Paul Graham: How to make a Pittsburgh start-up hub
“Should universities launch programs with such words in the title as“ innovation ”and“ entrepreneurship ”? No, they should not. Such things almost always turn out to be disappointments. They have the wrong goals. ”
“Universities remarkably unite the founders, but beyond that, the best thing they can do is get out of the way.”
- Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, programmer, investor, essayist
')
Original - How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
April 2016
( Thanks to the translation for nachit , for the help in posting the publication - Edison . )
(I gave this lecture at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of this applies to other cities. But not all, because, as I said, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most start-up hubs)
What needs to be done to turn Pittsburgh into a startup hub like Silicon Valley? I feel, I think, Pittsburgh is very good, because I grew up here in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley very well, because I live now. Could you get such a startup ecosystem here?
When I agreed to speak here, I do not think that I was able to give a very optimistic lecture. I thought I would talk about what Pittsburgh could do to become a start-up hub, but it would have turned out too much. Instead, I will talk about what Pittsburgh can do.
What changed my mind is the article I read in all sections of the New York Times food. The name was "The Pittsburgh Youth Oriented Food Boom" . For most, it will not cause a drop of interest, not to mention something related to startups. But I got hooked on this headline. I don't think I could choose a more promising heading if I tried. After reading the article, I was even more impressed. It said that "people between the ages of 25 and 29 now make up 7.6 percent of all residents, compared with 7 percent about a decade ago." Wow, I thought, Pittsburgh could be the next Portland. It can be a cool place for all people who, in their twenties, want to find their place in life.
When I got here a couple of days ago, I could feel the difference. I lived here from 1968 to 1984. I did not understand that at that time, during this entire period, the whole city was in free fall. At the peak of the flight to the suburbs, which was happening everywhere, both steel and nuclear enterprises die. Guys, something has changed! The point is not only that the center seems much more prosperous. There is energy here that was not when I was a child.
When I was a child, it was a place that young people left. Now this is the place that attracts them.
What should I do with startups? After all, startups consist of people, and the average age of people in a typical startup is just between 25 and 29.
I saw how strong it is for the city to have such people. Five years ago, they moved 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 San Francisco. The reason why the center of gravity shifted was the war for talents, especially for programmers. Most from 25 to 29 years old want to live in the city, and not down in the boring suburbs. So whether or not they like it, the founders know that they must be in the city. I know many founders who would prefer to live precisely in the valley, but were forced to move to San Francisco, otherwise they would have lost the war for talents.
So being a magnet for twenty years old people is a very promising thing. It is hard to imagine a place that becomes a startup hub, but has not yet become one. When I read this statistic about increasing the percentage of people from 25 to 29 years old, I had exactly the same feeling of excitement that I get when I see start-up schedules starting to creep up from the x-axis.
The national percentage from 25 to 29 years is 6.8%. That means you are ahead by 0.8%. The population is 306,000, so we are talking about a surplus of about 2500 people. This is the population of a small town, and this is only an excess. So you have a foothold. Now you just have to expand it.
And although the “youth food boom” may seem frivolous, this is far from the case. Restaurants and cafes are a big part of the individuality of the city. Imagine a walk down the street in Paris. What are you walking by? Small restaurants and cafes. Imagine driving through a depressed suburban area. Past what are you driving through? Starbucks and McDonalds and Pizza Hut. As Gertrude Stein said, neither there nor there. You can be anywhere.
These independent restaurants and cafes not only feed people. They make you be here
So here is my specific recommendation for turning Pittsburgh into the next Silicon Valley: do everything possible to stimulate this youth food boom. What can a city do? Examine the people creating these small restaurants and cafes as users, and ask them what they want. I guess that at least one thing they could want is a quick permitting process. San Francisco has left you a huge amount of space to beat them in this area.
