[Originally posted to LinkedIn on September 10, 2025 and reposted here for archival purposes.]
This new LinkedIn article by Ajmail Matin – Pittsburgh suffers from too much extractive landlordism and not enough feedback-driven Pittsburgh-specific investment – hits a lot of good points. In the spirit of my old Pittsblog home (2004-2013; critical takes on Pittsburgh by someone who literally grew up and then worked in a real tech-first economy), here are three more:
(i) The “ecosystem” metaphor is limiting and should be abandoned. The tech economy is not an “ecosystem” (that is: every agent and actor has its niche; the niches are co-dependent; the co-dependence is systemic and evolves slowly in complex patterns). The tech economy is not an agglomerated place-based economy the way that “steel” was an agglomerated place-based economy. Pittsburgh needs better infrastructures, not a more “dynamic” ecosystem. Infrastructures mean physical, economic, social, cultural, and political systems that bring lots of people, groups, organizations, and firms to the proverbial table, fueled by investment from wherever and propelled by ambition from wherever, without pre-judging targets or winners.
(ii) There are landlords and rent-extractors out there, for sure, but they are walking among us, here in Pittsburgh. They are not in Menlo Park. Pittsburgh was built on landlordism. Carnegie and Frick were, above all, landlords par excellence. Pittsburgh was an extractive economy. It is still an extractive economy. All of that talk about promoting “physical AI”? That’s extractive landlord-speak. The AI-ish left hand of Pittsburgh is extracting value from the non-AI-ish right hand of Pittsburgh. The region needs a better mirror; it needs to account for all hands.
(iii) The real problem in tech and Pittsburgh full stop is not money (too little, wrong kinds). More and smarter money is always better, but more and smarter money in the wrong hands is a recipe for continued disappointment. The real problem is people. The leaders that Pittsburgh is relying on, and that Pittsburgh has relied on for decades, use imaginations that keep them and the broader region locked into an old school hierarchy-with-a-hard-cap view of Pittsburgh’s possible futures (plural). They clap and cheer loudly; nothing happens other than their becoming minor local business celebrities. At the other end of the pipeline, meet-ups among early career tech folk are energizing for them but, without the right infrastructures to plug into, amount to little more than added clapping and cheering. In short, Pittsburgh does not have the talent right now – leadership talent, professional services talent – to make Pittsburgh more than the small- to mid-size service city that it already is. If the talent were here and were invested here, Pittsburgh would be brighter and more energetic than it is right now. Most of the most creative and ambitious professionals I know in Pittsburgh today are people who live here but spread their professional wings around the world rather than digging primarily into the local economy. Or digging here at all.
This is a first half of a critique. The second half – what to do differently, how to do it better, and who should do it – comes later. The seeds of that second half, I’m sorry to say, are at Pittsblog (sorry because I ended that blog more than a decade ago, and here I am saying the same things; nothing I’ve written above will come as a surprise to people who read me back in the day). Stay tuned.