How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#361

Post by LordKano » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 3:06 AM UTC

kom107 wrote: post #329

LordKano wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I could never live in the city.

I don't even like going into the city for work.

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#362

Post by surfmike » Thu, Apr 14, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

interesting perspective by ‏@kimmaicutler:

"@paulg's advice to Pittsburgh is so the opposite of what @sama, @justinkan want SF to do. http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html " https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/720031161989267461

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#363

Post by pesenti » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 3:49 AM UTC

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #308

pesenti wrote: post #197

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…

> we were the first company to ever do something with a technology that CMU released to the founders. Boom. A few thousand people vaporized, James Gosling among them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ https://www.pdf.com/Home etc, etc.

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).

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#364

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 10:11 PM UTC

ido wrote: post #317

lmm wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that's using the legal definition of Paris which excludes many of its suburbs.

The SF definition is also excluding its suburbs (i.e. Silicon Valley).

[deleted]

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#365

Post by johnward » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 12:31 AM UTC

jc4p wrote: post #285

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: what was the company that you founded, and that was sold in 2012?

It's in his profile, Vivisimo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivisimo

Worked for them. It was pretty awesome until we got acquired by IBM.

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#366

Post by johnward » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 12:34 AM UTC

kom107 wrote: post #330

drpgq wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 a…

The one I had to sign for IBM in Pittsburgh basically says they own everything I do, even in my time away from my job. It's pretty ridiculous.

Re: How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub

#367

Post by johnward » Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 12:41 AM UTC

colindean wrote: post #257

boulos wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

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...