Seattle tech veteran and angel investor Charles Fitzgerald went to Cleveland and came back with a warning: a city that was once the joke of the country is now more focused on its future than Seattle is.
Fitzgerald told “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio that he and GeekWire publisher John Cook spent several days in Cleveland meeting with startups, big companies, university leaders, and politicians, including Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, the county commissioner, and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. The trip grew out of a GeekWire column Fitzgerald wrote earlier this year comparing 1950s Cleveland to present-day Seattle, both cities that enjoyed 30 years of economic growth and were home to the dominant tech companies of their era.
“The thing that happened with Cleveland is 20 years later they were completely in the ditch,” Fitzgerald said. “The Rust Belt starts to rust, and the politicians did everything they could to make it worse. And they’ve spent the last 50-plus years really digging out of that hole.”…