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<h1 style="text-align: center;">How to make Pittsburgh a startup hub</h1>
<h2>[WHAT]</h2>
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<li>] by Paul Graham, founder@ycombinator.com - Graham shares some of his thoughts on what the city of Pittsburgh can do to on the path to becoming a "startup hub".&nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHY]</h2>
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<li>] &nbsp;</li>
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<h2>[WHERE]</h2>
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<li>] READ THE FULL ARTICLE</li>
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<li>]&nbsp;<a href="http://paulgraham.com/pgh.html" target="_blank">How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub</a>&nbsp;(paulgraham.com)</li>
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<li>] WATCH THE VIDEO</li>
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<li>]&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfdtgW6_oI" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpfdtgW6_oI</a></li>
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<h2>[WHEN]</h2>
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<li>] 2016-04-16</li>
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<h2>[EXAMPLE]</h2>
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<li>] based on talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] PG grew up in Monroeville, lived there from 1968 - 1984</li>
<li>]&nbsp;When I agreed to speak here, I didn't think I'd be able to give a very optimistic talk. I thought I'd be talking about what Pittsburgh could do to become a startup hub, very much in the subjunctive. Instead I'm going to talk about what Pittsburgh can do.&nbsp;</li>
<li>[youth]&nbsp;What changed my mind was an article I read in of all places the New York Times food section. The title was "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/dining/pittsburgh-restaurants.html">Pittsburgh's Youth-Driven Food Boom</a>."&nbsp;</li>
<li>] 25-29 demographic, growing, up from 7 to 7.6%,(national avg 6.8)&nbsp;Pittsburgh could be the next Portland. It could become the cool place all the people in their twenties want to go live.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;during that whole period (when he lived there) the city was in free fall. On top of the flight to the suburbs that happened everywhere, the steel and nuclear businesses were both dying. Boy are things different now.&nbsp;</li>
<li>]&nbsp;Because startups are made of people, and the average age of the people in a typical startup is right in that 25 to 29 bracket.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] 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.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] 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.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;So being a magnet for people in their twenties is a very promising thing to be. It's hard to imagine a place becoming a startup hub without also being that. Ahead of the national average, by about 2500 people, a toehold, time to expand on that.</li>
<li>] Food boom frivolous? Imagine walking down a street in Paris. What are you walking past? Little restaurants and cafes. Imagine driving through some depressing random exurb. What are you driving past? Starbucks and McDonalds and Pizza Hut. As Gertrude Stein said, there is no there there. You could be anywhere.&nbsp;These independent restaurants and cafes are not just feeding people. They're making there be a there here.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;do everything you can to encourage this youth-driven food boom. What could the city do? Treat the people starting these little restaurants and cafes as your users, and go ask them what they want. I can guess at least one thing they might want: a fast permit process. San Francisco has left you a huge amount of room to beat them in that department.</li>
<li>[buildings] The prime mover is cheap housing. That's a big advantage.&nbsp;&nbsp;But that phrase "cheap housing" is a bit misleading. There are plenty of places that are cheaper. What's special about Pittsburgh is not that it's cheap, but that it's a cheap place you'd actually want to live.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;Part of that is the buildings themselves. I realized a long time ago, back when I was a poor twenty-something myself, that the best deals were places that had once been rich, and then became poor.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] So here is another piece of advice for becoming a startup hub: don't destroy the buildings that are bringing people here. When cities are on the way back up, like Pittsburgh is now, developers race to tear down the old buildings. Don't let that happen. 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.&nbsp;</li>
<li>[neighborhoods] -&nbsp;Like San Francisco and New York, Pittsburgh is fortunate in being a pre-car city. It's not too spread out.&nbsp;Cities where you can get around without driving are just better period. So I would suggest you do everything you can to capitalize on this. As with historic preservation, it seems impossible to go too far.Why not make Pittsburgh the most bicycle and pedestrian friendly city in the country? See if you can go so far that you make San Francisco seem backward by comparison.</li>
