I bootstrapped a company in Pittsburgh in 2000 (the founders all came from CMU - I am from France originally) with a good exit in 2012.
When I moved there the food scene was nonexistent and people in the US still perceived Pittsburgh as a bad place to be (e.g., a lady I met in CA responded with "Oh I am so sorry" when I told her I was living in Pittsburgh). CMU also didn't really understand startups - we were the first company to ever do something with a technology that CMU released to the founders.
But it was also a time where you could hire CMU CS grads for $30K/year and rent an office for 30 people for less than $2K/month. And we were a big fish in a small pond so we got a lot of local press and a first cut at the local tech talent (one of our first hire ended up becoming co-founder of Tumblr!)
After the exit I tried to get involved in the local scene. And while I found a lot of talent/ideas/start up to promote it was amazingly hard to attract any kind of money in the city. That convinced me that Pittsburgh would never make it as a hub and I ended moving to Manhattan last year.
Now my family (wife and 4 kids) hate me for that move - because even if you throw huge piles of money on rent it's hard to match the quality of life of Pittsburgh - and we are reconsidering that move.
Happy to answer any question about starting a company in Pittsburgh!
People still seem to think Pittsburgh's a hellhole even though it's anything but.
Honestly, I don't think it's a bad thing that people think this. The city's steadily drawing in talent yet rent/cost of living is remaining low and stable. Every once in a while I see people say "Pittsburgh's the next Portland!", but good god, I hope not. Too many people from SV have flooded into Portland and driven rent up to insane levels in just a few years while offering nothing of substantial value--Pittsburgh doesn't need the same.
> people in the US still perceived Pittsburgh as a bad place
They still do.
I'm originally from the area and when I mention this everyone thinks I come from either a Deliverance-like backwoods or a bombed-out Detroit-style factory town.
No one takes me seriously when I call it The Paris of Appalachia.
Oh my, never considered Pittsburgh as part of "Appalachia" - I thought that was West Virginia! I guess the US looks at Pittsburgh like Pittsburgh looks at WV...
"I'm originally from the area and when I mention this everyone thinks I come from either a Deliverance-like backwoods or a bombed-out Detroit-style factory town."
This has been my perception of the city until recently. I grew up in Florida, and my perception of the city had been formed mostly/entirely by the Pittsburgh Steelers. The team (and city by association) has a very hard-nosed, blue collar kind of vibe... similar to how I would think of the Baltimore Ravens.
I've recently moved to Chicago and heard mostly good things about Pittsburgh. As I've gotten more into baseball, the Pittsburgh Pirates (and their ballpark) have also changed my perception of the city. The Pirates are a great team and you never hear of any off-the-field issues from that team. PNC Park is also top 5 on my list of parks I'd like to go to.
It's naive that my perception of the city was/is based mainly on sports, but I've definitely read and heard lots of great things about the city, especially since moving up north to Chicago.
> This has been my perception of the city until recently. I grew up in Florida, and my perception of the city had been formed mostly/entirely by the Pittsburgh Steelers. The team (and city by association) has a very hard-nosed, blue collar kind of vibe... similar to how I would think of the Baltimore Ravens.
It is sacrilege to compare or equate the Steelers with the Ravens. You'd be thrown out of this town so fast.
Because even if it is "the Paris of Appalachia", it's still Appalachia. I'm sure the city has made great strides but the outside perception is still negative.
I bootstrapped my startup so I indeed never needed outside money (well rather never really tried given that we started during the 2000-2002 nuclear winter).
But if I had to do it again, especially in the current VC environment, I would raise money. It can be slow and tedious to bootstrap (took us 12 years to grow to 125 people and exit) and a lot of good startups in Pittsburgh seem eternally stuck in the seed stage.
Even if you do need to raise money, why is it a necessity to run your company out of the same city that your investors are in?
I've never had to personally raise money for a startup, but I see a lot of the face-to-face meetings starting off as warm email/phone intros. Even if you have to constantly travel to NY/CA/* to meet prospective investors isn't it still a better value to run a business somewhere with a low cost of living?
> Even if you do need to raise money, why is it a necessity to run your company out of the same city that your investors are in?
It's almost never necessary but try telling an investor that. The amount of investors that said no to the start-up I'm currently working at, simply because it was on the East coast (that was literally the only reason given), was simply astonishing. In a world where you can be anywhere in essentially, physically, in less than a day (typically hours domestically) or instantly digitally technology investors would stick their noses up due to physical location.
I love SF but it just didn't make sense at the time and it's still insanely expensive there!
> "digitally technology investors would stick their noses up due to physical location."
Either they're correct, although there seems to be no logical reason why or any sane rationalization for it, or they're leaving great piles of money on the table for more open minded investors to snatch up, or they're not really in it for the money (retirement hobby, its for social signalling, etc).
I can see that. Imagine you're someone like Sequoia with "1,156 Investments in 664 Companies" according to crunchbase. It would do your head in flying all over the country to see them all.
Maybe the answer is to come to where the money is for raising and then set an office back home.
The problem is you'll be putting out a 5 persons team, hope you don't get a Silicon Valley competitor who hires a 50 persons teams and spends ad money with their VC funding.
I guess I forgot that not everyone is doing something because they're passionate about it and are willing to stick it out in the long haul (supposedly that is "tedious" nowadays). They're in it for the fame or "billionaire status" or whatever high hopes they wish to achieve.
But here's what's hilariously ironic for OP: After achieving that mystical billionaire status, what would he likely end up doing?
Serious chance he buys a plot of land outside of Pittsburgh with a dog and yard for his kids and now grandkids. All things he can already afford to do right now!!
Call me old fashioned, but I just don't get the point of that exercise.
It's amazing that Pittsburgh hasn't evolved past the bad rap. A cousin of mine moved there in the early 80s, and it was already rated one of the best cities in America to live in.
It's interesting that CMU just isn't enough to help the scene. Silicon Valley and Manhattan are hard to beat for access to money, personal ambition and risk appetite.
I hear you on the cost of NYC. It's a city that sucks every dollar out of bankers and hedge fund traders - everyone else can only just run the treadmill.
You didn't read the qualifier: "released to the founders". It means that CMU didn't pursue the tech we invented there. So we were free to go out and do something with it as long as we gave them a small chunk (though nobody knew what that was).
I for one "treat the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users" in SF and I can tell you, the permitting process is not the biggest problem.
It's costs.
Commercial rents have skyrocketed. Moreover, residential rents have skyrocketed to the point where few people in the service industry can afford to live in SF at market rates. Even if you can find a space, how are you going to staff it? Who's willing to commute in from Oakland (which is getting expensive too) for a low wage job with grueling hours?
Nopa, one of the most successful SF restaurants in the past 10 years, is posting job ads for cooks on their menus now.
This isn't because of a slow permit process. Nopa hasn't applied for a permit in years. It's a result of the macroeconomic effects of a tech boom. So while I'm very happy to see PG highlight macroeconomic factors that foster economic growth in cities, I see a missed opportunity to fully address their complex effects.
This is probably because this issue has been politicized here in SF, with the tech industry often lambasted for "destroying" the city (this comes from a lot of the people getting pushed out), so tech folks often get hyperdefensive and contort themselves trying to point fingers elsewhere. I think that's what's happened here with PG trying to blame the government's permitting process.
But clearly if we want to continue making SF an attractive startup hub, we need to help "little restaurants and cafes" continue to open and operate. And the elephant in the room there is quite simply the high rents and high cost of living for workers in the service industry, driven by a huge influx of wealthier residents competing for space. You want a startup hub, you need city policies that manage that growth.
Yep. San Francisco no longer has marginal spaces -- every conceivable inch of it has been claimed, developed, and/or bid into the stratosphere. And it has nothing to do with "NIMBYs" or lack of development. It's a tiny, tiny patch of land, all of the build-able portions of which have been speculated upon since the early 20th century. This is important, because while cafes and universities and whatnot are important, you need marginal spaces to be a creative hub. Creative people tend not to be wealthy. They need affordable, amenable places to live and work. And San Francisco doesn't fit the bill -- unless you have connections, power, fame or access to unlimited capital. Which is why SF is suffering right now.
The last time this city was on discount was probably the late 1980s, when SOMA was a wasteland and everyone wanted to live in the suburbs. And surprise surprise...along came the first dot-com boom. All of those (comparatively) cheap spaces where creative kids were having raves and making art became the birthplace of the modern web. Creativity happens in marginal spaces.
I was actually surprised that pg kept emphasizing the need for constraints on development in this essay ("The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.") The conventional wisdom around here is that we must refer to this kind of thinking as "NIMBYism", and condemn it as backwards-thinking. "Obviously," says the technorati, "we should be knocking those tiny old buildings down and replacing them with skyscrapers!"
But he's right. San Francisco was once a cheap, pleasant place to live, precisely because of those sorts of constraints, coupled with demographic trends. But it's at a different point in the development curve today. It isn't for scrappy, poor innovators anymore. It's for ambitious, get-rich-quick types who will tolerate paying $4,000 a month for an apartment to be part of the scene. And as soon as the scene moves somewhere else, those people will be gone, too.
When I walk around SF, I see a lot of underdeveloped spaces...abandoned buildings, abandoned gas stations, huge parking lots full of city trucks. Inexplicably, there's been a huge abandoned building on 18th and Mission (seemingly prime location) for I don't know how long. This article about it is from 2012[1].
So, yes, SF is a small space but it is far from being efficiently (or fully) developed and I think the SF Planning Department and other bureaucracies are partially to blame.
I think you're exaggerating when you say you see "a lot" of these spaces. There are some. And they're usually vacant for a reason that involves money. Or there's a more serious problem (like contamination).
For example, the reason that space at 18th and Mission was vacant is right there in the article you linked -- the landlord pushed out the previous tenant, and turning it into a grocery store required extensive renovation. It's not as if the space was sitting empty because nobody had a use for it:
"So when the 99-cent store closed — because of high rent, according to neighboring businesses — and the vacant building went on the market in May 2010, he seized the opportunity and bought it two months later."
But yeah, it would have been nice if the new owner allowed someone else use the space while waiting for his redevelopment plans to go through, instead of letting squatters turn it into a drug house.
I agree, there are waaaaaay too many parking lots in SF. If you covered every parking lot in the city with a 4 story multi-use building, what impact would that have?
Yeah, cities that are not in the active earthquake zone lovingly called The Ring of Fire. Remember, the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge cost 1 million per foot of road up to it.
Actually, much of the city isn't a city but a suburb. If you stand on Twin Peaks looking south, you will not see a single part denser than New Jersey. There is plenty of room above SF that is not used.
Yes, you're right. And that's one of the most ironic parts of the SF development debate: the folks who complain about "NIMBY opposition" the loudest are (usually) talking about already dense neighborhoods, like the Mission, when they should be thinking about the Outer Sunset or Laguna Honda.
That said, it doesn't change my point: to change the density of these places, you have to buy out a bunch of people who know exactly what their land is worth if it's zoned for higher density. Many of them are actually betting on that windfall. There is no equivalent in SF to the vast tracts of undeveloped land in, say, Texas.
That is an excellent point, however, part of the reason those areas are not as densely developed is that the transportation infrastructure sucks.
And how to fix it? It takes a long time and a lot of investment to improve public transport, but it's challenging when the need for it is driven by short-term boom-bust tech "bubble" cycles. Makes it harder for the city to invest when demand might go poof in a year.
PG was wrong to say that you cannot be too strict about historic preservation because it leads to the exact problem we have in SF right now -- there is no physical reason this city can't be more dense and remain beautiful (look at Paris for an example of how this might be possible), but there are many, many political reasons.
There are also economic reasons. Parisian density is only possible with a great underground transportation system. That's hugely expensive to build and takes decades. SF has traditionally been a boomtown economy with corresponding bust cycles, so it's harder to make those kinds of investments. They are happening (e.g. the Chinatown extension) but more conservatively.
Saigon where I'm back from is building a light rail to the center with twenty odd 30-40 story residential blocks along it. The whole thing is taking about 2 years to build.
That kind of thing is good for preserving historic buildings too - the blocks are all in nondescript areas 1-4 miles from the center.
I'm mainly just talking about the density -- many more people fit into less space than in San Francisco. And its both an option for us to build up, and build in -- we could close down some of our wider car-oriented streets and build walking/biking oriented roads.
I look at SF and I see the strangest thing. Many new buildings that are built at 4 stories max. A big innovation is to give a whole 2 story density bonus! Wow 2! I know of small towns of 250'000 that build buildings that are 20 stories regularly!
12 SFH homes on a block can be purchased for $30 million, have 400 unit buildings built on them and make far more than that selling it off. Then take the massive increase in property tax revenue and use it to fund an expanded rail system with right of way. But they can't do it effectively because of the law.
Build 250 of those 400 unit buildings and you will have filled the 100'000 unit backlog. 250. You can easily fit them all 0.5 miles from bart and muni tunnel stations. Everyone knows the solution, the planning department and SF NIMBYs don't want to happen, and they fight it hard.
