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. Fair

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.