I know that restaurants are not the main driving force. The main driving force, as the Times says, is cheap housing. This is a big advantage. But this phrase “cheap housing” is a bit misleading. There are many places that are cheaper. The specialty of Pittsburgh is not that cheap, but that it is a cheap place where you really want to live.
In part, these are the buildings themselves. I realized long ago, when I had been poor for twenty and something years, that the best offers were places that were once rich, and then became poor. If the place has always been rich, it is good, but too expensive. If the place has always been poor, it is cheap but gloomy. But if this place was once rich, and then became poor, you can find the palaces cheaply. And this is what brings people here. When Pittsburgh was rich, a hundred years ago, the people who lived here built large sturdy buildings. Not always in the best taste, but definitely strong. So here's another tip to become a startup hub: do not destroy buildings that attract people here. When cities are on their way back up, like Pittsburgh now, developers are eager to demolish old buildings. Do not let this happen. Focus on saving history. Large real estate development projects are not something that will bring here twenty-something year olds. They are the opposite of new restaurants and cafes; they subtract the individuality from the city.
Empirical evidence suggests that you can not be too strict in the protection of historical monuments. More durable cities are those that are better built than they look.
But Pittsburgh’s attraction is not only in the buildings themselves, but also in the neighborhoods. Like San Francisco and New York, Pittsburgh is fortunate to be a pre-car city. This is not too common. Because these people from 25 to 29 years old do not like driving. They prefer to walk, or ride a bike or public transport. If you have been to San Francisco lately, you can't help but notice a huge number of cyclists. And this is not just a whim, which took twenty-something summer. In this regard, they found the best way to live. The beard will go, but not the bikes. Cities that you can get around without a car is just the best point. So I would suggest that you do your best to capitalize on this. As with the preservation of historical heritage, this seems to be impossible to go too far.
Why not make Pittsburgh the most bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly city in the country? See, if you can go that far, then you do that, then San Francisco will seem to be moving in the opposite direction from you. If you do, it is very unlikely that you will regret it. The city will seem like a paradise for the young people you want to attract. If they were forced to leave to get a job elsewhere, it would be a shame to leave such places behind. And what are the disadvantages? Can you imagine the title "The city is destroyed, becoming too friendly to cyclists?" This simply can not be.
So, let the cool old quarters and some little small steep restaurants make the future Portland. Will this be enough? It puts you in a better position than Portland itself, because Pittsburgh has something that Portland lacks: a first-class research university. Carnegie Mellon University plus small cafes mean you have more than a latte hipster. This means that you have hipsters who drink lattes while talking about distributed systems. Now you become very close to San Francisco.
In fact, you are better than San Francisco, on the one hand, because Carnegie Mellon University (UKM) is the center of the city, and Stanford and Berkeley are located in the suburbs.
What can UKM do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub? To be an even better research university. UKM is one of the best universities in the world, but imagine what it would be like if it were the best, and everyone knew it. There are many ambitious people who have to go to the best place, wherever it is - even if it were in Siberia. If UKM were like this, they would all come here. Children in Kazakhstan would dream of living in Pittsburgh one day.
Being a sort of magnet for talent is the most important contribution of universities, which they can make in turning their city into a start-up hub. In fact, this is practically the only contribution they can make.
But wait, shouldn't universities run programs with words like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” in the title? No, they should not. Such things almost always turn out to be disappointments. They have the wrong goals. The way to get innovation is not to strive for innovation, but to strive for something more specific, such as better batteries or better 3D printing. And the way to learn about entrepreneurship is to do what you can't do at school.
I know that to hear that the best thing a university can do to encourage startups is to be a great university, and may disappoint some administrators. It's like telling people who want to lose weight, that the way to do it is to eat less.
But if you want to know where the startups came, look at the empirical evidence. Look at the stories of the most successful startups, and you will find that they grow organically from several founders who are building something that begins as an interesting side project. Universities remarkably unite the founders, but beyond that, the best thing they can do is get out of the way. For example, not asserting their ownership of "intellectual property", which is developed by students and teachers, as well as having liberal rules on extended access and time off.