250 high rises wont even make SF approach hong kong or manhattan levels. Not even 1000 of them. SF and it's people has it's head so far up it's ass it's comical.
Maybe we don't want to continue. Maybe the insane rents will cause closures of a lot of the places that make SF attractive to the tech workers, and slowly SF will become less of a destination for them, and they will start flocking to other places instead of to SF. And then maybe tech companies will have to open offices elsewhere and the situation will equalize itself that way. But then I'm not personally invested in SF staying a tech hub.
Would be nice. There are network effects, though, that make this less likely. If prices "succeed" in driving people out, prices will fall to the point that people come back in (as long as the network of money and jobs stays intact).
Maybe it shouldn't be such a low wage job, if [good?] talent is in short supply?
Just a thought.
I for one would be happy to pay higher prices, if it meant we could avoid the whole 20% restaurant subsidy (tips) song and dance. Charge me a fair price and I'll pay you a fair price. There's no need for the whole "And oh yeah, we don't pay our staff enough so you're a bad person if you don't pay extra".
SF restaurant prices have in fact already gone way up. ("The biggest factor: labor") [1]
It doesn't sound like you're actually offering to pay higher prices. You just want tipping built into the base price. There are restaurants experimenting with this, but it generally doesn't make them more money. [2]
You're talking about serving/wait staff, whose hours are significantly shorter and wages (including tips) are significantly higher than cooking staff, which is what the parent comment was actually talking about.
Born in Pittsburgh, raised in Pittsburgh, started (and failed, 2009-2014) my own company in Pittsburgh, currently have an excellent tech job in Pittsburgh and am going to launch the beta product of my new company (YC reject) in Pittsburgh in June.
So. First off, I nearly cried reading this headline, and did tear up reading it. So whether or not he reads this, thanks, Paul.
Second. To the hard work of it all. I agree with every point he made, with the caveat that Pittsburgh needs to be careful with the historic preservation aspect of things: they vascillate between 'hey let's forget all of our history and blow this place up' to 'we must preserve every nook and cranny exactly as it was, even though it's detrimental towards progress'.
We could also stand to improve tax policy (lower them, significantly), and get our major employers here to knock it off with their ridiculous IP agreements. Also, I'd love it if our politicians stopped directly trying to ape Silicon Valley (or New York, or perhaps most ridiculous, the Paris of Appalachia). Let's be Pittsburgh.
Here's the thing that perhaps Paul missed when he was here, and perhaps others who aren't here can't see: I feel we've reached a critical mass of people who just DGAF (in a good way), because the opportunity costs of testing out your vision here are so low. By that, I mean that you can try out your weird (read: innovative) vision of the future, and no one bats an eye. On top of that, if you are producing a signal, it's much easier to cut through noise here. I spent a fair amount of time interviewing in SF for startup gigs, and it's not a good value proposition compared to here, to me. Finally, while the investment scene is terrible, that can be very beneficial to the right founder, because obviously one will retain more for themselves, and one don't NEED very much capital to get started in Pittsburgh. I bought my first house for $80,000 in 2013. 4/2, hardwood throughout, 1944 brick single family, 2 car garage, yard, granite, stainless, wine fridge, etc, in a good neighborhood. It's that cheap here. Anecdotal, but if you're smart with your money here, you can build your own runway.
All of that said, I'm hoping it happens. More than that, I'll work for it to happen. Onwards and upwards, fellow Yinzers. And Let's Go Bucs.
If you're not set on living in the city, housing is fantastic in the Pittsburgh area.
I live 20 minutes from Downtown and I bought my house for $74,900 in 2008. 3/2, two car garage and driveway sitting on about 1/8 of an acre.
It blows my mind when I hear how much money people are paying for housing in bigger cities. The salary would need to be significantly higher to make it worth my while to move to a place like SF or NYC to take a job.
Additionally, this area is fairly centrist politically. Sure, it's Democrat heavy but there are a lot of conservative, blue collar Democrats that balance out the urban intellectual Democrats and we have a small but intense Republican population so we never go too far in any direction. That's an intangible thing that is very important to me.
The low cost of living, the low housing costs, the abundance of college educated professionals and the variety of experiences around would make this place attractive to all kinds of people. It could become a startup hub. I'm not sure I want to see that but I'm also not blindly opposed.
> Additionally, this area is fairly centrist politically.
I spent three months crossing the US in 2009 as a tourist. I had developed a light-hearted measure of the patriotism of an area by how many US flags were seen in suburban front yards. Before I visited Pittsburgh, I had rated '1 house in 4-5 with a flag' as a very patriotic area on this scale. Then I hit Pittsburgh, and the area where my hotel was had one house in 4-5 that didn't have a little US flag planted somewhere in the front yard. Even the local cemetery was bestrewn with Old Glory all over the place... :)
Snagged my house in Morningside, which is in the city. You can still get pretty inexpensive houses throughout the East End, but you'll need to put in some elbow grease. Average prices seem to be around $200,000 for a decent home in the city. $500,000 and it's a move in ready palace.
"and get our major employers here to knock it off with their ridiculous IP agreements"
What's Pennsylvania like for non-competes? I often think what a state or province could do for startups would be to shift to California style non-competes.
Agreed. I've just gone about it by refusing to sign the IP agreements, OR by editing the document to say that anything I do on my own time is mine. Have yet to run into an issue with those approaches.
I wonder how much innovation here is stifled because there are still only a handful of major employers, and all of them have blanket IP agreements. Frankly, if I was running UPMC, PNC, or Highmark, I'd set up a VC arm and encourage any employee with a good idea (related to the industry) to start a company with seed capital from the VC arm. UPMC is KIND OF doing this (I work for them now), but they're not quite there yet, and it doesn't seem like current employees can swing over there to start their own company easily. Still, I think they're headed down the right path.
There are some big things happening in Pittsburgh:
Code & Supply (http://codeandsupply.co) is growing very quickly. It is just more than two years old and has nearly 2,200 members of its Meetup group. It holds 6-10 meetups per month, ranging from language talks to toolkits, WiFi, mental health, design, career management, and more.
C&S is hosting Abstractions (http://abstractions.io), probably the largest ever software conference in Pittsburgh. It's in August and will likely sell out of its 1,500 tickets at the current rate (40% sold as of this writing). We've got big names speaking, like Stallman, Zeldman, Sandi Metz, Scott Hanselman, Mike Montiero, Raffi Krikorian, Mitchell Hashimoto, Joe Armstrong, Larry Wall, Allison Randal, Aaron Patterson, Jono Bacon, Kelsey Hightower, and lots more. The full lineup will be announced in May.
Disclosure: I am an organizer of both.
There are lots of other meetups that are big, too. PGH Python just merged into C&S. The PGH FP meetup is growing quickly, too. Pittsburgh hosted Midwest UX last year and Pittsburgh Web Design Day is a pretty big event.
TL;DR the Pittsburgh software community is booming.
Finished grad school at CMU last year. Loved coming to all the C&S meetups I possibly could when I had the time (and enjoyed the exercise hoofing it up to Squirrel Hill from Shadyside). Thank you for organizing such a great community along with Justin Reese.
- One of the most affordable places to live in the U.S.
- Large number of top tier universities within 3 hours (Univ of Texas, Baylor, TCU, SMU, UNT, Texas A&M, UTD, UTA)
- Massive amount of wealth/wealthy investors, who, are starting to put their wealth into more and more seed start-ups
My point is, many cities all fit the same criteria as he listed. But until the people IN those communities move to make it happen, it won't.
In the last 3 years, I've seen a magnitude increase in Start-up/entrepreneur activity happening in Dallas. And I believe much of the criteria PG said is right and a good part of the reason, but those things won't just "make" it happen.
Dallas misses on a few of pg's key points: it's a sprawling driving city, lack of a top university, and a red state culture.
> Pittsburgh is fortunate in being a pre-car city. It's not too spread out. Because those 25 to 29 year olds do not like driving. They prefer walking, or bicycling, or taking public transport... Cities where you can get around without driving are just better period.
> Pittsburgh has something Portland lacks: a first-rate research university. CMU plus little cafes means you have more than hipsters drinking lattes. It means you have hipsters drinking lattes while talking about distributed systems. Now you're getting really close to San Francisco.
> The culture of Pittsburgh is another of its strengths. It seems like a city has to be very socially liberal to be a startup hub, and it's pretty clear why. A city has to tolerate strangeness to be a home for startups, because startups are so strange.
I wouldn't associate "red state culture" and a particular city in that state together. Remember, Austin is a city in Texas.... The 4 major cities in Texas in fact are either well mixed or liberal (Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio).
I hardly move my car on the weekends, get around just fine. My current job I have to commute by car (actually I could ride the train technically...), but many people walk/use public transportation. There is even an entire underground tunnel network between most of the buildings downtown...
Also, what is your definition of a "top university"? Ivy?
Also fun fact...Dallas has the largest public transit system in the nation as far as length of track.
That last fact is a negative. You maximize track miles by having sprawl connected with trains. That's not what you want. Number of riders per mile of track is a much better metric.
I understand that, I was mentioning that because it's interesting, not to say it's better than others. It's an interesting fact because it shows how much of a massive area the Dallas metro is. It's fun to take the DFW area and overlay on other metros on a map. I wouldn't call it negative either. The potential Dallas has BECAUSE we have so much more room to grow is why I stay here.
Dallas has the largest light rail system in the nation by length of track. New York, DC, San Francisco, and Chicago all have larger rail transit systems overall.
>In Texas there's UT and to some extent Rice... neither in Dallas.
How do you mean "to some extent Rice"?
Rice is #18 in the US News ranking of top colleges in the US and has a 17% admission rate--the highest rated univ in Texas. It has a top-notch CS dept, most particularly well known for its compiler research.
Disclaimer: I did not attend Rice, but know several people who attended its CS program.
It doesn't have to specifically a CS research university... A good research university does much more than CS. I'd argue that having a great CS research university in close proximity is somewhat irrelevant to creating a great startup hub. Startups are SO much more than just tech.
Yes, there is. UT Dallas is third ranked public school in Texas and a top tier STEM research school. Dallas is perhaps best suited for building a company.
Length of track is completely unrelated to the quality of the system. It's something you could be proud of for sure... But it's still completely unrelated to the quality of the network.
"I wouldn't associate "red state culture" and a particular city in that state together"
You might not, but many of the people you're trying to recruit will. I realize it may not be accurate but there's a perception that Texas is universally horrible except for Austin, at least if you're left of center or want urban living. It doesn't matter if that perception's wrong if it means you never even talk to your potential candidate to say how great Dallas is.
Also, having the most track is a dubious distinction, just as having the most miles of road would be; that makes it sounds like commutes are long too. Interestingly a lot of the earliest suburbs weren't enabled by the car but by rail; San Diego and Los Angeles both have neighborhoods (now considered pretty close-in) whose construction was really enabled by rail.
I've only been to Dallas a couple times, but it seems like the soul of the city is in the suburbs.
Downtown seems dreary and dismal; it has the potential to be exciting, it's quite a beautiful area — but so few people! Scattered coffee shops and restaurants, but I felt like I could've been literally anywhere else.
Back in the 80's they pretty much highway-locked downtown (surrounded it with highways) and killed off a lot of the urban/livability. However much of that is changing/has changed. Downtown actually has people out at night. When you include Deep Ellum and Uptown (right next to downtown), though places are really active. I go out a lot at night...(too much)
I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is... but the suburbs of Dallas (Plano, Irving, Mckinney, Richardson) are most definitely not rural by any definition. Suburbs...yes...I'd even say dense suburbs at that.
I think you've nailed it with regards to Atlanta--I quite like Atlanta and have a lot of friends there (when DragonCon rolls around I stay an extra 3-4 days on each side of it to hang out with my local friends too), and I'd love to move there except I would almost have to have a car.
Dallas is a little different in that its suburbs are fairly dense, but you have to go there, and...car again. And, for me, life is way, way nicer without a car.
I lived in downtown-Midtown ATL without a car for several years, and currently reside in Midtown as well. We're a family of five, and drive maybe once a month. It is definitely possible, but you have to be extremely committed, make heavy use of on-demand/gig economy services, and incur considerable expense in structuring your life that way. I made (and make) a point of living near a MARTA station and other compromises many folks may not be willing to make. Wife + newborn + two stepkids in a 1200 sq. ft. 2 BR apartment is one of them--nothing terribly unusual by my native Eastern European standards, but probably stands out in America.
For most people, the biggest problem would be commuting to work. Since I'm self-employed and can choose where to have an office (yes, I do have one), I have one within walking range.
Yeah, I get you. What you describe makes sense, from talking to friends who live there; only one friend of mine down that way seems to have any luck with that approach, and he lives in Buckhead and a lot of his Uber travel gets comped by his job.
I really like the city, but I think any benefits I'd get from a cheaper area (because Boston is not cheap) would be drowned out by the need for a car or the expenses from not having one. MARTA's pretty nice though.
