“Is it possible that Boston is spawning too many startups?” That’s the question that Scott Kirsner asked in Sunday’s Boston Globe and set off a firestorm of responses from entrepreneurs, VCs and everyone in the Boston startup community. To quote the article,

“Boston would benefit from more talent concentration, where larger teams of skilled technologists, designers, and product developers get together to make a bigger dent in the universe.”

I share Scott’s concern. I know a ton of 2- and 3-person startups in Boston and not nearly enough with 20 – 200 employees. But consolidating the talent at our early stage startups seems to miss the point. We need to bring in more talent for these startups to flourish and expand the community at large.

Jason Evanish and others have done a great job at starting to build on-ramps for college students and recent graduates to engage in the community and find their first real jobs at Boston startups.

We need more efforts like Greenhorn Connect to convince promising young talent to join startups and stay in Boston. One good idea that I’ve discussed with a few people is starting a competitive internship program that matches top students with funded startups.

But there’s another pool of talent that’s even bigger than the students we have here in Boston. As John Prendergast rightly observed, “The larger issue is that startups compete with large companies for talent.”

Large companies in Massachusetts employ at least 15,000 software developers, according to one conservative estimate. Large companies, like IBM, Oracle, SAP and EMC, have the brand visibility and on-campus recruiting budgets to dwarf startups. Yet even if 5% of these developers made the leap to startups, it would have a huge positive impact on our ecosystem.

Recruiters often try to poach from large companies but I have heard mixed reviews of the results they deliver. Dharmesh Shah has come out swinging with HubSpot’s Prison Break recruiting campaign, but that was a solo effort, albeit a very savvy one.

Recently, Jon Pierce and I decided to collaborate on works.ee, a community project that’s launching soon to help address this challenge.

There is an acute talent crunch in Boston, but consolidating early-stage startups will only get us so far. A healthy ecosystem needs many, many early-stage startups to pursue scores of qualified opportunities. Instead of consolidating the startups we have, let’s help them to flourish by tapping new sources of talent.

This post originally appeared on Bostinnovation and generated many comments from the Boston startup community. Check out the original post and join the conversation at http://bostinnovation.com/2011/10/19/how-boston-can-find-new-talent-without-consolidating-startups/.