251–260 of 367 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hittin…
Either of these cities socially liberal? Hard to tell based on my visits there.
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.
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.
What successful startups are in Pittsburgh?
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 developme…
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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cos…
I'm a CMU undergraduate who moved to San Francisco. Every year, the School of Computer Science publishes a survey of where undergrads go after college: https://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2015-su... [pdf] 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…
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).
What's brutal to me? North Dakota. Montana. Maine. Vermont and New Hampshire. Northern New York and its Buffalo area.
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 fir…
> 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.
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.
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…
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.
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 o…
http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/dining/restaurant-o...
Even month to month when I visit I see the changes. There's getting to be a real cluster of tech people living and working near Grand Circus park.