3 ms·

Just curious: why do you think Philadelphia is a lost cause?

• rdl 10y ago
  Too close and too inferior to NYC, DC (so great stuff just goes there instead -- Philadelphia would be ok relatively if it were in the midwest or south). Odd mix of expensive (city taxes and other costs) but lacking redeeming value. It's not Camden or Baltimore, but not great. UPenn, while a solid standalone university, isn't as integrated into a startup culture as even CMU, and certainly not as much as Columbia/NYU, themselves vastly less so than Stanford. Legacy infrastructure, corruption, costs. Lots of big biotech/pharma/etc. companies to sustain it and crowd out tech -- sort of the same problem as NYC (finance) and DC (Government).
  • patio11 10y ago
    FYI and YMMV, Philadelphia is in my top two places in the US I'd move to run a small software company. (The other is Chicago.) Substantial community of people doing that around N3rd St ("Nerd Street", get it?) Enough local tech firms (Wildbit, Freckle, etc) to achieve a community of practice. Reasonably inexpensive by the standards of big cities. Houses available in quantity.
    • rdl 10y ago
      Better than Pittsburgh? (I also dislike Chicago, so maybe there's a hidden variable. I'd do Seattle, Berlin, Austin, SLC, Boulder, Prague, Budapest, some German cities, Vancouver, Montreal, Pittsburgh, maybe Boston. I've never really lived in Chicago though, but did spend ~10y in and around Philadelphia. It's better now than in the 80s/90s for sure.)