PS. I took a look at your sig & web site; looks interesting! We should get in touch and maybe catch up next time you're in town for Dragon*Con. Drop me a private message of some sort? (same username on Twitter)
My aunt and uncle live in Dallas, and I could imagine if I moved there I would just make sure to be near a Dart station. Like others have said, it is fairly comprehensive for a commuter rail line.
Maybe, but Plano, at least, looks like car country to me. I used to live on the end of one of the better commuter rail lines in the country. I still needed a car, and I hated it.
Indeed! By global standards, it's completely preposterous. 5.5m people should be crammed into 1/10th of the surface area occupied by Metro Atlanta. At most. The downtown area is interesting, but has no imaginable relevance to the lives of 90% of Metro Atlanta residents.
If you want a "downtownish" area of Atlanta, Midtown is really the place to look, a little over a mile north of the official Downtown. It has a lot more residents and consistent pedestrian traffic. I lived there for a few years in the 2000s and it felt very bustling to me. I almost never drove anywhere either.
Now, Downtown Atlanta is often crowded, but it's basically a giant convention center, so it depends on when there are conventions. There are approximately 10,000 hotel rooms within a few blocks of each other, so when it gets crowded it becomes very crowded .
Streetsblog's Parking Madness is an interesting tournament they run discussing cities that have been destroyed by parking craters. I know a lot of people disagree with me but I really think that when you have these levels of parking the city itself is gone, destroyed and replaced by suburb, or maybe some other human/auto organizational structure we need a new word for.
Yeah, but are people in Dallas truly open minded? I've never lived in Texas but from my understanding, Austin is the only place in Texas which really fosters an truly open thought process. Without that, it doesn't matter how many of the other elements a city has.
If by open minded we mean writing off 26 million people because they live in a geographical area that's different than yours (and perhaps hold religious views, "quelle horreur!"). But what you really mean by "open minded" is "votes for Democratic politicians". And lucky for you, Dallas (just like all of those other bastions of conservativism, San Antonio and Houston) has a mayor who is a member of the Democratic party!
To be fair, he said he hasn't been to Texas, implying he is not familiar with it, and was only asking a question. He wasn't throwing out stereotypes as truth, just fro what he has heard.
I mean..if you ask half the people in Europe they still think we ride horses everywhere...
I've actually lived in Boulder, CO. and I think Austin is more "hippy" than Boulder...I know...crazy but that was my experience. I'd say Dallas is pretty well balanced as far as number of republicans/democrats.
The horror is when such people use their biased views to impose un-American legislation to strip rights and freedoms from other people because it satisfies their fear of anyone who thinks differently than themselves. Texas has an established track record in this domain.
Remind me when the good people of Dallas stripped the rights and freedoms of any people, besides banning fracking in 2013?
For god's sake, they passed a law prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity/sexual orientation in 2002. That's 10 years before Barack Obama realized that same-sex marriage was a fundamental American right.
Ctrl-F "dallas" on that article mostly leads to things like "LGBT Protections: Housing, public accommodations, city employment, private employment, city contractors"
In the city, yes, absolutely.
Now if you go out way into the suburbs and the country....well..they don't call it the bible belt for nothing...
Note: I'm not knocking on Christians..I am one myself. Just saying a lot of the people out there are not as accepting. However I have found a larger percentage of "nicer" people here than in other places I've lived.
"nicer" is hard to define in words though...so I'll leave it at that.
This is speculation, but like most parts of the U.S., I'd suggest that maybe it's more an urban/rural split than anything else. Texas has its pockets of reasonableness and progressivism (and outside of Austin, too--I quite like San Antonio, Dallas is fine, and while Houston is best described as a highway in a swamp a million lanes wide that you merge across to get anywhere, it's a very tolerant community with a gay woman as mayor from 2010 to 2016, when she was term-limited). When you get out of where the money and the people is, it may be different (never been), but the urban areas aren't much different from any other urban area in that regard.
I've lived in small towns in Texas, and I've only found good natured people. Small town life is different. It's a little bit slower, I never had to deal with traffic, and I could drive anywhere in town in 5 minutes. But even my medium sized hometown (pop 60,000) stocked vegan cupcakes in the town bakery. Maybe it's not as progressive as Austin, but I don't appreciate how everybody else in the world writes it off as a joke.
I'm sure the evil bigots living somewhere, but I don't know where.
Did you notice anyone openly gay or transgender there? One of the issues with small towns is that you end up thinking people aren't racists, bigots, whatever because there just aren't that many people there for them to discriminate against. I grew up in a small town and thought it was open minded and didn't realize how wrong that was until I was older when I would listen to political conversations in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops how much mindless hatred was hiding beneath the surface.
> Large number of top tier universities within 3 hours
I know in Texas driving 3 hours is a moderate commute, but UT is literally in another metro area. If you read the article, PG mentions Stanford and Berkeley not being downtown as a liability compared to CMU and they both have reasonable public transit options to downtown SF.
Hmmm. Does he even reference the fact that the SF Bay Area was the recipient of massive amounts of government and government contractor money?
And what about the free-wheeling, non-traditional culture (embodied in the Homebrew Computing Club)?
These two factors created Silicon Valley. Federal money subsidized the semiconductor boom, which brought a lot of technical expertise to the area. Then the open-minded culture created the perfect environment for entrepreneurship.
It seems like the formula for success is:
(1) Massive exogenous funding (on scale only the federal government can do)
+
(2) A highly open-minded culture that accepts failure as an inevitable part of creation.
Honestly, there's just not a lot of places that qualify. Pretty much all of the east coast, mid-west, and south are too conservative. And nowhere is really receiving massive loads of external funding like the Bay Area did in the 20th century.
To be fair, Pittsburgh gets a lot of external government money through DARPA grants to General Dynamics and CMU. I had a friend (working on DARPA contracts at General Dynamics) who told me "wearable computing is going to be huge". This was in 2007. 2007, before the iPhone even came out. In general, the military seems to know about things 10 years before Silicon Valley gets ahold of them, who knows about them 5-10 years before the rest of America does, who (until recently, with China's resurgence) knows about them 5-10 years before the rest of the world.
Other huge innovations first funded by DARPA: multitasking (1963), the Internet (1969), the GUI (1968), GPS (1978), self-driving cars (2004).
“I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.”
Excerpt From: Walter Isaacson. “The Innovators.”
It's harder to see these roots now, but for a long time military-industrial competitiveness was a huge driver of advancement in the field
> the military seems to know about things 10 years before Silicon Valley gets ahold of them
I think it's more accurate to say that the military (and academia) are working on technology X for at least a decade before it's mature enough to commercialize.
Interesting to hear so much good about CMU: Long the president there was one of my Ph.D. dissertation advisers.
> Honestly, there's just not a lot of places that qualify.
I'm not so sure location has much to do with it or that there is much a location can do that would help.
But for places:
Sure, within 100 miles of the Washington Monument.
Federal spending? Awash in it. For technology? Same.
Universities? Johns Hopkins, Maryland College Park, Maryland Baltimore County, Catholic, American, Georgetown, George Mason, VPI, UVA.
VCs? There are some.
There is Boston with Harvard and MIT and no lack of Federal research spending. And lots of VCs and bigger bucks, too.
Then, sure, there is NYC:
Universities? Columbia, Rockefeller, and NYU and a new, growing tech educational center on Roosevelt Island.
VCs? Plenty of them, and bigger bucks, too.
Can make a good case for a large fraction of the college towns around major US universities, e.g., the Big Ten.
Maybe the bottleneck is elsewhere, say, finding the next Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Sun, Google, Facebook? If there is one and it goes through YC, then it's not in stealth anymore and, if it looks really good, can set up shop the same place as that 900 pound gorilla -- anywhere it wants to.
Net, I'm not sure location has much to do with it. And I'm not sure that the 25-29 age range PG has in mind is now the most promising. And, net, net, IMHO the bottleneck is just better ideas.
> And what about the free-wheeling, non-traditional culture (embodied in the Homebrew Computing Club)?
Not much mention of government funding, but there is this:
"A city has to tolerate strangeness to be a home for startups, because startups are so strange. And you can't choose to allow just the forms of strangeness that will turn into big startups, because they're all intermingled. You have to tolerate all strangeness."
> If an investor community grows up here, it will happen the same way it did in Silicon Valley: slowly and organically.
I love this. I'm in Kansas City and find myself constantly cringing at the number of projects that all try to be a silver bullet that will magically transform the startup ecosystem here or in any other midwest city. If you want to make some place a good place for startups, then you have to play the long game.
You can't be beholden to any political cycles. You can't jump on the startup bandwagon because it's suddenly fashionable. You can't run for the hills as soon as the economy takes a substantive dip.
The only answer is to put your head down and try to build whatever you can, and stick with it. If a large number of people do that, then over time, good things will happen.
I took note of a post Katrina suggestion to bring aid to New Orleans by opening a large federal office there (whoever was making the suggestion pointed out that DC had plenty of federal spending and the difference showed).
Pittsburgh has a lot going for it, and it's been really cool seeing the growth since I moved to Pgh in 2009.
I think the one thing it might have against it is a growing anti-gentrification/tech movement. It's nothing like throw-rocks-at-busses San Francisco, but you do see things like this graffiti:
And it's not just the fringe with these views, but (in my experience) reasonable people who are frustrated with rising rents and they scapegoat tech growth.
The housing market is also a little wonky. Pittsburgh is cheap on average, but it's sort of bimodal -- there are nice new shiny apartments being built, especially around Google (Bakery Square) and thereabouts, but they're going at maybe 1.5-2x the median rent. Then the rest of the apartment stock is just a little... old. I took for granted having parking and laundry and post-1950s wiring when I was on the west coast. There are a bunch of places here that haven't been renovated in 50 years.
In any case, I agree with PG that there's a certain pragmatism here and I think really great things are coming if the growth continues.
> I took for granted having parking and laundry and post-1950s wiring when I was on the west coast
having lived in both sf and la, you really can't expect many rental places to have all 3 of these things (or even 2, really), except the newest developments. most buildings in both cities are cheap-ish mass housing built in the 40s-70s. the new stuff gets a lot of attention but is a tiny fraction of the city.
That's true... but I think it just depends on the market. I lived one year each in Mountain View and in Hillsboro, OR (a Portland suburb near Intel's campus), and while Mountain View was competitive, Hillsboro had oodles of nice, modern places ready right away. I ended up in modern (< 20 yr) construction in both cases.
I'd still say average housing quality in both markets is much better than in Pittsburgh, at least in the neighborhoods near CMU (Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, etc). My current place was built in 1916, still has knob-and-tube wiring, and I considered it a good find. I'm moving to a 1950s building in August and I'm looking forward to having enough electrical capacity for a microwave.
All that said -- everyone should still consider moving here -- it's a beautiful city, with a lot of culture, and the housing market will eventually come to a better equilibrium!
A core difference is that in Pittsburgh, you can afford to renovate the knob & tube. In MTV, you can't afford the house in the first place. :) In Hillsboro, you get very reasonable, new blah blah housing, but when you decide to walk to the region's major employer, it's four miles away with half your commute on a fairly bleah road that goes around the airport. And, ah, it's a little culturally isolated unless you drive the 45 minutes to Portland.
No doubt, Hillsboro is not for the young and hip, nor anyone with a possible allergy to suburban un-culture or parking-lot-sprawl. A number of my coworkers commuted from downtown or the eastside (and MAX light-rail makes that pretty easy, modulo the time commitment).
But, eh, I didn't mean to turn this into an ad for PDX! One thing I do appreciate very much about Pittsburgh is the walkability. It's hard to beat a 45-minute walk through Schenley Park as a morning commute, at least in summer, and I have... 5?... coffeeshops and as many pizza places within a 15 minute walk. And, yes, if you're in a position to buy a house, there is a lot of character to be had.
Anyway, my views on the housing market may be slightly colored by PhD-student glasses (and the two-year west coast industry detour...). To anyone reading, do consider it here -- it's a very unique city.
I was under the impression that the Marcellus fracking boom (not tech) drove up prices and scarcity. It's only in the past year or so that I've seen for rent and for sale signs springing up everywhere. Now that fossil fuels collapsed, the housing market pressure is being released.
Im convinced that the next valley will happen in the place that can attract the most unmarried people ages 18 through 30. What do these people care about?
- night life
- high density urban living
- progressive local governments and freedom (drug and marriage decriminalization).
- good public transportation
- access to high speed internet
- good universities
As they grow older and get married, affordable and high speed public transportation will allow them to move without causing terminal urban sprawl.
I'm not sure where do you get the idea that people aging 18-30 care about those specific things. I assume Pew will have some statistics about interests and priorities for these ages but I wouldn't be surprised if those are not the main worries of the generation. Yes, urban living is on the rise and with it some of these list item will rise too (density, night life, high speed internet, public transportation...) but this is a trend that will affect most mayor cities in the US.
My guess? The "next valley" will be highly decentralized and a lot of big cities will act as innovation hubs.
Oh and remember that the valley happened well before the flock of young people to SF. Lot of factors played in, including the presence of well established semiconductor companies whose employees were far from the stereotype you are describing.
