Ten $50,000 grants for startups who move to St. Louis

I agree. I see this in a lot of the places that don't have a strong entrepreneurial community. I see people bemoan about not enough investors or not enough resources. Their solution is then another website or another LinkedIn group or more mingling with suites like it will magically solve the problem.

The places outside the Valley that have succeeded have all done so because they have nurtured and embraced the entrepreneurial and tech community. St. Louis and elsewhere should do the same.

I was trying to work out where people stood on SOPA to get some idea of how much they understand internet startups. But I don't understand enough about Americna politics to get very far - all I have is that the Senator for Missouri, Claire McCaskill, was a SOPA co-sponsor.

How do congress-people fit into this? There seem to be lots more of them...

Things to know about St. Louis:

The City of St. Louis is a separate entity from St. Louis county. When I last checked the employee map for a 150 engineer software company, there were two employees living in the City of St. Louis, (a receptionist, and a newly divorced man in an apartment) the remainder where in St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and living on the "east side" in Illinois (but far enough to clear East St. Louis).

The City of St. Louis has a 1% payroll tax for people that work in the city, plus another 1% for people that live in the city. That may not be important for a startup, but if you are looking to long term employ a lot of highly paid people you have to ask yourself if you want an extra 2% margin or not.

There has been a fair amount of redevelopment in the city itself in recent years, and probably a large amount to come, so you can find a nice place. Make sure to check for a grocery store nearby. Public transit is next to useless. Prepare to drive.

The radial highways in and out of the city are in pretty good shape these days. Check the actually commute times, but 20 miles in 30 minutes wouldn't be outrageous.

I disagree on the intellectual scene - it depends where you are in Saint Louis. The Metropolitan Area is most definitely socio-economically segregated and that is going to have an impact on the distribution of intellectuals. In the area there are some fairly solid institutions as well with intelligent researchers and employees working at them - atleast two med schools, two business schools, a handful of other misc. universities, a world class hospital system (BJC), some renown programs (e.g.,WashU DPT), and some respectable companies based in STL (e.g., Monsanto). Startups might be another issue but I imagine with the business schools there would be some, albeit small, community.

Whenever I meet people that come to STL to study, I find they rarely leave the immediate campus area and if they do they usually only go downtown or to the big college spots like the Loop. The city has the worst of the urban elements, and if you go too far out into South county, you can get the country-folks stereotype. North County is pretty desolate these days as well - but there are a lot of good areas here too. "STL" means more than the city proper and a lot of people live in the counties. We're spread out. Where exactly did you live in the area?

A slight aside, but I'm seeing a lot of comments about how the cash isn't really enough to tempt people. They're probably correct.

You know what I'd love to see? States being able to set their own special immigration policies. I live in New York and am very happy here, but it's very difficult to create my own startup because I'm on a restrictive work visa.

However, if St. Louis had the ability to request a special exclusion for foreign nationals to create a startup in their city, you'd better believe I would be looking at it very closely. From talking to other people in similar situations, I doubt I'd be alone.

(Of course, if St. Louis had the power to do this then I suspect NYC would as well- and Bloomberg is a very vocal supporter of immigration reform. But still...)