In fact, one of the most effective things a university can do to encourage startups is to develop a form of leaving the road, invented by Harvard. Harvard used to conduct exams in the fall semester after Christmas. In early January, they had something called the Reading Period, when you were supposed to prepare for exams. Both Microsoft and Facebook have something in common that few people understand: they both started during the Reading Period. This is the ideal situation to get this type of side projects that turn into startups. All students are on campus, but they do not have to do anything, because they have to prepare for exams.
Harvard may have closed this window because a few years ago they moved exams for the period before Christmas and shortened the reading period from 11 days to 7. But if the university really wanted to help its students start start-ups, the empirical data weighted by market capitalization offer the best what they can do is literally nothing.
Pittsburgh culture is another of its strengths. It seems that the city must be very socially liberal to be a start-up hub, and it’s pretty clear why. The city has to endure weirdness to be a home for startups, because startups are so weird. And you can not solve only those forms of strangeness that will turn into big startups, because they are all mixed up. You must endure all oddities.
This immediately excludes large chunks in the USA . I am optimistic, this does not exclude Pittsburgh. One of the things that I remember from growing up here, although I did not realize at the time that there was nothing unusual in this, how well people got along. I still do not know why. Perhaps one of the reasons is because everyone felt like an immigrant. When I was a kid in Monroville, people did not call themselves Americans. They called themselves Italians or Serbs or Ukrainians. Just imagine what happened here a hundred years ago, when people flocked from twenty different countries. Tolerance was the only option.
What I remember about the culture of Pittsburgh is that it was both tolerant and pragmatic. This is how I would describe the culture of Silicon Valley, too. And this is no accident, because Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley of its time. It was a city where people built new things. And while the things that people build have changed, the spirit that you need to do this kind of work is the same.
So, although the influx of hipsters who greedily drink lattes can be annoying in some sense, I would step aside to encourage them. And more generally, tolerating weirdness, even to the degree that crazy Californians do. For Pittsburgh, this is a conservative choice: it is a return to the roots of the city.
Unfortunately, I saved the toughest part last. There is one more thing that is needed to make a startup hub, but Pittsburgh does not have this: investors. Silicon Valley has a large investor community because it was 50 years old to grow it. New York has a large investor community because it is full of people who love a lot of money and who quickly notice new ways to get it. But Pittsburgh has none of this. And cheap housing, which attracts other people here, has no effect on investors.
If the investor community grows here, it will happen just as it did in Silicon Valley: slowly and organically. So I wouldn't bet on having a large investor community in the short term. But, fortunately, there are three trends that make it less necessary than it was before. One of them is that startups are starting up more and more cheaply, so you just don’t need as much money from the outside as you are used to. Secondly, thanks to such things as Kickstarter, a startup can get income faster. You can place something on Kickstarter from anywhere in the world. Third, programs such as Y Combinator. A startup from anywhere in the world can go to YC for 3 months, take the funds, and then go home if he wants.
My advice is to make Pittsburgh a great place for startups, and gradually more and more of them will linger. Some of them will be successful; some of their founders will become investors; and even more startups will linger.
This is not the fastest way - to become a startup hub. But at least this is the way some other cities go. And at the same time, it is not so if you have to make painful sacrifices. Think about what I suggested you do. To encourage local restaurants, preserve old buildings, take advantage of concentration, make UKM the best, encourage tolerance. These are the things that make Pittsburgh good for life now. All I want to say is that you have to make even more out of it.
And this is a hopeful thought. If the way to make Pittsburgh a start-up hub is to become even more than itself, then it has a good chance of success. In fact, there are probably better odds than any city of its size. It will take some effort and a lot of time, but if any city can do it, then Pittsburgh can.
Thanks to Charlie Cheever and Jessica Livingston for reading the drafts of this [report], and Meg Cheever for organizing Opt412 and inviting me to speak.
