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What companies in Boston are you referring to?

My field is data analytics, and the companies that come to mind are Vertica, Tokutek, Hadapt, Autonomy. Clearly Palo Alto has Cloudera, Hortonworks, Trifacta, and I'm sure countless others. I was generalizing incorrectly.

The point I was really making was that most YC startups are focused on solving for inefficiencies in various verticals (inspired by AirBnB I guess). Very few are focused on core CS. So I was pleasantly surprised to read about CoreOS.

Sorry to toot our own horn, but RethinkDB is a YC startup which is about as hardcore CS as you can get. Clustrix too (though you wouldn't normally hear about them since they're not too focused on the open source community). There are a couple of others but I can't think of them now off the top of my head.

Core CS/systems startups are definitely a minority in YC, but there are more than a few!

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