Baltimore ‘seems to be reinventing itself’: Matt Price [Entrance Exam]

It’s been a busy summer for Ohio native Matt Price, who quit his job at GE, left upstate New York and moved to Baltimore about one month ago to work full-time at Silith.io, a startup he cofounded in June.
Along with Silith.io’s four other employees, Price is working on a private beta version of the startup’s first product, an online tool that would allow teams of designers and their clients to leave annotations and notes on websites or mobile apps as they’re being programmed.
For a 25-year-old who just left a steady job to become a newly crowned CTO, founding a startup in Baltimore was more a numbers-game than anything else: as in, the cost of living here (rent, food, the occasional beer) makes it cheaper to work from a basement office in Hampden than it would be to found a new project in New York City, Washington, D.C., or Boston. It’s that same consideration that led such startups as OrderUp and Parking Panda to put down roots here.
Technically Baltimore had a short chat with Price on why else he and Silith.io started up in Baltimore.
TB: The five of you are spending your own money on Silith.io right now, so saving as much money as possible is a priority, we’re guessing?
MP: You have to worry about how fast you’re spending your cash. The cost of living of different cities was an important consideration for us. It’s cheaper than New York and Silicon Valley, and we’re also close to places like D.C. and New York City. We can still have connections.
TB: So being on the Eastern seaboard is important. Any other reason why you came to Baltimore?
MP: Before this, my only previous experience of Baltimore was visiting friends who live here, but one of our engineering team members was in Baltimore, and our other engineer went to UMBC.
TB: Was being close to someone’s alma mater important at all?
MP: We have connections with some of the local colleges. Hopefully in the future when we start to hire people, we have a nice pipeline at Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, UMBC.
TB: Any reason for coming to Baltimore that isn’t directly related to the job?
MP: Having been from Cleveland, I know how hard it is to turn around a city, and I think Baltimore is one of those cities that seems to be reinventing itself. I wanted to be part of a city like that and hopefully in the future bring jobs here.