Channelling Pittsburgh

Silicon Valley grandee, tech venture capitalist and Y-Combinator accelerator founder Paul Graham recently posted this piece about how Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania could become a startup hub.

Here's his summary of what he said the 300k population city could do:-

• Encourage local restaurants
• Save old buildings
• Become bicycle-friendly
• Take advantage of density
• Make CMU [the local university] the best
• Promote tolerance

These objectives sound pretty familar to anyone living in Leicester, don't you think?

He including a particularly interesting section about what universities should or shouldn't do to encourage enterprise:-

"Shouldn't universities be setting up programs with words like 'innovation' and 'entrepreneurship' in their names? No, they should not. These kind of things almost always turn out to be disappointments. They're pursuing the wrong targets. 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."

Hear, hear!