Million Dollar Carrot Dangled As St. Louis Redefines Itself In Start-Up Space

The opening line:<p>"When you think of technology start-ups, a small cluster of cities comes to mind – Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin and Charlotte."<p>Charlotte?? I thought Raleigh-Durham was bad for startups - Charlotte has to be worse. And where is the mention of New York City? Strange perspective. Maybe someone from Charlotte can shed light on their Ive league status.

The article touches on this, but the real reason St. Louis could be a great place to start a company is because it has one of the most underrated Universities in the country. Wash U attracts very talented students to St. Louis, but because the school doesn't have much name recognition, very few tech companies recruit there. When I was at Wash U, the best tech jobs at the career fair were (in order): Microsoft, Raytheon, and General Mills. Unless things have changed dramatically in the last five years, I think it's safe to say that there's not much competition if you're trying to hire developers there.<p>Combine that with the low cost of living, and St. Louis might be the easiest place in the country to hire talented young people.

The comments suggesting Wash U's CS program has (too much of) an academic slant have a point but also miss it entirely. In my experience, the academic is certainly emphasized over the pragmatic (for example, lots of talk about algorithmic complexity but zero mention of testing or version-control). That isn't in-and-of itself a problem, it's just a mistake in the order-of-operations. I needed a lot of real experience to motivate the academic in me.<p>In college, you couldn't pay me to read cutting edge CS literature because I was sure the academics were never going to teach me anything practical. Fast-forward five years and I'm bored of what I was doing and interested in the same hard problems academics are. (Of course, I'm coming to worse but occasionally good-enough solutions.)<p>It'll be good for Saint Louis and Wash U to have an injection of that context earlier because it might motivate the academic side of CS early enough for students with a couple of years left to give more of a shit.

Sounds great. Now where are the Who's Hiring posts/comments for St. Louis?

I'd love to see St Louis start to develop a tech startup scene.<p>Low cost of living, really cool neighborhoods and lots of smart programmers at stodgy big companies. It seems like the city just needs some capital &#38; a few experienced tech entrepreneurs to get it going.<p>That being said, I don't know of any Wash U CS grads that stayed in St Louis for startups - they all headed for the coasts (me included.) Hopefully that'll change over time.

As a college student and St. Louis native, this really excites me. I wish all the startups in these programs the best of luck.

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