I joined some Boston technology colleagues and a few West Coast interlopers for Red Herring East this week. The formal agenda is here, but the informal discussion was this: Is technology innovation on North America’s eastern coast different?

Admittedly there are a few problems right off the bat with this question. First, different than what? The implied contrast of course is that center of the tech universe known as Silicon Valley. “East coast” is the next issue: As any chowder-eater knows, Boston is one thing and Manhattan another. Pity the speakers from Canada and Raleigh-Durham who had the job of reminding the rest of us that there are also vibrant entrepreneurial communities north and south of the Amtrak corridor.

Setting aside niggling details like those, however, we gamely entered the fray. Paul Sagan of Akamai claimed, in an ironic twist on the Getrude Stein remark about Oakland, that there’s no ‘here’ here – not enough of an after-work social fabric to engage young tech venture workers. [However, as an ardent fan of MITX, I can tell you that there are lots of events in this area to draw tech folks together. Perhaps they just like the Red Sox better.]

I offered that if American innovators are the descendants in many cases of European immigrants – those who chose to get on the boats and go to an unknown new world – then Western entrepreneurs are frequently offspring of those who were then venturesome enough to jump into a covered wagon to check out the other side of the Rockies. Maybe that makes our California cousins even bigger risk-takers.

The point at which I got startled out of my own tired assumptions about innovators in North America was when an audience member suggested that there’s a funding gap in some regional markets. The most thoughtful response to this came from a VC panelist added to the roster too late for me to note his name. He said there’s no funding gap, as there should in fact always be more companies seeking funding than the number that win it. “That should be the case, otherwise we’re saying that every company that wants capital deserves it, and we know that’s not true. The gap we have in the East and may eventually have elsewhere is a founding gap. When we let future entrepreneurs come to the US to complete advanced degrees at MIT, but then deny them legal residency afterwards, they found their businesses elsewhere. That’s the biggest innovation problem we face here today.”

The problem with East coast innovation, whatever that is, is that it hasn’t gotten worse than California – it’s that many other places have gotten a lot better.