PS
Who is ready to help with the translation of The Refragmentation , write in a personal or e-mail (specified in the profile)
“Universities remarkably unite the founders, but beyond that, the best thing they can do is get out of the way.”
- Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, programmer, investor, essayist
')
Original - How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
April 2016
( Thanks to the translation for nachit , for the help in posting the publication - Edison . )
(I gave this lecture at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of this applies to other cities. But not all, because, as I said, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most start-up hubs)
What needs to be done to turn Pittsburgh into a startup hub like Silicon Valley? I feel, I think, Pittsburgh is very good, because I grew up here in Monroeville. And I understand Silicon Valley very well, because I live now. Could you get such a startup ecosystem here?
When I agreed to speak here, I do not think that I was able to give a very optimistic lecture. I thought I would talk about what Pittsburgh could do to become a start-up hub, but it would have turned out too much. Instead, I will talk about what Pittsburgh can do.
What changed my mind is the article I read in all sections of the New York Times food. The name was "The Pittsburgh Youth Oriented Food Boom" . For most, it will not cause a drop of interest, not to mention something related to startups. But I got hooked on this headline. I don't think I could choose a more promising heading if I tried. After reading the article, I was even more impressed. It said that "people between the ages of 25 and 29 now make up 7.6 percent of all residents, compared with 7 percent about a decade ago." Wow, I thought, Pittsburgh could be the next Portland. It can be a cool place for all people who, in their twenties, want to find their place in life.
When I got here a couple of days ago, I could feel the difference. I lived here from 1968 to 1984. I did not understand that at that time, during this entire period, the whole city was in free fall. At the peak of the flight to the suburbs, which was happening everywhere, both steel and nuclear enterprises die. Guys, something has changed! The point is not only that the center seems much more prosperous. There is energy here that was not when I was a child.
When I was a child, it was a place that young people left. Now this is the place that attracts them.
What should I do with startups? After all, startups consist of people, and the average age of people in a typical startup is just between 25 and 29.
I saw how strong it is for the city to have such people. Five years ago, they moved 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 San Francisco. The reason why the center of gravity shifted was the war for talents, especially for programmers. Most from 25 to 29 years old want to live in the city, and not down in the boring suburbs. So whether or not they like it, the founders know that they must be in the city. I know many founders who would prefer to live precisely in the valley, but were forced to move to San Francisco, otherwise they would have lost the war for talents.
So being a magnet for twenty years old people is a very promising thing. It is hard to imagine a place that becomes a startup hub, but has not yet become one. When I read this statistic about increasing the percentage of people from 25 to 29 years old, I had exactly the same feeling of excitement that I get when I see start-up schedules starting to creep up from the x-axis.
The national percentage from 25 to 29 years is 6.8%. That means you are ahead by 0.8%. The population is 306,000, so we are talking about a surplus of about 2500 people. This is the population of a small town, and this is only an excess. So you have a foothold. Now you just have to expand it.
And although the “youth food boom” may seem frivolous, this is far from the case. Restaurants and cafes are a big part of the individuality of the city. Imagine a walk down the street in Paris. What are you walking by? Small restaurants and cafes. Imagine driving through a depressed suburban area. Past what are you driving through? Starbucks and McDonalds and Pizza Hut. As Gertrude Stein said, neither there nor there. You can be anywhere.
These independent restaurants and cafes not only feed people. They make you be here
So here is my specific recommendation for turning Pittsburgh into the next Silicon Valley: do everything possible to stimulate this youth food boom. What can a city do? Examine the people creating these small restaurants and cafes as users, and ask them what they want. I guess that at least one thing they could want is a quick permitting process. San Francisco has left you a huge amount of space to beat them in this area.
I know that restaurants are not the main driving force. The main driving force, as the Times says, is cheap housing. This is a big advantage. But this phrase “cheap housing” is a bit misleading. There are many places that are cheaper. The specialty of Pittsburgh is not that cheap, but that it is a cheap place where you really want to live.
