Those of you who spend time with me and are aware of my obsession with London may be interested to read this entry. You might call this is just a slightly belated love letter to Boston‘s recently departed and beloved Mayor, Tom Menino.

I have spent the past couple of years trying to find my place in my adopted home of Boston. Now, I’m not going to bitch about the weather, which is obvious (the weather just plain sucks here) or the restaurants, which are amazingly mediocre for such an affluent, educated, and diverse city.

It’s just that I missed the incredible intellectual, ethnic, cultural, and gastronomic diversity of my former home. It was in London that I realized that New York may be the financial capital of the world, but it is far from the world’s greatest city.

Today I am here to say that with each passing day Boston becomes more and more of a fantastic place to live, a world city. The diversity here across many parameters continues to surprise me in a positive way. I am beginning to feel like I did in London. Not a day passes in which I don’t have multiple interesting conversations on a world of topics with well-informed, thoughtful people. Most of these conversations involve people with ideas of how to make the world a better place. This desire is found in both the private and public sector and is something I usually found missing in New York where it is always about the money.

Every day with I meet people from different disciplines, different countries, different races and religions. Most are drawn here by the fact that unlike many other places in America, Boston welcomes different types of people and ideas. We have yet to fall into the myopic, nativist dialog that has gripped much of America.

This diversity and the fact that it’s welcome here has been highlighted to me twice in the past month or so. On the first occasion, I was looking at an apartment that was for sale in Brighton, a part of Boston. When I arrived the place was packed with twenty prospective buyers more than half of who were of Asian origin. Why were they there? Well it was to purchase a residence for their children who may attend one of Boston’s diverse colleges, or to move here for a career, or as an investment in a city with strong and stable real estate values, or perhaps, like London, Boston is one of the few global landing zones for people who’s homes are in places that may not always be so safe. This is increasingly the case for people from many places.

The why doesn’t really matter. All of these people add to our intellectual capital, they add to our diversity, and they make Boston a more interesting place to live. Oh yeah, they sure help real estate valuations. That apartment I was looking at sold for 15% above the asking price that day!

The second example of this diversity came this week. I had the pleasure of attending Tech Stars, which is an annual event in which 12 of the best new innovators get to pitch their ideas to an audience of investors, media, and other innovators. Boston is riddled with these events, from Tech Stars, to Mass Challenge (which now has international spinoffs), to Social Innovation Forum, run by Root Cause for innovations for with social benefit.

We got to hear twelve pitches, eight of which came from innovators born outside of the United States. The innovators came from five of the seven continents. It was great to see that all of these innovators came to Boston to pursue their dreams. Their ideas, hard work, and just their presence enrich Boston in many ways.

But why Boston? Well we have the greatest concentration of top universities in the world. We have access to capital both here and through New York a mere 200 miles away. We have a government led by people like Tom Menino, Deval Patrick, and our Senators Ed Market and Elizabeth Warren, who all understand that the nurturing of intellectual capital IS Boston’s and Massachusetts’s advantage and we don’t care where it comes from as long as it comes here and stays here. 10% of area college students are local products. 30% of all Boston area college graduates make their home in the area!

Perhaps most importantly Boston has a very large number of seasoned individuals from a diverse group of disciplines. An amazing number of them not only are willing to fund, consult, and mentor to people with ideas, we actively seek to do so. This passion for paying it forward is not only altruistic,  it keeps us fresh and involved, and it sets Boston apart as an area where we don’t care who you are or where you come from, what we care about is what you bring to our community.

So after two years, I get it. Boston is a small but very special place. Now if I could just get a decent slice of pizza…….