> The "next valley" will be highly decentralized and a lot of big cities will act as innovation hubs.
I would like it if you were right, but I think you are discounting the critical factor of being able to be face-to-face with somebody. I live and work in Boston, and while it's not SF, I am within a forty-five minute public transit ride of most of my clients and almost everybody from whom I could conceive of needing a favor or an intro. Meeting a potential investor at a coffee shop because they had a few minutes and you happened to be in the area is the sort of thing you don't get with distributed communities, and as much as the I find the Valley to be personally kind of odious, that's an unmistakable advantage.
And this is a problem that technology, hype to the contrary, doesn't seem ready or able to fix. Video chat is not a solution. It may never be a solution. Being able to sit down and talk to somebody is not replaced by talking at a screen (and while I love the current crop of VR tech, I think it will be as effective as Second Life in terms of meaningful telepresence).
> My guess? The "next valley" will be highly decentralized and a lot of big cities will act as innovation hubs.
Really? It seems to me like things are getting more centralized, rather than less. I recall reading (though I can't find the source right now -- on mobile; correct me if I'm wrong) that venture capital is more concentrated in the Bay Area now than it was in the dot-com boom.
This ignores the fact that the current Silicon Valley has none of these things. Palo Alto has a 3x4 blocks region of low density apartment buildings alongside storefronts, and that's all encircled by single-family residences.
Right now, only NY and Chicago (edit: and Boston) have anything in the US that really can claim to be high density. Most of the other "next valley" candidates are not set up to be high density, at all. The real test is that it should be easy for a person to have all of their needs and most of their desires met, while choosing not to own a car. They should not be unreasonably burdened by choosing that.
SF is barely passing that test IMO, being a non-car owning resident here, but it's getting better. The other city where that might possible is Portland, and from what I recall of Austin (it's been a while) it's not nearly dense enough to support this.
NYC and Chicago, but not Boston? You can live without a car very comfortably in the parts of the Boston metro connected by the T; in the old town and Cambridge, you're actively better off without a car. But I wouldn't bet on Boston becoming more of a startup hub than the modest extent to which it already is; it's too expensive...
Oh it's a well-known problem in the area. Most recently, people in Boulder were upset with the fact that Google wanted to expand and add something like 4000 jobs.
Heaven forbid a bunch of new tech jobs are added to your precious town, right?
I'm not a big fan of the 'privilege' stuff, but "too many good jobs" smacks of someone who's completely disconnected from the reality of a great many people in the world. Especially since I was living in Italy, with a 40% youth unemployment rate, at the time I wrote the above article. "Move to Greece if you want to experience the pleasure of a place without so many of those darn jobs!" is what I can't help but thinking.
I've lived in Boulder and San Francisco. Most people weren't upset, just a strong vocal minority. It is the same type of people that don't like tech jobs in San Francisco.
I lived in Boulder from '99 until late last year and still own a place there that I rent out. It really is a great place but culturally you start to feel like you've seen everything it has to offer after a couple years. You can't beat the outdoorsy stuff though.
I moved to Denver in December and really like what I see. Lots of startups as well as established companies, easy to get around, and great variety between the various neighborhoods.
Every urban area fits the bill. Once you have a dense enough city, night life and progressive politics are automatically included. Good transit, universities, high speed internet are all common enough.
I personally think there will be a decline in interest in traditional night life due to some neo-Luddism taking hold. We'll see more appreciation among young people for "long-form," delayed gratification pleasures like hiking and nature. So my bet is that CO will really start to take off in the next 30 years.
Agreed. I'd say that the 5+ dollar latte is going to run its course one day very soon. Modern young people have a slew of problems that previous generations cannot fathom. Some of my friends don't have cars - not because they don't want them but because they are financially cognizant. They are focused on paying off student debt asap. They have advanced degrees but are fighting insane competition to get jobs (I have a lot of academics as friends :) ). People have shifted their expectations of life, especially those without rich parents who can lend a hand. At gatherings, we fantasize about moving to cities with low housing costs.
What if you didn't have to attract the "most" 18 to 30 year olds? What if what you really needed was to attract an underserved niche of 18 to 30 year olds?
I think Atlanta or Nashville is ripe. Northeasterners can and do move to California already. Southerners are much less likely to do so imo. The rural market is grossly underserved right now. Almost none of the efforts to get people into computer science are hitting rural communities. I'd very much like to see that change.
To everyone proposing places like Nashville and Dallas - do you have any idea what it's like being a not-white person outside of the major coastal cities?
It's a miserable experience. You go from seeing a lot of people who look like you in the industry of your choice, to being one of a token few. Food and grocery options go from omnipresent to something you have to hunt down. The way you lead your life goes from something you take for granted to a difference that you must confront at every turn.
Good luck building the next Silicon Valley in a place that is not welcoming to multiculturalism.
That's definitely an important consideration. From what I've heard, Raleigh-Durham RTP actually has had a huge influx of immigrant engineers, and so is more diverse than one would expect from the South.
Shame about their recent legislative decisions, though.
The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is extremely diverse and multi-cultural. Between the major universities here (UNC, Duke, NCSU) and all the big companies in RTP (IBM, Glaxo, EMC, Cisco, etc.) people come from all over to work here or go to school here. And this area (colloquially, "the Triangle") is much different than most of the rest of NC in terms of being socially tolerant and inclusive.
Yeah, the whole HB2 thing was something of a stain on our state (OK, we're the laughing stock of the whole damn country, fine...) but that really does not accurately reflect what life is like in the Triangle area.
Raleigh/Durham is great in terms of cultural and employment diversity, and you can't beat it in terms of salary/cost of living. Most of the people outside the major cities and the elected officials are a ridiculous joke though.
However, from the perspective of having lived here for two years, Nashville neighborhoods (and social activities/nightlife) are highly segregated. The normal everyday full-spectrum multicultural mix that you tend to find in other cities simply doesn't exist here, IME.
> Northeasterners can and do move to California already. Southerners are much less likely to do so imo
The South is in dire need of at least one giant tech city. I can't be the only person who wants to stay here near family, but the lack of any world-class tech opportunities is extremely frustrating. My girlfriend doesn't understand why I keep wanting to move to the west coast — "Surely you can find a decent job somewhere in the southeast?" Yes, if "a job" is all that I'm looking for, then I can certainly find one. I think she's frustrated with my constant talk about jobs located outside of the South, but I don't really know how to explain the situation to her :/
There are mountains of tech Goliaths in the SE. If you look beyond social and gig, you will find very interesting and challenging scale companies. Most of the big retail chains(Home Depot), huge DoD and Federal(NASA, CDC, DARPA) opportunities, huge transportation(Air, Rail), infrastructure(ATT, VZ), GE's entire physical, firmware, and on-board development division(ie it has to work level smart people).
These are huge companies with bleeding edge technology problems and solutions, that also have ample vertical mobility.
Isn't Raleigh already a giant tech city? Even though apparently it's mostly located in a vast research park that's more South Bay than SF, and the tech companies are usually giants like RedHat, rather than startups?
I think Birmingham fits well in that list. We have a very low cost of living and our downtown is undergoing a huge revival these past few years. Great access to nature too.
We have 'Code for Birmingham' non-profit organization that works to build software for the city, a strong computer science department at the local major University (UAB), and a few tech incubators. We're lacking in the 'meetup.com' department of the tech scene, but the point is we're primed for an influx of entrepreneurs and startups.
How is the computer science program at University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa? Does it have a growing emphasis? Historically C.S. hasn't been big at SEC schools but I've no idea if that's still the case.
(I grew up an hour west of Knoxville. And have family in B'ham/Tuscaloosa.)
Not too sure. I just moved to the area 2 years ago so aside from basic rivalry knowledge I can only speak for UAB, where I graduated from. Excellent professors and a strong sense of community among the C.S. undergrads. Also home to a very active chapter of the ACM that holds upper-grad presentations for lower-grad students and regular one-on-one study sessions between the two.
Atlanta proper is super gay(I am a gay who grew up in the south), I think a few years back it was the highest percentage of any city in the country. The issue with Atlanta as others have said is it is hugely sprawly and the actual city doesn't account for that much of the 'metro area.'
State politics aren't really liberal, they just almost passed an NC style 'right to discriminate' or whatever law, but were smart enough to back down over the threats of the film production companies(GA has become a major film state of late).
The city is very racially diverse, but I dunno what the social politics are really like in general(tho I think the pearl clutching about living around ~conservatives~ is a bit overblown having grown up in that area of the country(TN)).
Plus Georgia Tech is there, so lots of smart computery folks around(from all over the world) in that part of ATL society.
Less liberal than the coasts. More liberal than their surrounding rural neighbors.
We talk about how women make up 50% of the population and if we don't hire women then we're leaving a lot of talent on the table. Well 50% of the country is conservative and if we don't hire conservatives we're also leaving a lot of talent on the table.
Conservatives are people too. Many who are incredibly smart, talented, and hard working. They shouldn't be overlooked.
I don't think that tech companies are discriminating against the more conservative parts of the country because they're conservative, per se, but because the more conservative parts of the country tend (with exceptions, like Utah) to have low levels of funding for attractive amenities like good public schools. I'm not going to draw causation arrows, but the correlation is sure there.
I don't think being expensive necessarily inhibits innovation and a vibrant culture.
Talking in broad generalizations here but:
I feel like Portland has the creativity and culture, but not the talent and intelligence. The Research Triangle has the talent and intelligence, but not the creativity and culture.
And there is a burgeoning tech industry in Austin...if the choices of my fellow tech industry recent college graduates relocation choices is a reliable anecdotal indicator. I found out a fair number of my acquaintances from college (University of California) took jobs and relocated to Austin.
"[B]urgeoning tech industry"? For what definition of "tech"? Dell and various semiconductor companies have been down there for decades. The games industry has had a strong presence since the mid-90s at least.
The startup scene might be considered burgeoning, but the tech sector in Austin as a whole is pretty well-established.
Moving from Austin (where I went to grad school) to NYC was eye opening on that score. The average rents had skyrocketed in Austin since I first moved there in 2008, but when I was living there I didn't fully realize how cheap it remains relative to NYC or SF. My friend is currently living in a 2 bedroom apartment in a nice part of town that costs around $900 per month (granted, not the greatest complex, but it has a pool and is 2 blocks from the new metrorail line). The city has changed a lot but the core things I liked about it are still there (natural springs to swim in, good camping and walking trails, Tex-Mex and BBQ, relatively friendly and interesting populace, active music scene). I'm surprised by how much I miss the quality of life in Austin relative to NYC.
Austin isn't even close to finishing its growth. It's currently "burroughing" out with me SoDoSoPa style mini-downtowns like The Domain and Mueller due to the awful traffic situation.
There's an issue with getting huge money still, but you can live cheap in the burbs and bootstrap to your heart's content.
If the REAL tech / hardware industry doesn't have a collapse, there will be no stopping the growth.
> If the REAL tech / hardware industry doesn't have a collapse, there will be no stopping the growth.
You're correct, but look at Detroit and look at the old steel and coal towns. There is always a collapse, and the collapses are happening in faster iterations as technology advances at a faster pace.
I've never used drugs, but am definitely more likely to move somewhere that has progressive drug policy, if for no other reason than that it suggests a reality-based approach to governance.
Uber is building a self-driving car research center in Pittsburgh. They hired most of the CMU self-driving car people. Supposedly they're going to renovate a railroad roundhouse in Hazelwood and use some of the empty space from the old coke plant for road testing. How's that working out?
In California, anything you do on your own time belongs to you, and the previous employer can't enforce most non-compete agreements. So you can leave and do a startup even if your old employer doesn't like it. That's an edge Silicon Valley has and no other state has had the guts to copy.
It took a long time for Sili Vally to become Sili Valley, and a confluence of factors.
CMU has grant money coming in. But CMU seems to pride itself on being Scottishly tight-fisted with how it treats the IP of faculty and students. And tight-fisted about everything else -- About a year ago I attended accepted student's day with my daughter (accepted to both Carnegie's College of Computer Science and Institute of Technology) and I got the distinct impression that CMU is not very flexible and is not very generous about much of anything -- kind of a state school attitude at private school prices. (My daughter chose MIT over CMU.)
So I think to make Pittsburgh work as a start-up hub, it will take CMU being a little more open, some more inventor-friendly IP laws by the state of PA, and patience. And somehow you have to keep the first generation of successful entrepreneurs around to be the VC's for the next generation.
It's a normal employment clause, don't freak out. Just fix it. Tell them that you would like your own projects excluded and your agreement should exclude your own personal projects as long as you inform them in writing of what those projects are.
It's not something to be appalled about. They aren't trying to be evil overlords.
About half of the 2015 graduates go to employment in the West/CA.
I'll add that I am not even a graduate in CS (I majored in Business), yet I know a lot of non-CS majors my year who have also moved out here.
California is where the prestigious jobs are. And that's what matters at the end. Is Pittsburgh capable of supporting a Silicon Valley? Not as long as Pittsburgh's weather remains the way it is, anyways.