In part, these are the buildings themselves. I realized long ago, when I had been poor for twenty and something years, that the best offers were places that were once rich, and then became poor. If the place has always been rich, it is good, but too expensive. If the place has always been poor, it is cheap but gloomy. But if this place was once rich, and then became poor, you can find the palaces cheaply. And this is what brings people here. When Pittsburgh was rich, a hundred years ago, the people who lived here built large sturdy buildings. Not always in the best taste, but definitely strong. So here's another tip to become a startup hub: do not destroy buildings that attract people here. When cities are on their way back up, like Pittsburgh now, developers are eager to demolish old buildings. Do not let this happen. Focus on saving history. Large real estate development projects are not something that will bring here twenty-something year olds. They are the opposite of new restaurants and cafes; they subtract the individuality from the city.
Empirical evidence suggests that you can not be too strict in the protection of historical monuments. More durable cities are those that are better built than they look.
But Pittsburgh’s attraction is not only in the buildings themselves, but also in the neighborhoods. Like San Francisco and New York, Pittsburgh is fortunate to be a pre-car city. This is not too common. Because these people from 25 to 29 years old do not like driving. They prefer to walk, or ride a bike or public transport. If you have been to San Francisco lately, you can't help but notice a huge number of cyclists. And this is not just a whim, which took twenty-something summer. In this regard, they found the best way to live. The beard will go, but not the bikes. Cities that you can get around without a car is just the best point. So I would suggest that you do your best to capitalize on this. As with the preservation of historical heritage, this seems to be impossible to go too far.
Why not make Pittsburgh the most bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly city in the country? See, if you can go that far, then you do that, then San Francisco will seem to be moving in the opposite direction from you. If you do, it is very unlikely that you will regret it. The city will seem like a paradise for the young people you want to attract. If they were forced to leave to get a job elsewhere, it would be a shame to leave such places behind. And what are the disadvantages? Can you imagine the title "The city is destroyed, becoming too friendly to cyclists?" This simply can not be.
So, let the cool old quarters and some little small steep restaurants make the future Portland. Will this be enough? It puts you in a better position than Portland itself, because Pittsburgh has something that Portland lacks: a first-class research university. Carnegie Mellon University plus small cafes mean you have more than a latte hipster. This means that you have hipsters who drink lattes while talking about distributed systems. Now you become very close to San Francisco.
In fact, you are better than San Francisco, on the one hand, because Carnegie Mellon University (UKM) is the center of the city, and Stanford and Berkeley are located in the suburbs.
What can UKM do to help Pittsburgh become a startup hub? To be an even better research university. UKM is one of the best universities in the world, but imagine what it would be like if it were the best, and everyone knew it. There are many ambitious people who have to go to the best place, wherever it is - even if it were in Siberia. If UKM were like this, they would all come here. Children in Kazakhstan would dream of living in Pittsburgh one day.
Being a sort of magnet for talent is the most important contribution of universities, which they can make in turning their city into a start-up hub. In fact, this is practically the only contribution they can make.
But wait, shouldn't universities run programs with words like “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” in the title? No, they should not. Such things almost always turn out to be disappointments. They have the wrong goals. The way to get innovation is not to strive for innovation, but to strive for something more specific, such as better batteries or better 3D printing. And the way to learn about entrepreneurship is to do what you can't do at school.
I know that to hear that the best thing a university can do to encourage startups is to be a great university, and may disappoint some administrators. It's like telling people who want to lose weight, that the way to do it is to eat less.
But if you want to know where the startups came, look at the empirical evidence. Look at the stories of the most successful startups, and you will find that they grow organically from several founders who are building something that begins as an interesting side project. Universities remarkably unite the founders, but beyond that, the best thing they can do is get out of the way. For example, not asserting their ownership of "intellectual property", which is developed by students and teachers, as well as having liberal rules on extended access and time off.
