I&#x27;ve lived in both Boston and California. All of what I&#x27;m about to say comes from the small sample size that is personal experience and therefore YMMV, but this is my observation.<p>The most important difference between Boston (and the East Coast in general) and California is this: On the East Coast and in most other places, business culture has a kind of de-facto caste system in which executives, managers, and owners by definition are separate from and out-rank <i>doers</i>. To <i>do</i> is not to <i>own</i>, and to <i>own</i> is not to <i>do</i>.<p>In Boston if you roll up your sleeves and actually <i>do</i> the work, this makes you lower class compared to the executives who manage, own, and control. On one occasion I had this actually explained to me explicitly and the explanation included the phrase &quot;CEOs don&#x27;t do anything&quot; stated as if this were a fact and a law of nature. It was explicitly explained to me that for a CXO-type person to actually get their hands dirty with real work was a dangerous distraction that would negatively impact their ability to lead.<p>In California, being a maker and a doer is respected equally and in some cases more than being a manager or a hustler. The extreme end of this is the CA startup culture where being a &quot;non-technical founder&quot; is sometimes seen as a liability. A founder might eventually transition to mostly managerial work but having a background and having been the original builder of the product is seen as a good thing and a badge of honor.<p>At the very least, being a maker and a doer in California does not count against you and mark you as lower class the way it does in Boston. It doesn&#x27;t by definition mean you can&#x27;t lead, found, or own.<p>This is why I left Boston. I couldn&#x27;t stand it. The message I got from the culture is that I was a sucker for trying to get good at actually doing things. I don&#x27;t have What It Takes and therefore I can only work for those who do. What It Takes is never quite defined but I gathered it to be a mixture of extroversion, a very dominant personality type, and mild to moderate narcissism. Skills and abilities and experience don&#x27;t factor into it unless that experience is exclusively within the business realm.<p>East Coast: &quot;I&#x27;ll have my people talk to your people.&quot; -- the ideal archetype of the East Coast business elite would be Donald Trump or Carl Icahn.<p>West Coast: &quot;Here let me get on that.&quot; -- the ideal archetype here is Elon Musk or Larry Page.<p>East Coast: &quot;We&#x27;re looking to hire people from the right schools.&quot; (I actually heard this multiple times and even read it in print at least once. Skills were not mentioned.)<p>West Coast: &quot;We&#x27;re looking to hire people with the right skills.&quot;<p>I also felt more <i>classism</i> in general on the East Coast. The fact that I&#x27;m originally from Ohio and went to a small Midwestern university meant I wasn&#x27;t fit to mop the floor. The West Coast certainly has its Stanford cult but the Ivy League cult on the East is orders of magnitude more intense and pervasive. I know and do business with a number of high-ranking Stanford types and <i>never</i> have I gotten the sense that I&#x27;m a &quot;plebeian&quot; simply because I don&#x27;t have an impressive university name behind me. If I&#x27;m talking to a Stanford Ph.D and what comes out of my mouth is intelligent, it feels like a conversation between equals and I don&#x27;t get the sense that my opinions are inherently suspect.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. There is absolutely class in California, and if you&#x27;re not from a top-tier university or an otherwise impressive background you will probably have to work harder to achieve a similar level of cred in most circles. But you <i>can</i>. Class is malleable here and if you demonstrate merit I&#x27;ve found that people respond <i>quickly</i>. By contrast out East it feels fixed by birth and education. After being there for years and working really really hard I did gradually feel like I&#x27;d risen a bit but it felt like a really slow process with a constant undertow. I did find that if I stopped referring to my educational background or place of origin people started to assume I&#x27;d gone to a place like MIT, so I could sort of sneak in under the radar and only reveal my beginnings once I&#x27;d thoroughly demonstrated ability. Out East I was actually tempted to lie about my education (never did), while out West the idea seems preposterous and silly.<p>There are exceptions in both places of course, but that was the general cultural zeitgeist I ran into. I imagine it might be even worse in a place like Washington DC where it&#x27;s all about political clout.