Rust Belt startups face different set of challenges

Talent scared off by lack of opportunity

Luis von Ahn said there are only a few places where a startup like language learning app Duolingo could have thrived.

“I imagine that there’s a handful of cities where I could have done what I did, [but] not every city,” Mr. von Ahn said during the Thrival Innovation Festival on Wednesday afternoon at East Liberty’s Ace Hotel.

“The really top schools for computing around the world are Carnegie Mellon, MIT, [University of California] Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton, maybe.”

Surviving in not only Rust Belt cities, but any emerging market, can be a challenge for startups that don’t opt for the bright lights of New York City or the iconic draw of the Silicon Valley.

There’s a smaller population,

less connectivity to other cities vis-a-vis airports, and sometimes there’s a phenomenon of net brain drain, where top universities yield talented students that end up moving away en masse.

Mr. von Ahn, a CMU alumnus and professor, didn’t say much throughout the panel, but when he did, he offered wry jokes about how Pittsburgh’s greatest strength was its Primanti Brothers sandwiches — and found time to tout the university, where he first created the reCAPTCHA tool, which he referred to, with a laugh, as an “annoying” set of images that prove a website visitor is not a robot.

The talent created and nurtured between Downtown and Oakland has been key to Pittsburgh’s growth in the tech sector.

The city placed eighth in a study of 50 small tech job markets in North America and Canada, according to Los Angeles, Calif.-based commercial real estate company CBRE Group Inc. The report described Pittsburgh as a top “momentum market,” or place where job creation grew faster in the past two years — 2015 and 2016 — than in the previous twoyear period.

The pool of tech talent grew 12 percent from 2015 to 2016, and the region has the fourth largest labor pool among other small tech markets, with 42,130 employees.

And yet, Mr. von Ahn said, some of the best and brightest at his company are on the verge of leaving.

About 70 percent of his 100 or so employees come from outside of Pittsburgh and about half are from outside the U.S. What they share is that they’re all young, mostly between 23 and 30, and have achieved a high level of educational attainment, typically at some of the most prestigious universities in the world.

“And they cannot find significant others here in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I think a few of them are going to start leaving.”

While the packed ballroom on the second level of Ace Hotel roared with laughter, that’s a serious concern for those looking to relocate to a city with just over 300,000 residents.

Stan Joosten, innovation manager for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, noted that in his current city, and in Pittsburgh, it’s even difficult to move from place to place because of relatively underequipped airports that require connecting flights to reach the likes of Silicon Valley. But once entrepreneurs and startup gurus find the small cities like Cincinnati, they are wholeheartedly impressed, he said.

“How we keep talent and how we tackle beyond that is still a vexing problem for cities like Pittsburgh or Cincinnat,i because people want to explore the world, and some see dreams come true in Silicon Valley,” Mr. Joosten said. In the meantime, he admits Pittsburgh has a better football team than Cincinnati. For some, that’s enough of a draw.