A venture capitalist is working with a city passed over for Amazon's HQ2 to use its secretive proposal to bring other tech companies to roost
- Tech investor Patrick McKenna runs a nonprofit called One America Works that's focused on bringing tech companies to often-overlooked cities.
- In Pittsburgh, he took the hundreds of pages of research behind its highly secretive proposal for Amazon's second headquarters and transformed it into a digest for other businesses considering a move to the old mill town.
- The four-page document was part of a campaign that's bringing 60 to 80 high-paying tech jobs to Pittsburgh this year, according to One America Works.
- McKenna said more cities should recycle their proposals for Amazon's second headquarters to draw other businesses to their backyards.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Pittsburgh was passed over as the site of Amazon's second headquarters.
The former steel capital still scored some high-paying tech jobs in the process.
Not long after their bid was rejected, a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley asked city and county officials to release to him the hundreds of pages of research behind its highly secretive proposal for Amazon HQ2. Patrick McKenna had the idea to distill the document into a tight, four-page pitch that could be shared with other tech companies that may be more amenable to relocating to Pittsburgh.
It appears to have worked on a handful of much smaller businesses.
A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, McKenna runs a nonprofit called One America Works that's focused on bringing tech to often-overlooked cities. Last year, the group gave the Pittsburgh pitch based on the Amazon proposal to about 1,000 companies, mostly in the Bay Area.
Of those, a dozen tech companies said they would consider going to Pittsburgh, and a smaller group of five are hiring there, according to McKenna. They could create 60 to 80 jobs between them.
McKenna said his nonprofit plans to work with at least two more cities this year to bring tech to their backyards. It would only partner with cities, he said, that are willing to share the research behind their proposals for Amazon's headquarters.
"If a city hasn't gone through the process of thinking about how they would make this proposal, then they're not going to be a great fit for us," McKenna told Business Insider. "We're not creating those assets. We're telling the story of those assets."
An explosive report from Bloomberg published on Monday said that Amazon had a shortlist of cities it was considering for a second home before it announced the nationwide search competition. Its 20 finalists were mostly the same cities it had already scouted, people familiar with Amazon's effort told Bloomberg.
According to one source, city and state officials "privately complained to their Amazon contacts" that the exercise of putting together a proposal was "a tremendous waste of public resources." They felt like the retail giant was "stringing the entire continent along."
Is Pittsburgh the next hot tech hub?
McKenna said his group reached out to local leaders in Pittsburgh about getting access to the research put into the unsuccessful proposal. They seemed reluctant. Pittsburgh had concealed its bid from the public, forcing a small number of residents to public protest.
McKenna told them he wanted to put their hard work to a better use.
The idea was to convince fast-growing companies to open a second office in the old mill town, which has reinvented itself in recent decades as a haven for tech companies seeking a rich talent pool in a more affordable market. Pittsburgh's tech workforce grew 21% from 2012 to 2017, while major employers such as Google, Facebook, and Uber already have remote offices in the city. Still, it doesn't have a reputation for cranking out startup unicorns or drawing venture capitalists.
McKenna said his team picked apart the original proposal and drafted a version that would inspire companies without Amazon's financial resources to see the reasons plainly for going to Pittsburgh. They scrapped any mention of local or state incentives for planting roots.
"We weren't trying to talk to Amazon anymore with our story," he said.
Pittsburgh's original proposal described the city as a birthplace of innovation, where people come from around the world to study at its local universities and work at the more than 1,600 tech firms that have a presence in Pittsburgh.
The four-page proposal that McKenna's group created - which you can read here - was an effective digest, he said.
It highlights the city's talent pipeline. The dozens of higher education institutions nearby graduate more than 4,000 students with tech-related degrees each year. Carnegie Melon's computer science program is widely recognized as the best in the nation. Many of those recent graduates stay in Pittsburgh for the quality of life they can afford. The city has the highest rate of homeownership of the 40 largest metro areas in the country.
Amazon didn't pick Pittsburgh. But McKenna makes the case to businesses that other tech companies have.
"We like to say, 'If it's good enough for Google to go to Pittsburgh, isn't it good enough for XYZ?'" McKenna said.
