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<p>The WSJ ranking, eh? Isn’t that the same WSJ ranking that ranked Tepper #5 overall, over Wharton (#11), Harvard (#14) and Stanford (#19)? I don’t know, do you believe the ranking? Somehow I find it very hard to believe that many people are turning down Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton to flock to Carnegie Mellon. </p>
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<p>Yes, but how many startups can you actually name that come from Carnegie Mellon, or from the Pittsburgh area generally? In particular, how many venture capital firms are in the area? </p>
<p>Let’s be perfectly honest. Pittsburgh, while a nice city with a pretty darn good football team and a decent economy with numerous larger companies, isn’t exactly a hotbed of technology entrepreneurialism. And I’m not the only one saying it. Here’s what essayist and computer entrepreneur Paul Graham has said about Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon:</p>
<p>*Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. MIT yielded Route 128. Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley. But Carnegie-Mellon? The record skips at that point. Lower down the list, the University of Washington yielded a high-tech community in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin yielded one in Austin. But what happened in Pittsburgh? And in Ithaca, home of Cornell, which is also high on the list?</p>
<p>I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can answer for both. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there’s no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is in Boston. Rich people don’t want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. So while there are plenty of hackers who could start startups, there’s no one to invest in them.*</p>
<p>[How</a> to Be Silicon Valley](<a href=“http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html]How”>How to Be Silicon Valley)</p>