I'll second that I found it strange that the brutal Pittsburgh weather wasn't mentioned. CMU, Cornell and MIT have an awfully hard time competing for graduate students in CS when the visit days have to be late March or early April (there can be nearly a sixty degree Fahrenheit difference once you include wind chill).
Brutal is pretty relative. I grew up about an hour north of Pittsburgh and moved into the city about eight years ago. I find Pittsburgh's weather to be abnormally sane for the area. Pittsburgh doesn't get the extremes that much of a Rust Belt gets. Even 35-50 minutes outside the city gets four or five times the snow. Sure, the temperature gets into the single digits for a couple of weeks (negatives with wind chill, but I've found there's not much wind in a Pittsburgh winter), but most of our summers don't exceed 90˚F. I can heat and cool a 1400 sq ft house for under $200/mo with gas heating and electric A/C, plus a house full of geeky electronics, a house inhabited by people who chronically forget to turn things off.
What's brutal to me? North Dakota. Montana. Maine. Vermont and New Hampshire. Northern New York and its Buffalo area.
Stockholm syndrome. Pittsburgh gets less direct sunlight per year than Seattle. 6 months of the year you basically can't go outside without freezing your face off. It's still snowing in April...
>Not as long as the weather remains the way it is, anyways.
Really? I like a lot about the California climate (and terrain) but this seems a level of geographical determinism that wasn't true until pretty recently. And arguably, even today, is influenced mostly by a fairly specific class of mobile/social/web companies.
For example, there's a huge amount of pharma/genomics and other forms of tech in the Boston area (and most of the big SV companies are adding or have added offices there as well). And Boston isn't exactly known for its weather--not that I actually mind it all that much most of the time.
By that logic, the desert southwest should be booming in tech. The weather is admittedly not to everyone's taste but a lot of people like it.
Pittsburgher who moved to Seattle here - would agree. As bad as Seattle weather is, Pittsburgh hits both extremes (ice and heat) and isn't predictable.
I'm a PhD student at CMU right now. We just went from 75-degree "wow, we skipped spring" weather a few weekends ago to snow last weekend. Who knows what next week will bring.
Keeps things interesting as long as you remain indoors!
There's plenty to complain about regarding Pittsburgh's gray, gray weather, but this up-and-down spring is wildly atypical for the area and not localized to southwestern PA. The same thing is happening in Ohio, across the rest of Pennsylvania, through New Jersey, and into the NYC area - and I'm sure in neighboring states as well.
This has just been a bizarre year. In New England, I swear someone mixed up the March and April buttons. March is usually crazy (but was pretty nice this year) and we're getting snow and gold grey days in April.
As a native Clevelander, I love the idea of the a rust-belt city becoming the next big startup hub. Unfortunately, I can't help but disagree with several points in this article:
Low cost of living: Sure, it's low compared to SF, but it is increasing at an alarming rate. Just look at how quickly housing prices have been rising the past few years. Maybe this isn't something to worry about - maybe it's just a sign that Pittsburgh is a place people already want to move to.
Bicycle/pedestrian friendly: This is a great point, but it seems unrealistic given Pittsburgh's geography - it's surrounded by mountains and can experience some pretty harsh winters. Those factors make it difficult to be friendly towards cyclists. The public transportation could be much better, but faces the difficulty of, again, the geography.
Culture: Now I don't mean any offense to anyone from Pittsburgh, but their culture (in my experience) has been anything but "tolerant". I visit Pittsburgh at least once every other month, and most people I meet there, unfortunately, are pretty racist. Now, it's perfectly possible that the people I have met there are a minority, but I'm just speaking about what I've observed.
There are also several great points that I agree with: the food scene in Pittsburgh is great (and growing!) (check out Butcher and The Rye if you have a chance) , great universities all near downtown (CMU, Pitt), several notable tech companies there as a foundation (Google, Uber, etc), and every time I visit there I am optimistic about the city, though I question whether or not it can become the next big Startup Hub.
Also, don't forget that there are other rust-belt cities that are experience a regrowth: Detroit and Cleveland. Pittsburgh is ahead in that race, but each city is unique, and who knows what the actual next Startup Hub will be.
Those are Hills dude, not mountains :) I am from the Pittsburgh area and the geography is tough for a cycling culture, but mostly because of extremely steep terrain. See Canton Ave.
Pittsburgh has a fantastic cultural scene. Performing arts, visual arts, it's all great and cheap.
I think the Elephant in the room is the weather. The partly cloudy weather pattern is tough for me. I prefer for more consistent sun (which I get in Boston or the West Coast).
The Andy Warhol Museum is fantastic. I go every time I happen to be in Pittsburg. Besides Wahrols and history of Andy Warhol they usually have a pretty good visiting exhibit.
Sadly, I don't travel to Pittsburg as much as I did post collage (used to go every year or so).
> Low cost of living: Sure, it's low compared to SF, but it is increasing at an alarming rate. Just look at how quickly housing prices have been rising the past few years. Maybe this isn't something to worry about - maybe it's just a sign that Pittsburgh is a place people already want to move to.
I find it to be largely opportunistic at this point. A correction of sorts, as the real estate was underpriced significantly in areas that 10 years ago were very rough. Middle class and upper middle class business owners saw opportunity to open storefronts in an area that may have been a little risky, but the caution turned out to be unnecessary. Those areas are booming now.
> I visit Pittsburgh at least once every other month, and most people I meet there, unfortunately, are pretty racist.
I'd be very interested to hear where in the city you are encountering this. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying it happens rarely. I know it's not really in the touristy areas, at least AFAIK.
I lived in PGH for 5 years and, unfortunately, I think he's right that there is a huge amount of racism in the area. It definitely wasn't most people I knew, but among people that grew up in the area it's definitely a thing.
Pittsburgh is one of the least diverse metro areas in the country (http://www.post-gazette.com/business/career-workplace/2015/0...) and it really is eye opening how segregated the city is when you live anywhere else. I discussed this with most transplants I knew there and they agreed. I think the effect of this was pretty apparent for my entire time there.
This makes me super sad, because I absolutely love PGH and am a huge booster of it. The lack of diversity was far and away the biggest draw back of living there for me.
Go out a county in any direction and the culture leans racist. But in Allegheny County, with a few exceptions, the level of racism seems more-or-less passive, a.k.a. Wendy Bell Racism (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wendy+bell).
I'm not saying that it's not a problem where it happens, but I guess I have the fortune/privilege of observing it so rarely despite living in an suburban borough that is 29.25% White, 66.51% African American according to the 2010 census. I admit that I don't patronize its lone business district very often.
In the city, though, I don't have incidents in my memory that I can cite as evidence that racism is "huge" in Pittsburgh. Big incidents are in the minds of many, e.g. Jordan Miles incident (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jordan+miles) and to my knowledge and memory, are the exception, not the rule. Then again, I spend most of my time in the East End, which is pretty segregated.
I do concede the lack of diversity in Pittsburgh's tech scene though. The only quantification I have of it is C&S's meetup attendance, which is approximately 10% people of color on average (women = 20%). The number of PoC attending have been slowly but steadily increasing but the number of women fluctuates. We're working on encouraging both demographics to attend!
Where is the actual evidence that strict historical preservation actually matters? The culturally important buildings tend to stay around whether they are "protected" or not...its really only at the margins where they do anything.
And those margins tend to be pretty ridiculous. Seattle, for example, has upheld historical preservation status on buildings that were completely vacant and had no discernible written history whatsoever. Things like old mechanics garages and derelict wooden apartment buildings that had already rotted through.
Strict historical preservation is nothing more than an anti-development attitude codified into law.
Let me give you two examples that show different things about preservation review. First, the idea that significant buildings usually survive, anyway, is emphatically not the experience here:
Secondly, preservation review is about more than saving beautiful or historically important buildings. It's also about maintaining an urban form -- about preferencing the existing built environment over modern, car-centric, suburban-style developments. See this example:
Wow, gas stations like that in an urban setting really are awful. But then again St. Louis has long sacrificed its neighborhoods for the ill-conceived benefit of automobiles.
I live less than half a mile from the new QuikTrip mentioned above. This part of the city isn't really what I'd call an urban setting. It has a sprawling Sheet Metal Worker's Union building a block wide, a Mack Truck dealership, and a 4-lane-wide street. http://i.imgur.com/QTHKGdu.jpg
OK, probably less objectionable in that context. [EDIT:] The existence of those two many-lane streets you mention probably explains the vacant lots so close to popular St. Louis destinations. Then again, it's kind of a wonder that any public-serving business could survive in the no man's land between I-64 and I-44. Whoever decided that either of those highways, let alone both, should be routed as they are was a demented bastard.
That's right, of course, which is why the more interesting question is how could we let that corner get so bad that the best argument that can be made against a terrible development is that what's there is already terrible
> Where is the actual evidence that strict historical preservation actually matters?
In all the historic places you visit and that, in some parts of the world, add up to a significant amount GDP thanks to tourism or related activities. There are some intangible values as well as they help shape the history and evolve a community around specific places (think West Village, Manhattan for example).
I know it can be frustrating and that sometimes is poorly implemented but historic preservation of places eventually pays off. Maybe not all of the landmarked buildings will pay off, but sure some of them will(not unlike startups in that regard).
And what is not culturally important today might be a century form now, or viceversa. You are applying survivor bias. Think of all the historic places no longer with us because they were not deemed culturally relevant or properly protected in first place.
> In all the historic places you visit and that, in some parts of the world, add up to a significant amount GDP thanks to tourism or related activities.
How did ancient Rome ever survive to the extent that it exists today if they didn't have historical preservation statutes? It has a lot more to do with protecting their buildings from angry invaders than it does with protecting their buildings from developers. In reality, developers have little innate interest in destroying the culturally valuable...it is too expensive.
> And what is not culturally important today might be a century form now, or viceversa. You are applying survivor bias. Think of all the historic places no longer with us because they were not deemed culturally relevant or properly protected in first place.
It is true, I'm applying survivor bias. But you are applying a bias of your own. Think of all the future historic places that won't exist because they never get built. At least with my bias we can reason that the buildings that were torn down were, at one point in time, more of a burden than they were worth. Can you imagine not having Independence Hall today because historic preservation statutes decided to preserve all the historic Chestnut Street homes that were torn down for it?
> It has a lot more to do with protecting their buildings from angry invaders
Well, time changes. We no longer face the threats of the barbarian hordes of northern Europe but we have modern day speculators that will torn down anything for a profit and not think long term.
And again with the culturally valuable. What is valuable today might not be years from now or viceversa, that's why deciding what should be protected usually requires quite a lengthy process.
> Can you imagine not having Independence Hall today because historic preservation statutes decided to preserve all the historic Chestnut Street homes that were torn down for it?
Or having it two blocks up from the current location? But listen, I'm not arguing that everything should be preserved for ever. And I don't know any preservation society that thinks in those terms. What I'm saying is that deciding what gets preserved and what does not is a tough call and a very complex issue.
You asked where's the evidence that historic preservation, as a whole, matters. I'd argue its pretty evident. Yes you are right when you point out that the system can be abused but that doesn't diminish the importance of building preservation initiatives, specially in country that has a short history.
Also, no such thing as survivor bias when applied to hypotheticals, for obvious reasons.
> Well, time changes. We no longer face the threats of the barbarian hordes of northern Europe but we have modern day speculators that will torn down anything for a profit and not think long term.
You don't think those existed in antiquity? Now that is some survivorship bias.
> What I'm saying is that deciding what gets preserved and what does not is a tough call and a very complex issue.
Of course it is. All I'm asking for is to let the decision be made by the people with the skin in the game: the owners. Otherwise you get committees overrun with people who see it as nothing more than a tool to send "fuck you" notices to developers. Without skin in the game, there is nothing stopping them from being abused as an anti-development tool, and to the detriment of our current culture and quality of life.
> How did ancient Rome ever survive to the extent that it exists today
They had a shitload of buildings, and they made them out of stone, and they made many of them to last, and also the city was essentially abandoned for hundreds of years.
> historic preservation of places eventually pays off.
Historic preservation is no more than collecting, done by the government. There's no guarantee that what they collect will appreciate in value. For example, maybe they're preserving 1970's Kenner Star Wars toys, and maybe they're preserving the ones from 1999.
No guarantee, right. Just past experience. But even if there's no big payoff at the end, I'd argue it is important for the identity building process of a community or a nation. If 100 hundred years from now gov't finds out it has a worthless building, they can torn it down then.
Historic building preservation in NYC came about as a direct result of the destruction of the old Penn Station. If you've ever been to NYC via Penn Station you'll realize what a tragedy it was. The torn down station looked much more like Grand Central than a rat maze.
As always, laws are reactionary and laws can be abused for personal gain. But I don't think the idea of historically preserved buildings is fundamentally bad.
That seems like a pretty absurd historical designation. It's just creating a burden for the people who bought it. It's a far cry from bulldozing a beautiful old brick building to put in a McDonalds.
Edit:
> The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.