In fact, one of the most effective things a university can do to encourage startups is to develop a form of leaving the road, invented by Harvard. Harvard used to conduct exams in the fall semester after Christmas. In early January, they had something called the Reading Period, when you were supposed to prepare for exams. Both Microsoft and Facebook have something in common that few people understand: they both started during the Reading Period. This is the ideal situation to get this type of side projects that turn into startups. All students are on campus, but they do not have to do anything, because they have to prepare for exams.
Harvard may have closed this window because a few years ago they moved exams for the period before Christmas and shortened the reading period from 11 days to 7. But if the university really wanted to help its students start start-ups, the empirical data weighted by market capitalization offer the best what they can do is literally nothing.
Pittsburgh culture is another of its strengths. It seems that the city must be very socially liberal to be a start-up hub, and it’s pretty clear why. The city has to endure weirdness to be a home for startups, because startups are so weird. And you can not solve only those forms of strangeness that will turn into big startups, because they are all mixed up. You must endure all oddities.
This immediately excludes large chunks in the USA . I am optimistic, this does not exclude Pittsburgh. One of the things that I remember from growing up here, although I did not realize at the time that there was nothing unusual in this, how well people got along. I still do not know why. Perhaps one of the reasons is because everyone felt like an immigrant. When I was a kid in Monroville, people did not call themselves Americans. They called themselves Italians or Serbs or Ukrainians. Just imagine what happened here a hundred years ago, when people flocked from twenty different countries. Tolerance was the only option.
What I remember about the culture of Pittsburgh is that it was both tolerant and pragmatic. This is how I would describe the culture of Silicon Valley, too. And this is no accident, because Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley of its time. It was a city where people built new things. And while the things that people build have changed, the spirit that you need to do this kind of work is the same.
So, although the influx of hipsters who greedily drink lattes can be annoying in some sense, I would step aside to encourage them. And more generally, tolerating weirdness, even to the degree that crazy Californians do. For Pittsburgh, this is a conservative choice: it is a return to the roots of the city.
Unfortunately, I saved the toughest part last. There is one more thing that is needed to make a startup hub, but Pittsburgh does not have this: investors. Silicon Valley has a large investor community because it was 50 years old to grow it. New York has a large investor community because it is full of people who love a lot of money and who quickly notice new ways to get it. But Pittsburgh has none of this. And cheap housing, which attracts other people here, has no effect on investors.
If the investor community grows here, it will happen just as it did in Silicon Valley: slowly and organically. So I wouldn't bet on having a large investor community in the short term. But, fortunately, there are three trends that make it less necessary than it was before. One of them is that startups are starting up more and more cheaply, so you just don’t need as much money from the outside as you are used to. Secondly, thanks to such things as Kickstarter, a startup can get income faster. You can place something on Kickstarter from anywhere in the world. Third, programs such as Y Combinator. A startup from anywhere in the world can go to YC for 3 months, take the funds, and then go home if he wants.
My advice is to make Pittsburgh a great place for startups, and gradually more and more of them will linger. Some of them will be successful; some of their founders will become investors; and even more startups will linger.
This is not the fastest way - to become a startup hub. But at least this is the way some other cities go. And at the same time, it is not so if you have to make painful sacrifices. Think about what I suggested you do. To encourage local restaurants, preserve old buildings, take advantage of concentration, make UKM the best, encourage tolerance. These are the things that make Pittsburgh good for life now. All I want to say is that you have to make even more out of it.
And this is a hopeful thought. If the way to make Pittsburgh a start-up hub is to become even more than itself, then it has a good chance of success. In fact, there are probably better odds than any city of its size. It will take some effort and a lot of time, but if any city can do it, then Pittsburgh can.
Thanks to Charlie Cheever and Jessica Livingston for reading the drafts of this [report], and Meg Cheever for organizing Opt412 and inviting me to speak.
PS
Who is ready to help with the translation of The Refragmentation , write in a personal or e-mail (specified in the profile)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/301664/
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