<li>[universities]&nbsp;Pittsburgh has something Portland lacks: a first-rate research university.&nbsp;In fact you're better off than San Francisco in one way, because CMU is downtown, but Stanford and Berkeley are out in the suburbs.What can CMU do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub? Be an even better research university.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;shouldn't universities be setting up programs with words like "innovation" and "entrepreneurship" in their names? No, they should not.The way to get innovation is not to aim for innovation but to aim for something more specific, like better batteries or better 3D printing. And the way to learn about entrepreneurship is to do it, which you can't in school.</li>
<li>] one of the most effective things a university could do to encourage startups is an elaborate form of getting out of the way invented by Harvard. Harvard used to have exams for the fall semester after Christmas. At the beginning of January they had something called "Reading Period" when you were supposed to be studying for exams. And Microsoft and Facebook have something in common that few people realize: they were both started during Reading Period. It's the perfect situaton for producing the sort of side projects that turn into startups. The students are all on campus, but they don't have to do anything because they're supposed to be studying for exams.</li>
<li>[culture]&nbsp;The culture of Pittsburgh is another of its strengths. It seems like a city has to be very socially liberal to be a startup hub, and it's pretty clear why. A city has to tolerate strangeness to be a home for startups, because startups are so strange. And you can't choose to allow just the forms of strangeness that will turn into big startups, because they're all intermingled. You have to tolerate all strangeness. This rules out a big portion of the USA</li>
<li>]&nbsp;What I remember about the culture of Pittsburgh is that it was both tolerant and pragmatic. That's how I'd describe the culture of Silicon Valley too. And it's not a coincidence, because Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley of its time. This was a city where people built new things. And while the things people build have changed, the spirit you need to do that kind of work is the same.</li>
<li>[investors]&nbsp;Unfortunately I saved the toughest part for last. There is one more thing you need to be a startup hub, and Pittsburgh hasn't got it: investors. Silicon Valley has a big investor community because it's had 50 years to grow one. New York has a big investor community because it's full of people who like money a lot and are quick to notice new ways to get it. But Pittsburgh has neither of these. And the cheap housing that draws other people here has no effect on investors.&nbsp;</li>
<li>] If an investor community grows up here, it will happen the same way it did in Silicon Valley: slowly and organically. So I would not bet on having a big investor community in the short term. But fortunately there are three trends that make that less necessary than it used to be. One is that startups are increasingly cheap to start, so you just don't need as much outside money as you used to. The second is that thanks to things like Kickstarter, a startup can get to revenue faster. You can put something on Kickstarter from anywhere. The third is programs like Y Combinator. A startup from anywhere in the world can go to YC for 3 months, pick up funding, and then return home if they want.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;This is not a fast path to becoming a startup hub. But it is at least a path, which is something few other cities have. And it's not as if you have to make painful sacrifices in the meantime. Think about what I've suggested you should do. Encourage local restaurants, save old buildings, take advantage of density, make CMU the best, promote tolerance. These are the things that make Pittsburgh good to live in now. All I'm saying is that you should do even more of them.</li>
<li>]&nbsp;If Pittsburgh's path to becoming a startup hub is to be even more itself, then it has a good chance of succeeding. In fact it probably has the best chance of any city its size. It will take some effort, and a lot of time, but if any city can do it, Pittsburgh can.</li>
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<h2>[HOW-TO]</h2>
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<li>]</li>
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<h2>[REFERENCE]</h2>
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<li>] SRC=HN(326)/<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483362" target="_blank">comments</a>(353)&nbsp;</li>
<li>] Paul Graham</li>
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<h1 style="text-align: center;">comment mine</h1>
] sucessful startup founder in pittsburgh, tried to move into investing, found startups/talent, not able to attract money, moved to new york&nbsp;
] pittsburgh 'perception' across US is of bombed out detroit style factory town, Nope, its the Paris of Appalachia&nbsp;
]&nbsp;a lot of good startups in Pittsburgh seem eternally stuck in the seed stage.
]&nbsp;http://www.evanmiller.org/marketing-startup-hubs.html&nbsp;
]&nbsp;<a href="https://discover.imaginecareers.com/" target="_blank">https://discover.imaginecareers.com</a>/ &nbsp;( ibt
<h1 style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</h1>

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