A group of local chief executives held a quiet meeting back in September. The invitation-only conclave included the chief executives of iRobot, Constant Contact, and LogMeIn, as well as the fast-growing startups Fiksu, Formlabs, and Acquia.
Governor Deval Patrick and Greg Bialecki, the state’s secretary of Housing and Economic Development, both showed up.
The focus? How to help those startups grow into big successes.
The event, the MassScale CEO Roundtable, took place at the offices of Communispace in Boston.
(Communispace chairman Diane Hessan, now CEO of the Startup Institute, was among the attendees.)
The group plans to continue meeting in 2015, though the next date hasn’t been set.
“The ultimate goal is to find ways to catalyze a culture for ‘scale-up’ in Massachusetts that is analogous to what already exists for ‘start-up,’ ” said Pamela Goldberg, chief executive of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which has been helping to organize the events.
Scott Savitz of Data Point Capital, one of the prime movers behind the event, said this was the second such meeting. The first took place earlier in 2014 at LogMeIn.
In addition to support from Goldberg’s organization, other organizers include Savitz, Andy Ory, former CEO of Acme Packet, Michael Greeley of the VC firm Foundation Medical, and iRobot CEO Colin Angle.
The sole purpose of MassScale is to focus on scaling startups into anchor companies — the next generation of EMCs, Akamais, and Wayfairs.
With Patrick’s term in office coming to an end, Bialecki in December met with entrepreneurs and investors to strategize about reviving the campaign to eliminate employee noncompete agreements under the next governor. These contracts between employee and employer, typically signed at the start of a job, limit where an employee can work next, until a specified “cooling off” period has elapsed, often a year.
I’m among those who think the agreements, which aren’t legally enforceable in California, keep talent from moving where it can be best utilized and prevent employees at big companies from pursuing their own startup ideas.
Patrick and Bialecki had proposed to ban noncompetes, but the measure failed to make it through the Legislature this year. Convened by the New England Venture Capital Association, the group plans to meet again in January.
Governor-elect Charlie Baker said during the campaign that he doesn’t think the pro-noncompete and anti-noncompete groups are “that far apart,” and he hopes for a compromise.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him
on Twitter @ScottKirsner and on betaboston.com.