If you go a bit beyond the US, you could look at Europe and... I'm not sure that's true. Rome has a ton of old stuff that's been reasonably well preserved. Berlin has been torn apart and reinvented. Berlin is doing way better than Rome in terms of startups.
Granted, there are a ton of other factors in play, but if it were just about having a lot of historical stuff, Italy would be the startup capital of the world.
I think I get what he's talking about... you want architecture and places that feel 'real', not some homogeneous office park. On the other hand... most of Silicon Valley is very new, and not very exciting, and it did "ok".
>Rome has a ton of old stuff that's been reasonably well preserved. Berlin has been torn apart and reinvented. Berlin is doing way better than Rome in terms of startups.
So what city should we bomb to create the next startup hub?
That was obviously very facetious but there was a quote from the eighties or so when the Japanese were doing so well in manufacturing relative to the rust belt. One of the reasons proffered was that the Japanese had to rebuild their infrastructure from scratch after WWII. The quote was to the effect that the problems of American manufacturing wouldn't be solved by dropping an atomic bomb on Gary, Indiana.
You could throw Munich into the comparison too: it certainly was not spared during WWII, although it didn't have the subsequent cold war problems that Berlin did. It's wealthier than Berlin, but more conservative, and more expensive. Berlin seems to be emerging as one of the startup hubs of Europe.
I think if PG reformulated his point to something involving interesting architecture and places, it might be better. Although... even there, Silicon Valley doesn't/didn't have that at all, and it has prospered.
I'm not sure whether YC is actually that great for startup hubs outside of SF. After all, the most ambitious founders seem likely to just go through YC and then stay in SF because all the other ambitious founders have stayed in SF, the VCs are there, the talent is there. Yes, they could head back to Pittsburgh, but that's 2 moves for a fledgeling startup, and they have little to gain from the second.
It kinda reminds me of Front[0], another YC startup from France, which decided to eventually move their entire team to SF. I'd wager that the cultural differences in this move outshine those of a Pittsburgh-San Francisco move, and they still decided it was the most sensible option.
And if they are sucessful, you file them under SF startup instead of French startup, or Pittsburgh startup, or Berlin startup, because that's where they've spent the majority of their time, and that's where they are right now. Through some mental fudging, it becomes another data point for "If I want to start a startup, I need to go to SF".
Not sure if the venue, but why is UPitt left out here? CMU is great, but Pitt is also a world class research institution and with a first rate medical school and insurer already investing deeply in startups.
It's not a bad school by any stretch, but it's not on the same level. Looking at federal grant money (e.g. NSF, reasonable metric for research), U Pitt is at 26 million to CMU's 70 million. Penn is a much closer match at 48 million. Berkeley and Stanford are at 112 and 78 million, for comparison.
You can make 'world class' mean whatever you'd like, but I think most would consider Pitt a solid state-level school, whereas CMU is more competitive nationally.
I'm definitely not saying it doesn't matter, but it's not as significant as CMU, and PG's argument seems to be that you benefit from having a really apex research institution for making a startup scene.
You are correct that CMU and Pitt are not on the same level, but you have your dirctionality flip. Pitt is in top 10 in research expenditures nationally[1], I don't think CMU is even in the top 50. Don't ignore the significance of a medical school. NSF has a 7 billion dollar budget, but NIH is 30 billion. Don't even get me started on endowments.
Pitt+CMU == complementary research institutions that have had a long tradition of collaborating (for example the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) and BOTH provide strong intellectual anchors for the city. BOTH are significant.
NSF funding isn't really a fair comparison, because Pitt is most well known for its excellent medical research. $4.5 million in NIH funding at CMU vs $79.9 million at Pitt in FY2016...
Plus CMU and Pitt collaborate quite a lot, especially in biomedical research.
Funny, I just got recruiter spam promoting Lantern today, and the email mentioned the investment from UPMC (that’d be University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the med school & healthcare conglomerate, for those unfamiliar with the 412)
Somewhat unrelated, but a lot of people complain about Boston being too expensive, like SF or NYC, but honestly you can live downtown inexpensively if you live in Chinatown, or within subway distance if you live in Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, or Roxbury, which become cheaper (and less safe) in that order. You don't need to live in Cambridge / Somerville / Back Bay / Seaport.
If you are seriously considering moving to Pittsburgh or someplace similar because of cost, look at Boston, which is way closer culturally to Silicon Valley than any second tier tech city, and don't focus on living in the prime locations.
Boston is too expensive. Have you looked at real estate prices in Pittsburgh? You can easily get an apartment in a nice neighborhood for less than a bedroom in Dorchester.
Surprised no one has mentioned the gravitational effect these hubs have -- Sacramento will never really blossom in the tech industry because so much talent gets sucked into SF.
But as plane ticket prices go down, those areas get larger and larger. It's worth saying: "Pittsburgh, this is time sensitive! Boston will eat your lunch by default, so make your moves quickly."
Also, if plane trips get cheap enough, look at how the Hong Kong / Shenzhen area fares. Plenty of money and tech talent, and China's pushing a lot of VC money (although, who know where that ends up). If plane tickets get below the price of a video game console before an American city pops up as a cheap-dense-livable-tech-hub, HK/SZ will probably gobble them just due to order-of-magnitude advantages (4x the VC, 30x the population of SF, with preposterous numbers of PhDs, at some point the advantages will compound into something like SF but 100x more powerful).
Could be good, but Hong Kong is massively expensive and mainland China is censored, with slow int'l data connections, presumably because they have to scan for words like "Panama Papers." Goodbye Google, Facebook, real news... well you can have (need) a VPN, but that could also be attacked at any moment. You also kind of end up having to be a member of the Party, and are reliant on fickle gov't approval. Which makes one think that for quite a while China may be only for Chinese. Hong Kong, we'll see.
So, obviously that is the core issue -- a tiny correction is that very few Chinese people are members of the communist party, less than 7%, and there is no expectation that foreigners join considering they have not been allowed to be members of the party since 1956.
> What does that have to do with startups? Because startups are made of people, and the average age of the people in a typical startup is right in that 25 to 29 bracket.
So Paul Graham is now helping to perpetuate the current Silicon Valley ageism.
How useful is that data point? That bracket could be the current average of SV's founders, due to forces in action at that region. Another region could have an entirely different age bracket.
And that's founders. As the article touches upon, there won't be many investors. And certainly not at that age.
What you actually need to do is to get bright people to go to a region and stay there. If you just try to optimize for that age bracket, you won't have Silicon Valley.
There are good reasons for startup employees to be young. Front loading risk when you don't have dependents (a spouse and kids, or parents of advanced age) to worry about is a big one. Also when you're young the pay differential between working at a startup and Google is smaller. If you're experienced enough to make Staff Engineer or something the economics of a startup look a lot worse.
> Also when you're young the pay differential between working at a startup and Google is smaller. If you're experienced enough to make Staff Engineer or something the economics of a startup look a lot worse.
Here's the thing, though. IMO successful entrepreneurs (startup or otherwise) have to want to be working for themselves. Money as a concern is of the form "Do I have enough money to make this work?" rather than "Can I make more money at MicroAmaGoogBook?". Personally, as someone who ultimately wants my own company and doesn't really want to sell portions of it to get there, I see the high-paying BigCo jobs as stepping stones to get to where I ultimately want to be. I don't see them as drawing me doen an alternate path.
It's an interesting article but I feel like the investor/entrepreneur relationship isn't quite as simple. I'd be really interested in a meaningful analysis of why investors cluster in SV. The obvious explanation is because that's where the talent is. However I feel there are a lot of social factors at play, too. It's cool to be in SV, people start companies there and change career path from selling their company to becoming investors etc.
[lifestyle wise the city of SF doesn't sound all that great and Cali seems to be full of strange regulations and the like]
What if investor seeding would be hugely beneficial for a hub to become "the next SV". Imagine this thought experiment...pg overcome with nostalgia convinces YC to permanently move to Pittsburgh and change the standard recommendation to "stay 3 month in Pittsburgh". I'm not convinced YC would implode..there'd be some difficulties sure. But I'd also expect (some of) the money to follow YC.
A "Pittsburgh batch" (to go along with the regular one) might actually be an interesting experiment to run.
A lot comes down to the seed planted when Shockley co-invented the transistor and then moved to be near his mum's place in Palo Alto. The whole thing went from there. The 'traitorous eight' left his company and:
> would go on to found other companies after that, including legendary venture firm Kleiner Perkins, AMD and Intel. Over the next 20 years, 65 companies would be started by first or second generation defectors from Shockley Semiconductor Lab, giving it a legitimate claim as the birthplace of the chip industry that gives Silicon Valley its name.
And then the people who made millions/billions from those invest it in new ventures in the tech field they understand. It's pretty hard to reproduce that else where.
Detroit fits the bill on the whole lots of old buildings that were once built when the city was rich but then turned poor. You can buy a 6 bedroom placial estate in Indian Village for $350,000 and live next to estates once owned by the Fords and the Dodges, etc.
It's near a world class University (UMich) and has an abundance of office space, mostly owned by Dan Gilbert. The challenge is that it's just not that safe of a place once you venture outside of the protected downtown bubble and public transit is dismal. It's becoming a refuge for artists and free thinkers priced out of Brooklyn, seeking space that still retains it's edginess and grit. The problem is what they're bringing is aimed at the new Detroit urbanites and don't really help solve problems for all of the other normal working class folks in Detroit.
Disclaimer: I live in the Bay but spent a lot of time in Detroit over the last few years when my SO was doing a residency in Clinton Township in the Detroit suburbs. She would vehemently disagree with me on my assessment and sees a frontier spirit emerging there.
Gilbert seems to have seen the trend of midwesterners embracing their central cores well ahead of everyone else.
What he's done in Cleveland has been pretty smart. He started by purchasing the Cavaliers and becoming a relatively vocal owner (at least compared to the previous owner). That won him a lot of favor with public. He opened up a Quicken Loans office in the city, providing jobs. He then was able to put a deal through public election granting him a casino monopoly in the city. He leased (and later bought) a mostly empty old department store building to house the casino that conveniently connected to the Cavs' arena. He later bought the Ritz hotel that also connects to the casino and arena and just recently purchased the shopping mall / train station that is the connecting piece to all of those.
There are definitely some negatives to be seen from what he's doing, but I think in the end it will be an impressive improvement for that part of downtown, which was already in the upswing.
I thought about moving to Detroit but decided I would hate the weather. I lived in Chicago for 12 years. Loved the city and tolerated the weather. Then I moved to Boulder thinking I would go back to Chicago after two years. But after a year I knew I could never go back to that weather.
There is most definitely a frontier spirit emerging there. I actually thought of Detroit when I was reading PG's essay. The food scene is really exploding with new restaurants opening all the time.
Anecdata: I have a friend who is from Detroit. A techie, lived in the East coast and works for a company on the west coast. Visits Detroit to see family.
He says that the Detroit "rejuvenation" is a complete scam. That all the articles in the press reference the same three or four restaurants. That, yes, there is a nice area in Detroit around what he calls "the green zone" (not sure if that is the accepted term or just a reference to the protected area in Iraq) but once you leave that square mile it is a wasteland.
Again, I have never been. But my friend gets annoyed at all the "Detroit is the next big thing" talk for these reasons.
There's definitely more restaurants opening up than just the original few and many of them are opening up outside of the downtown core near other blighted areas. There is a positive, optimistic energy and that sometimes comes across as being a little less critical than they should be of new restaurants. For example, they opened up a ramen/noodle joint and the ramen is just terrible but if you read the reviews from locals, you would think that someone took a noodle joint out of Tokyo and plopped it down in the middle of Corktown. The Vietnamese and Middle Eastern food is good though on account of large local communities of those folks.
Pittsburgh is unfortunately kind of isolated transportation-wise, which I think is a bigger disadvantage than it looks on the surface.
It was founded when waterways were the main transportation access point, and boomed as it was the intersection of 3 rivers. But today Pittsburgh has an airport that isn't a major airline hub, with limited flights that need a connection from most cities. Rail by Amtrak is infrequent and impractically slow. The drive from NYC is 6 hours, 5 even just from Philly. And extremely treacherous in winter, too - winding Appalachian mountain passes with icy roads, blizzards, fog, narrow lanes. The nearest neighboring city is Cleveland, which isn't exactly a big boost economically.
Contrast to Philly on the other end of the state and you're 2 hours from NYC, Jersey, DC with high speed rail, a major intl airport etc. Sure there are west coast cities with worse problems, but they still have the optimism of manifest destiny working in their favor. Getting caught in a blizzard driving to Denver just feels more exciting than a blizzard driving to Pittsburgh..
If Pittsburgh doubled down on the airport or got cash from harrisburg to improve rail links to NYC (we can dream), maybe build up as a tourist destination even, it could be competitive. Till then, yinzers are going to have to enjoy the secrets of their charming city on their own.
It's a good suggestion. Besides things like Hyperloop and such, even with today's train technology, a fast train (TGV, Pendolino, etc) could connect Pittsburgh to NYC in 2.5 / 3 hours. Unfortunately it would take 20 years to build it.
