's research arm both moved into One Broadway — and national innovation programs from more than a dozen countries use CIC as their gateway to the Boston ecosystem.