City of Greenville, SC to Entrepreneurs…From Here You Can Change the World

The City of Greenville, SC wants to attract innovators and from all over the country and all over the world. Under the leadership of Mayor Knox White, City Manager John McDonough and Director of Economic and Community Development, Merle Johnson, the city has launched an ambitious campaign to attract more entrepreneurs. I think it’s a terrific idea and have been following this development.

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 90’s through the early 2000s. It was a spectacular area for innovation and technology and it still is today. But California has gotten insanely expensive, crowded and burdened by overly impressive state and local governments. Greenville on the otherhand is also gorgeous but is up and coming. Residential and commercial real estate is still relatively inexpensive. The Upstate of South Carolina where Greenville sits at the center of this region has lots of colleges and universities to pull from if an employer is looking for certain degreed individuals. Clemson University is 45 minutes away…University of South Carolina is less than 90 minutes away…Furman, Bob Jones and Wofford and Greenville Technical College are all are all near by as well as many others.

Here is the letter they published in the Greenville Journal. Be sure to check out the site, You Can Greenville. It looks great and has a lot of useful pages and information links.

We moved here two years ago from the Minneapolis area and we do so for many of the reasons the Economic Development team has mentioned in their pitch to encourage others to move here. The city and area is a real jewel that is getting discovered. I don’t know that any of us hopes this becomes like Charlotte or Atlanta but it will continue to grow and as it does, hopefully we can continue to expand the culture of innovation that exists here and become a technology leader of the South.