
St Louis is the new startup frontier - dwaxe
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/st-louis-is-the-new-startup-frontier/
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dionidium
> But it’s hard to know whether those efforts — or those of local boosters in
> St. Louis — are what’s making a difference. That’s partly because the
> limited data on entrepreneurship makes it hard to study the impact of
> government policies.

Moreover, I wonder if there's actually anything _at all_ different about St.
Louis. There's a new article about the growth of startups in some old rust
belt city seemingly every week. But I've yet to see any real evidence than any
specific one of them is doing anything wildly different to encourage that
growth.

In fact, I suspect that the amount of growth they're experiencing now could be
achieved while _doing almost nothing right._ There's some baseline amount
that's going to happen _in spite_ of your policies.

Nearly everything Paul Graham said about Pittsburgh [0], for example, is true
of St. Louis and Kansas City and Cincinnati and so on. I'd really love to see
one of them run with it. (I'm biased in favor of St. Louis (for the same
reason Paul's article is about PGH and not some other city), but, really, I'd
be happy if any one of them went all in.)

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/pgh.html)

Really important edit: Nobody calls it "the Arch City." Nobody.

