[146]

> And lets get honest here - Pittsburgh is great but if you're finally making it to the big time, why would you want to stay in a declining rustbelt city?

Luis (the reCAPTCHA founder) wrote a blog post about this recently. Basically to summarize, staying in Pittsburgh helped picking up CMU talent, and Pittsburgh doesn't suffer from a lot of distractions that come with the Valley.

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2010/06/startups-and-cmu.html

Very importantly to note though, Luis has a professorship, a fiance, and a life built out in Pittsburgh. Similarly, I've heard that a lot of the Google Pittsburgh engineers are family men/women who don't want to leave the area.

[melling]

Robots. This is going to be the decade of robots. Carnegie Mellon is a world leader, and Pittsburgh should benefit from the boom. Just Google and see what you come up with. I found a few:

http://www.seegrid.com/seegridoffices.html

http://kotaku.com/5577771/intel-inside-your-mind-serving-you... - Intel Lab in Pittsburgh

http://www.pittsburghroboticssociety.org/

[jimbokun]

An interesting thought from that discussion:

"I agree with you, the resources in the Valley can't be beat. Fortunately there is a way to leverage both - we are trying to pave the way for development in Pittsburgh and business in SV. There are many upsides to this approach - incredible team, dedication, outside the bubble, lower costs, better office space, local recruiting, etc. We are testing this all out at the moment - so far so good!"