The frustrating part is that Pennsylvania has had tons of railway planning, infrastructure built - but it's mostly been abandoned or neglected for the last 70 years. So much of the state was born out of investment in rail connections and then economically smothered by the end of the railroads and never recovered.
Pennsylvania became an economic powerhouse because of the railroads, but without them it's just a sad shadow of it's former glory. If someone took the lead on rebooting the railroad industry in PA it would reboot the entire economy of the state.
"But if a university really wanted to help its students start startups, the empirical evidence, weighted by market cap, suggests the best thing they can do is literally nothing." This is an important insight and will be totally counterintuitive to universities.
This is perhaps the first essay I read from pg and thought "You're hopping aboard this bandwagon now?". Even he admits to following the lead of the NY Times Food section. Having attended grad school in Pgh from 1999-2004, it was clear back then the city was on it's way back. Now with Apple, Google, and Uber, the question isn't how to make Pgh a startup hub, it's how much it will be.
Celsense, Rorus, and PieceMaker are three that come to mind. There are especially a lot of biotech startups. Not as many of the consumer-web type startups that are more commonly seen on HN though.
Off the top of my head, Duolingo, 4moms, Treatspace, Wombat Security, Redzone Robotics got big $$$. That doc has more that I'm less knowledgeable of.
Exits:
Vivísimo acquired by IBM 2012 (I was a part of this one)
M*Modal acquired by One Equity Partners 2012
Carnegie Learning acquired by Apollo Group 2012
BlackLocus acquired by The Home Depot 2012
The ExOne Company IPO 2013
BodyMedia acquired by Jawbone 2013
Mobile Technologies acquired by Facebook 2013
BPL Global acquired by Qualitrol 2013
Shoefitr acquired by Amazon 2015
Giftcards.com acquired by Blackhawk (I think 2013)
LightSide Labs acquired by Turnitin 2014
Powered Analytics acquired by Target 2014
Millennium Pharmacy Systems acquired by PharMerica 2014
RedPath Integrated Pathology acquired by PDI 2014
Aesynt acquired by Omnicell 2015
iGate acquired by Capgemini 2015
Blue Belt Technologies acquired by Smith & Nephew 2015
Ottomatika acquired by Delphi 2015
I love Pittsburgh... but now too many of you know about it... so it's over ;p
My Family is from Pittsburgh, I went to CMU for undergraduate and then graduate school. I helped found/bootstrap a video game company there that did quite well for a few years form 2009-2011. The city is manageable, quirky, tolerant, fun, and affordable. I agree with everything PG says here... including the lack of funding. I was with ModCloth when they had to "move the core team to SF to get investment". My video game company's troubles can be traced to lack of funding (and the CEO used too much personal capital remain objective).
I would add one more negative: a bad airport. The Pittsburgh airport used to be a world-class hub for US-Airways and offered a ton cheap flights everywhere. A good airport is important for attracting talent and business... now this huge airport is less than 1/2 utilized and due to poor mass transit, it's hard to get to (I guess Uber is fixing that for the city). You could be in Philadelphia, DC, and NYC within an hour... but I always opted to drive to save on those overpriced domestic flights tier-2 airports are known for.
There are investors in pittsburgh (like http://www.bluetreealliedangels.com), but they aren't used to investing in "digital" tech. There are some early-stage incubators (http://alphalab.org and some others) but they don't have the network reach to justify their high stake in the company. I would argue that capital exists, but isn't as loose as it is out west. The folks who have it aren't as risky... which might be because they don't have as much to play with, but I think it simply is that they aren't used to the type of businesses Silicon Valley is starting... and that seems too risky.
PIT's "AirMall" was a fantastic concept. I grew about an hour north of the airport and we'd go shopping at the airport frequently. 9/11 basically killed it and much of the expansion of the airport. The 2008 Recession didn't help, either. AirMall business did eventually bounce back to pre-2001 levels in the last few years. I'll bet that if the gov't ever relaxed the security theater of the TSA, the mall could be booming again.
>Focus on historic preservation. Big real estate development projects are not what's bringing the twenty-somethings here. They're the opposite of the new restaurants and cafes; they subtract personality from the city.
>The empirical evidence suggests you cannot be too strict about historic preservation. The tougher cities are about it, the better they seem to do.
Interesting contrast to the common belief here on HN that historic preservation is just unimportant NIMBYism and should be opposed in the name of bringing down housing costs.
I think the question of where the "next" silicon valley will be is the wrong question; the question of where is way less significant than the question of what.
I don't think the next hub of cultural and economic significance is necessarily going to be about what we think of as startups, it will probably be something that doesn't even register with most people today.
Money quote: "I've seen how powerful it is for a city to have those people. Five years ago they shifted the center of gravity of Silicon Valley from the peninsula to San Francisco. Google and Facebook are on the peninsula, but the next generation of big winners are all in SF. The reason the center of gravity shifted was the talent war, for programmers especially. Most 25 to 29 year olds want to live in the city, not down in the boring suburbs. So whether they like it or not, founders know they have to be in the city. I know multiple founders who would have preferred to live down in the Valley proper, but who made themselves move to SF because they knew otherwise they'd lose the talent war."
As a current CMU student and startup founder, I agree with Paul's observations about the environment and the kind of people Pittsburgh attracts. I've witnessed firsthand the startup culture that is churning, and I don't doubt it will continue to grow.
However, the comparison between Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh Paul omitted has to do with the weather. Any freshman at CMU can tell you that the winter (and fall, and spring) in Pittsburgh are less than pleasant. Just last week it was snowing, in April. The fact is, for more than half the year, people won't be able to fully enjoy all those cafe's, restaurants, and cycling. The cold, rain, and snow do impact the day to day life of the people who live here and it's a factor of life that can't be overlooked. For many people, the choice between similar jobs in San Francisco and Pittsburgh is an easy one in favor of San Francisco.
Pittsburgh's startup culture is growing, and there are great companies springing up here. But as a founder, I see Pittsburgh as a jumping off point. I don't wish to live with this kind of weather any longer than I have to. Not when I have the option to setup an HQ in San Francisco. And I know the people I want working with me now and in the future feel the same way.
The weather isn't that bad. There isn't the 40 degree below zero temperatures of Minnesota or North Dakota. There are dumplings of 20 inches of snow in one day. You can do lots of activities in the winter: skiing, snowmobiling, hiking, ice fishing...
There are many places with colder, rainier, and snowier weather. But that doesn't change the fact that between San Francisco and Pittsburgh, San Francisco is a clear winner in terms of weather. Many people will take climate into account when deciding between job offers, and it's not a difficult choice to choose the warmer, more stable climate of the Bay area.
Yes, the weather is a big problem. Whenever I think about returning to Pittsburgh I know I can't do it, or at least would really rather not, because the weather is so much better out west.
Ironically PG did point out Pittsburgh's weather as a sticking point in another essay some years ago, not sure which one at the moment.
I remember my time in Pittsburgh. Mostly fond memories. However 8 to 9 months of the year the atmosphere is really gloomy (not just the weather - take a walk in the downtown - feels like everything is falling apart) - when things are not going right in life that is just the worst thing to put up with.
I used to live in pittsburgh. I wish I still did but I have to live here in the Bay for work. Other than the work environment, unless you're a millionaire, this place sucks compared to pittsburgh: takes an hour to get anywhere, insane cost-of-living and sanctimonious locals who openly loathe "the tech elite" while they sit in their million-dollar ranch houses.
I live in the Midwest and would be happy to continue living here. Pittsburgh would in many ways be ideal.
But if start-ups flock to Pittsburgh and start engaging in cargo-cult replication of the idiotic open-plan madness of SV, poor wages relative to cost of living, poor employment culture that places importance on inane things like how much alcohol you consume, then count me out.
I frankly don't understand why a region would want to become like Silicon Valley.
Don't get me wrong. I understand why unrealistic founders would want it and I understand why exploitative VC firms might want it. But why would employees or residents want it? It will only accelerate wealth concentration, establish monoculture, lead to absurd corporate corruption, gentrification issues, and on and on.
Quick, Pittsburgh. Stop this before your local politicians have completely sold you out!
Can you imagine a headline "City ruined by becoming too bicycle-friendly?" It just doesn't happen.
It's pretty close to that in Sydney. Conservative media voices are fairly unanimous in their derision of Sydney City Council's attempts to build a network of bicycle lanes through the CBD.
I hold the opposite view, despite never riding in the city, but it's definitely a strongly divisive issue.
I was going to attend this event (mainly because of pg's participation), but regrettably had to miss it (family claimed the Saturday). Thanks for the write-up.
How to make any place a startup hub: Have connected investors/money that is willing to take risks (drives job growth) and founders who have exited to encourage and promote new startups (creates the ecosystem).
There are almost no cities in the US outside of SF that meet those two criteria. Even NYC which has VC money (nowhere near that of SF) doesn't have more than two major exits (Etsy, Tumblr).
All those other things are nice to haves. Job opportunity and money are everything.
Pittsburgh has none of those. Nowhere on the East coast does, and I can verify it as we are HQ in D.C.
I am an investor, with 500 startups. Originally from Pittsburgh, went to CMU- tremendous love for the place. Will come to find great companies to give them money. I particularly look at FinTech but would love to look at other stuff. Drop me a line if I can be helpful. Not hard to find me.
I went to Pittsburgh a couple years ago, the downtown is just slightly better than Buffalo, not fully a ghost town but pretty close.
Buffalo is worse because someone made the wise decision to move UB out to the suburb, which essentially rendered the already lost town to a ghost city.
Put young people into the center of town helped to sustain it, however a city's future is more decided by the overall economy development, both Pittsburgh and Buffalo are just _lost_ in recent decades on that part.
Buffalo is crippled by truly awful winter weather, especially downtown where the wind from the lake is incredibly strong. You could spend billions renovating the area, turning all the parking lots into something useful, and it would still be a fairly miserable place to live.
I've only spent a little time in western PA, but it's definitely better than that.
Our ratio of sports to population is really high. The Cultural District is really vibrant, particularly if you happen to be around during a gallery crawl. If you're at Point State Park at the right time, you might wander into a big event (arts festival, regatta).
Downtown definitely gets quiet after a certain point, but I've seen some take that as a point of pride - we're a "city that sleeps."
Strange comment about Pittsburgh's diversity and strangeness! In my experience, outside Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, perhaps Monroeville, and some working class neighborhoods, Pittsburgh is a fairly conservative South-US-ish city.
Bingo. The farther suburbs are fairly conservative, midwesternish in culture. Though the areas you mentioned (SqHill, Shadyside etc.) provide enough of a cool college-town vibe to perhaps be sufficient as a nucleus to attract (or rather, keep) the young college graduates required for general optimism... not just startups.
Regarding the “startup” thread. When i first came to Pittsburgh, 2003, there was very little jobs in IT. When I came back in 2010 and every year since, its been noticeably better. The cost of living, and housing is significantly lower than UK. I worked in Belfast for a London based company. Lots of London based companies outsourced IT jobs to regional cities, because they could pay lower wages, as the employees didn’t have the expense of living in London. I always thought Pittsburgh could follow Belfast. In Dublin, they attract the American companies because of the low corporation tax. It also helps that they are a english speaking country in the eurozone. I think if US fixed the broken immigration (it takes a year for work authorization, compare to 2-3 weeks in UK), and Pittsburgh had some international flights, that would help investment in the city. I love Pittsburgh, and amazed at the speed of the changes since i first came here. Keep er lit!
I've been born and raised in Pittsburgh, went to CMU for undergrad and Pitt for grad but eventually left for other places.
Pittsburgh has plenty of business opportunities. There is A LOT of industry within the metro area. A small group of folks can relatively easily set up shop and make excellent careers doing tech in Pittsburgh.
The "bones" of the city are excellent. It is a medium-size compact urban area surrounded by streetcar main-streets, industrial areas, and older 'burbs. Neighborhoods are relatively stable, there aren't insane fluctuations in property values, many places are walkable/bikeable and there's at least a corner in pittsburgh for every taste.
As for it being a "start-up hub" where "start-up" is defined in the silicon valley sense of going from idea to VC investment to IPO in a few dozen months-- no that is not common. But that's such a narrow band of activity, can you really say it is common anywhere?
Probably too late in the conversation. I'm a Pittsburgh product, as in I did my grad schooling from there. I've always found pgh vibrant! I was residing in the Oakland area. I liked everything about it. To this day I call it one of my favorite places to live or visit.
In a 2013 ranking of 277 metropolitan areas in the United States, the American Lung Association (ALA) ranked only six U.S. metro areas as having higher amounts of short-term particle pollution, and only seven U.S. metro areas having higher amounts of year-round particle pollution than Pittsburgh. For ozone (smog) pollution, Pittsburgh was ranked 24th amongst other U.S. metro areas.
Pittsburgh can be cool, but I wouldn't consider moving to a city where my health is in serious danger.
Paul Graham is giving deadly advice for maintaining housing affordability. Those cute historic building become an albatross around a city's neck in a hurry once a lot of people start moving in.
