> 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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :/
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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...
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.
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.
>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.
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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>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 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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI 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'd also love to see Portland Oregon, mentioned as an alternative, get the world-class research university it lacks now.)
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?
I've never heard of it.
I'm curious to see what you think.
Along these lines, I'm quite pleased that Bend is getting a university, OSU Cascades, which is something that has been lacking over here.
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.
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.
CMU and Pittsburgh are great, but for college. I cant imagine ever moving back.. and I'm from jersey originally.
Also the weather, landscape, and a road system designed to match a 4 year old's hot-wheels track are a real love it or leave it kinda thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I work in Pittsburgh, and recently learned that my employer can own intellectual property that I created on my own time in my home. I was appalled.
It's not something to be appalled about. They aren't trying to be evil overlords.
Not so fast. A lot of East Coast companies aggressively enforce contract provisions, EMC being one of the worst.
If it's in your contract, and it's not illegal in that jurisdiction, you should be very concerned.
Most companies require board-level approval to change a contract, and you will usually be told, "I want you to leave the premises now."
This X100. Add in the fact that Stanford makes it easy for faculty to weave in and out of industry, and those facts explain a lot.
Stanford didn't always pull in a lot of government research money. See http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...
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.
- 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 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.
(I grew up an hour west of Knoxville. And have family in B'ham/Tuscaloosa.)
Beyond the metro area, the rest of Georgia isn't at all.
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 say this as a fairly conservative person living in a very liberal city.
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.
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.
Shame about their recent legislative decisions, though.
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.
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 :/
These are huge companies with bleeding edge technology problems and solutions, that also have ample vertical mobility.
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.
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.
The startup scene might be considered burgeoning, but the tech sector in Austin as a whole is pretty well-established.
Kansas City is nice too, and Google fiber being available is a huge plus.
Obviously I'm biased since I've lived in both places.
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.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-b...
Heaven forbid a bunch of new tech jobs are added to your precious town, right?
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.
I would say the research triangle seems poised for something interesting, but again, kind of already expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
- calm, peaceful nights
- suburban house with a yard and a dog
- a comfortable car and well-kept roads
- internet good enough to stream Netflix
- quality local universities that offer tuition scholarships
Unmarried 18-30 year olds are quite a diverse bunch.
[0]: http://www.evanmiller.org/marketing-startup-hubs.html
Aside from Duolingo (who have been there for ages) and Uber (who aren't really based there) what's so exciting about Pittsburgh?
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 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.
AlphaLab accelerator and TechShop are in the area, and there are the Google and Uber campuses by CMU.
A lot of the talent right now is getting pulled by the big name west coast companies, but I could see something growing over the next ten years.
(The weather is awfully dreary, though.)
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.
Yes, it really is that bad.
Keeps things interesting as long as you remain indoors!
... not to mention the coastline. In terms of longer-term capital investment, Pittsburgh has some high-ground advantages. ;)
What's brutal to me? North Dakota. Montana. Maine. Vermont and New Hampshire. Northern New York and its Buffalo area.
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.
...which it may be soon! In fact, for office space, it already is!
I don't get the appeal of Boston as a transplant at all. Not compelling unless you are there for a very cool job or education.
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.
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_27278888/boulder-...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
1. http://www.stlmag.com/arts/history/why-is-st-louis-destroyin...
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:
2. https://nextstl.com/2015/01/do-the-math-qt/
This second point is tricky, because lots of people prefer the gas station to some old, simple, under-utilized structures.
But not the type of young people who want to work at a startup. Cities need to decide which kind of constituent they want to support.
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.
>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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfdtgW6_oI
The video of PG's keynote is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfdtgW6_oI
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.
I've only spent a little time in western PA, but it's definitely better than that.
http://www.stateoftheair.org/2015/states/pennsylvania/allegh...
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ccd-data/pctposrank.txt
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."
https://www.innovationworks.org/Portals/1/documents/Pittsbur...
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 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:
http://imgur.com/5T0iJQ6
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.
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.
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!
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.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/mental-health-startup-lante...
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.
http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdlst2/default.asp
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.
Plus CMU and Pitt collaborate quite a lot, especially in biomedical research.
[0]: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm
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.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pittsburgh#Res...
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.
Also Pitt is cold.