just don't plain don't want to stay in the city I'm not so sure it is that as much as... they get hired for research/corporate work ... actually prefer _that_

just don't plain don't want to stay in the city I'm not so sure it is that as much as... they get hired for research/corporate work ... actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup Most of the CMU nerds want to work at the best companies for stimulating their intellectual minds. I suspect people who get accepted to CMU recognize its capacity for strengthening your inner nerd, and so those are the types who go there: people who can maximize their time thinking about difficult computer science problems. AlphaLab, I presume the seed funding organization you refer to, is going about it all wrong. They are trying to be a copy of YCombinator, and I'll challenge them to a debate if they think otherwise. What they ought to be doing is being more open to the startup community at large to the point where all of the startups in Pittsburgh and all of the investors in Pittsburgh are in one room hobnobbing. So far I have yet to even have met anyone affiliated with AlphaLab. They had some lame happy hour kind of event at their facility once in the last few months, but I left when the director started to waste our time with a presentation which I could have (already had) absorbed via the information on their website. I've overheard a few comments from investors here. One said something along the lines of, "AlphaLab expects you to invest a couple million in some companies who give 10 minute presentations? Get real." This tells me the adaption to the trend of angel investing isn't happening here. Another investor, when I mentioned the startups in Pittsburgh he replied, "Yeah. There are not enough." One solution, as I mentioned, is creating the illusion of a startup scene. Just have weekly events and do what you have to that people will actually go to them. Don't waste their time. Carnegie Mellon has a Pre-college program. These are kids who end up going to UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and so on. That is, they are there because CMU is one of the best schools for computer science so why not get a sample of what it is like there. So, if incubators like AlphaLab actually helped the startup scene seem as though it exists, those Pre-college students may decide they like it and choose to go to CMU over MIT (let's say Stanford rejected them by chance) because they feel a strong sense of a startup environment.