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St Louis is the new startup frontier
- dionidium 10y ago> But it’s hard to know whether those efforts — or those of local boosters in St. Louis — are what’s making a difference. That’s partly because the limited data on entrepreneurship makes it hard to study the impact of government policies. Moreover, I wonder if there's actually anything at all different about St. Louis. There's a new article about the growth of startups in some old rust belt city seemingly every week. But I've yet to see any real evidence than any specific one of them is doing anything wildly different to encourage that growth. In fact, I suspect that the amount of growth they're experiencing now could be achieved while doing almost nothing right. There's some baseline amount that's going to happen in spite of your policies. Nearly everything Paul Graham said about Pittsburgh [0], for example, is true of St. Louis and Kansas City and Cincinnati and so on. I'd really love to see one of them run with it. (I'm biased in favor of St. Louis (for the same reason Paul's article is about PGH and not some other city), but, really, I'd be happy if any one of them went all in.) [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html Really important edit: Nobody calls it "the Arch City." Nobody.