I agree with PG that Mississippi probably isn't the right place for a startup hub, but it is disappointing that he contributes to the spin that Mississippi's religious liberty bill represents intolerance. It's these sort of religious protections that allow people of differing beliefs to live together, as opposed to the enforcement of secular norms found in jurisdictions that are supposedly more tolerant.
Would you help me compile a list of interesting software companies in Pittsburgh? (I'm seeking to relocate there from SF but am having a hard time sourcing an attractive employer)
This sounds very similar to the actual process that Durham has gone through over the past 15+ years, and the first visible signs were in the restaurant business too (concerted efforts by the city and local businesses were less visible, but preceded the visible signs). Pittsburgh seems like it has an incredibly similar social and historical setting, so hopefully they can pull it off as well.
Early on in my undergrad life in Pittsburgh (circa 2001-2005) I remember seeing this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1985/12/20 . It took a while to really understand the rather negative perception people had of Pittsburgh, but that comic strip helped. After undergrad I moved to NYC and sort of regretted that a little bit. I realized the same things PG mentions: low cost of living and constant influx of young people from the 20+ universities in the area creates the right ecosystem for a startup culture.
Philly checks these boxes much better than Pittsburgh and doesn't have a tech scene of note. These cities will also need an anchor company to keep the talent there. Maybe autonomous cars can do that in Pittsburgh.
Points I would like to have seen mentioned:
1. Non-competes are enforceable in Pittsburgh, PA. Unlike in California.
2. Intellectual property rights over personal projects.
I feel that the non-compete thing is one of the biggest problems that PA technologists face. I'd be willing to put money on a state legislature candidate who would vow to get rid of them.
CMU grad here (EE, CE, Math '89). My wife is a native Pittsburgher. Her parents still live in the house she was born in – which I believe is not uncommon in this city. Anyway, I have her perspective too. Met wife shortly after graduating, got married, moved to Toronto to study neuroscience. After our daughter was born, we moved back to Pittsburgh to be with the grandparents. Can't say enough about how great an experience that was for our daughter. Pittsburgh is still very much a family town with deep roots and deep history. Daughter didn't go to CMU (had worked on robots there in HS and wanted a change) but if she had, she would have been 4th generation. Grandparents are great. Consider that you young adults coupling down. Are the soon-to-be grandparents in San Francisco?
Having lived and traveled plenty, I think I can give a pretty honest assessment of Pittsburgh. The first thing I need to share is that this is a racist city. Granted, things have improved from the 80s when most of my Pittsburgh-born friends would think nothing of using the n-word. But I dismayed how often I still hear it from thirty-somethings. It is something I've never experienced outside of Pittsburgh. Check out "The most racist places in America, according to Google" in the Washington Post. A city can be amazing in many ways, but it is going to take a serious hit in terms of attracting a global diverse tech community with that shortcoming.
But now for the good stuff. First, as PG discussed and others did mention, Pittsburgh is now a great food city. I think it easily holds its own against cities much larger. Seconds (and related to first) the city is getting more diverse. The fact that the universities have become so diverse (~80 non-Anglo-Saxon) plays a manor role in this transition. Most of these people will not stay in Pittsburgh, but their presence does change the culture. More and more are staying or moving here to start their careers.
On the tech front, things have been slowly improving. CMU and Pitt have always fostered tech spin-offs, but things are really changing now with Google, Apple, Facebook, and Uber setting up research centers. Without a doubt, this is going to change Pittsburgh. You can already see the changes with the construction of hundreds of $2000+/mo apartments in what used to be the "ghetto". I am hopeful that this will change one of the current shortcomings of the local tech scene – that this is an "eds and meds" town, and if you want to get funded, you are more likely to meet with success if your business in that space.
Pittsburgh has MANY cool, walkable neighborhoods. This is a huge draw for young adults. There are up-and-coming hip, walkable neighborhoods were you can still buy a nice house for $80K. FIOS is readily available. Taxes are pretty average. The weather is relatively mild (granted, I came from upstate NY). The geography is beautiful - the rivers, the hills, the parks, etc. We have an excellent system of bike trails. I'll be biking to DC later this spring.
Pittsburgh is very active on the city-data forums. There is no better place to put your finger on the pulse of a community in my opinion. You'll find many threads on the issues I've discussed here. I remember reading a couple threads worth paraphrasing. In one, someone commented that Pittsburgh must be a very rich city because it has more mansions than any other city. He clearly didn't understand the history of Pittsburgh and how much wealth was created during the industrialization of the early 20th century. But his assessment is accurate in that the city has WAY more than its fair share of mansions build during the timeframe when houses were built big and beautiful by craftsmen who cared. If you do move to Pittsburgh, do yourself and the city a favor and buy one of these diamonds in the rough and renovate. Another lasting legacy of the robber-baron era is that Pittsburgh has an amazing arts and cultural heritage.
In another interesting city-data thread, the discussion was on how Pittsburgh is still a place where people of average means can still live a middle-class life. The reason is two-fold. First, the cost of living is relatively low. But just as important is that Pittsburgh is a very hardworking and entrepreneurial city. This is the city that, in a sense, built itself and also much of the rest of the country. Steel, electricity, glass, etc. – they all came from Pittsburgh. That work ethic is still very much present. People here work hard, play hard, drink hard, and love their sports teams.
Sorry for the long post, but since so much of what I read on this thread wasn't about Pittsburgh, I felt I had to help shift the balance back. Finally, check out pittsburghtoday.org which will tell you most everything, data-wise, that you'd want to know.
I would be curious if there's ever been a city built from scratch with any success around startups; seems unlikely, unless it more of an R&D city funded by a very large entity.
Yes please! I grew up in PDX, and live in Pgh now. There are a surprising number of similarities in the sort of grassroots neighborhood community, and the slower pace of life compared to CA. (And the weather, I guess.) Pittsburgh is way ahead in intellectual foundation -- CMU is world-class -- but Portland has a quality-of-life edge.
Portland already has a small but respectable startup scene, and a few bigger anchors (Intel, etc), but it has huge potential if it were to build more of a tech/CS critical mass.
Well, and time. I imagine it would take 3 to 5 years to start poaching and recruiting new, top faculty. These top faculty in turn have to recruit top PhD students and assemble research labs, which is going to take time as the school is not yet mentioned among the top 10-20 programs. Tack a few more years on for enough publications to hit top venues. This is probably at least a decade to hit the level of, say, USC, let alone crack the top 10 or even top 3 occupied by the likes of a CMU or a Stanford or a Berkeley.
I know a few people who work in R&D who are quite good at their activities.
They can usually turn around an effective product in at max a year.
They usually create a set of underlying patents, this takes maybe a year of reading academic journals and thinking of your physics and me guys, and then you usually have a theory you can put in practice.
Apparently, all they need from there is a trip to home depot, one or two things off amazon, and a PCB designed and printed. From there, they can make a wide range of products.
One small invention can be used as the underbelly for many, many pieces of technology; everything that comes as a result usually also has one or two applications to research or defense. This means big money.
Most real R&D is self sustaining, so long as you have a team that can sell.
The hard part of R&D is getting the right people in my mind.
I've had this conversation with many people, and it usually helps to ask this: has anyone you have met who works in R&D said they didn't like their job?
Really Portland has only 4 year schools (both private and public). PSU is really a giant 4 year university (with a scattering of mostly masters and a few doctoral programs). OHSU is more sui generis.
Would be better to have a private school, I think. I'd probably go either graduate-only or do something crazy like graduate + coop/internship with $0 tuition, and small.
Realistically you have to start small, so I think it's better to be focused.
Olin College would be my model for the undergrad program; probably takes a $200-500mm commitment which is about the upper bound of a high net worth endowment.
Combine that with a heavily industry-funded graduate program (maybe start focused on a couple specific industries -- say, security and hardware verification, if you could get HP/Intel support), also small and focused. MIT Media Lab would be another model.
Given a lot of money, sure. One angle is to offer internal research funding. If a university said: come here and you won't have to chase grants, just do good research and we'll fund it internally, you'd have a ton of people wanting to move there. Good salaries help too, but given sufficient funds, the first thing I'd do to differentiate is offer working conditions that look qualitatively better than elsewhere.
The obvious solution is to get more CMU grads to learn to ski. Then the weather becomes a positive. Problem solved.
Oh, shoot. SF is only about 4 hours from Tahoe. Damn. Pittsburgh's ski resorts (har har) are like bad zits owned by a prick named Robert Nutting in comparison. Now my idea will backfire and everyone will rush west even faster. This city planning stuff is harder than it looks.
All kidding aside, even with the weather, Pittsburgh has a lot of advantages going for it. CMU might be the major research institution in the region, but the other schools will benefit the startup scene as well. Not just in terms of direct research, but in feeding other students towards CMU for grad work, having a more educated local populace in general amongst the younger demographics, etc. Time will tell how those factors play out.
I'm from Europe but lived in Pittsburgh and graduated in CMU (software engineering). Really enjoyed the city and the people I've met there. CMU is really a place where you can discuss engineering breakthroughs while having breakfast or a coffee.
It is true that the coffee houses there tend to have their own personality and become really good places to study.
But still left the city and just returned to Europe. I've left because the poverty rate in the city was high at that time (2010) and was too easy to either get mugged on the street or get yourself inadvertently involved in some violent event.
Still, Pittsburgh is a special place in my heart and I still keep contact with friends there. Was happy to read this article, really happy to see the city getting better.
I grew up out west, had family and such out there. That was a big reason.
The weather has been mentioned by others. They have relatively rough winters. Fairly hot and humid summers. Spring and autumn are pretty awesome though, unfortunately that's when CMU was doing the CMU thing and play time was limited.
Perhaps it has changed as Paul suggests, but in the 1990s they were still in their negative pessimistic ways. It was routine to hear locals talk about how the city's best days were in the past. I learned 2 things: 1) when big time jobs leave it takes a long time for the place to heal and Pittsburgh lost a lot of jobs from the unions and steal and all sorts of things. 2) I grew up in a fairly optimistic place, at least a neutral one towards progress and just building things and doing things. They had this negative attitude that just sort of sits on you, I couldn't place it until I really left, but the negative attitude was oppressive. You're young and excited, you want to dream, you want to believe the dream and it's a place where a lot of people have had their dreams go away. A substantial portion of the populace just sort of expected Pittsburgh to fail when it attempted things. I found that attitude rough, it wasn't obvious to me the entire time I was there but it didn't feel good. It's bigger than just Pittsburgh, Wheeling has experienced some rough times, I visited Youngstown once (they had the nearest version of some store where I could exchange some Christmas gift) and it was like visiting a different country.
The tax situation there isn't great. Sort of surprised nobody has mentioned this, there is like a city income tax. And then ultimately, more money is more money, you can talk about the cost of living but iphones, xboxes and cars cost the same everywhere.. I want to say the good starting jobs for fresh grads in the Cleveland/Pittsburgh area were like $50k-$60k in the mid 1990s, out west I made more than that.
PGH is a great town, a lot of character, it's a good town to raise a family in, it has a lot of positives. Surely there is enough money there to spin up some VC funds, I could see it being a small to medium startup hub but I don't know how much it has really changed.
At CMU there's a lot of rhetoric about how bad Pittsburgh is. There's a surprising amount of talk by students at CMU about how much Pittsburgh sucks. Many students never venture far off campus, never actually get a feel for the city itself. Then, once they graduate, the jobs are in SF or Seattle or NYC, so having no other attachments to the area, they move.
Isn't Silicon Valley a black hole with unrelenting monetary gravity that would pull all skilled software engineers down towards it? Any young developer who is any good will go from the minor leagues to the big league attracted by the cash, leaving Pittsburgh or whereever behind.
Budding "Silicon Valleys" would simply be the target of aggressive and unrelenting talent raids.
Not necessarily. Companies like Facebook and Google build offices outside of the Valley partly because it's less competitive. Google has been expanding in Boulder because they know their employees won't be poached as frequently as in SV.
I think VR has so much potential to make people in remote places work together in close productive ways, that I wouldn't be surprised if the next silicon valley isn't even a real place.
When I moved there the food scene was nonexistent and people in the US still perceived Pittsburgh as a bad place to be (e.g., a lady I met in CA responded with "Oh I am so sorry" when I told her I was living in Pittsburgh). CMU also didn't really understand startups - we were the first company to ever do something with a technology that CMU released to the founders.
But it was also a time where you could hire CMU CS grads for $30K/year and rent an office for 30 people for less than $2K/month. And we were a big fish in a small pond so we got a lot of local press and a first cut at the local tech talent (one of our first hire ended up becoming co-founder of Tumblr!)
After the exit I tried to get involved in the local scene. And while I found a lot of talent/ideas/start up to promote it was amazingly hard to attract any kind of money in the city. That convinced me that Pittsburgh would never make it as a hub and I ended moving to Manhattan last year.
Now my family (wife and 4 kids) hate me for that move - because even if you throw huge piles of money on rent it's hard to match the quality of life of Pittsburgh - and we are reconsidering that move.
Happy to answer any question about starting a company in Pittsburgh!