How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded" - Yogi Berra.

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.

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'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".

[0]http://themacro.com/articles/2016/02/pros-and-cons-of-distri...

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.