Pittsburgh

USAirways Demonstrates the Futility of Subsidizing Big Biz

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 13, 2011 / Leave a comment

If I’ve said it once on this blog, I’ve said it a hundred times. It is dangerous to put public money in to the private system. However, if you’re a government that insists on doing it, please use seed funding concepts like Innovation Works or Alphalab. The worst thing you...
Project Olympus

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 10, 2011 / 3 Comments

It occurs to me that I should probably give some space to Project Olympus on this blog. After I spoke last week about the number of CMU software engineering students who leave Pittsburgh (CMU Professor Lenore Blum estimates it’s 95%), I thought a project specifically designed to help keep them...
Fred Wilson on Stimulating a Startup Ecosystem

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 7, 2011 / 1 Comment

Fred Wilson, as usual, had some valuable insights on his blog yesterday. The topic this time was particularly interesting, how the government can stimulate the startup ecosystem. He started by saying that there are at least two ecosystems in NYC, one around BioTech and one around Software/Internet/Digital Media and that...
Stop beating yourself up, Boston

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 22, 2010 / 3 Comments

Right after Mark Zuckerberg was named Time’s Person of the Year, Boston Globe Columnist Steve Syre penned an article lamenting the loss of Zuckerberg and other top tech talent to California. The article talked about a handful of individual entrepreneurs who have studied at one of Boston’s prestigious schools and...
cityLAB’s 6% Project is an Interesting Way to Provide Stimulus

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 21, 2010 / 1 Comment

Local Pittsburgh “Do Tank” (as opposed to “Think Tank”) cityLAB has undertaken a fairly radical, and extremely interesting project around the Penn Avenue Arts Corridor (East End). Citing a study that I couldn’t find on the internet, cityLAB believes that if they can get that region of the Burgh to...
How Can Portland VCs? Pittsburgh?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 13, 2010 / Leave a comment

TechCrunch has been running a series on their TV “network” called “Ask a VC”. There have been some interesting discussions, but I think the most interesting one to date for our purposes was David Hornik. Hornik has had quite a bit of success in silicon valley, but he was asked...
Pittsburgh Property Values a Good Sign for Growth?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 9, 2010 / Leave a comment

A couple weeks ago Chris Briem had a great link to this article entitled “Startup City”. The article is written by Harvard economist Edward Glaser and begins (the first 2/3 or so) by detailing several points in New York’s history where the city faced economic challenges only to be saved...
An Exciting Stat for Pittsburgh’s Future

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 2, 2010 / Leave a comment

The above chart comes directly out of UCSUR’s Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly for 1Q2010. Chris was talking about it again on his blog yesterday, and a thought occurred to me. Yes, this means that at the end of the day we’re about an average city in terms of education, but doesn’t...
Lesson 1: The Irish and the Potential for Remigration

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 26, 2010 / 1 Comment

This is part of a series of blog posts based on the book Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. The picture above is of Dixie’s in Charlotte during the Steelers vs. Oakland Raiders game. Not a particularly important game and definitely not a primetime one, but the bar...
The Hollywood Model, Richard Florida and the Burgh

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ November 4, 2010 / Leave a comment

I have been aware of the Hollywood Model (DeVany, 2003) for a while. I’ve never read the book, but the discussion of it is something that has interested me for a while. Essentially, it calls on business to work more like Hollywood. It argues that Hollywood used to be run...