Noelle Mateer , July 17, 2024

The Techies Who Lunch

Happy hour at the Duolingo taqueria © Amir B. Jahanbin

I regret to inform you that the food is fantastic, and they know it. “Welcome. This is the best Mexican food in the city,” gushed the hostess as she sat us at our table and handed us menus labeled menú, the Spanish word for menu. Ordering in Spanish would be optional, she told us, but on the menu’s back page we would find a vocabulary list of suggested words to try. Holais the Spanish word for hello, it said. Cilantrois the Spanish word for cilantro. “Aprende español, get tacos,” it went on, seemingly giving up halfway through.

When Duolingo began selling tacos out of its Pittsburgh headquarters in 2022, I assumed it was a gimmick. At the time, I was a tech reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, so any news from our startup darling would be within my remit, but what was this? Surely no one would want to eat tacos in the lobby of a company famous for gamifying language-learning via app. 

I’ve since been proven wrong. What began in 2022 as a roadside taco stand is now a full-service restaurant with rave reviews. It was buzzy enough on the weeknight that I visited that the waitstaff acted perplexed when I said I didn’t have a reservation. The tacos were not, in fact, made by software engineers, but by a talented chef. My coctel de camarónpaired fulsome Mexican gulf shrimp with a tangy chili sauce and shocks of chilled cucumber. The beef brisket in my suaderotacos was juicy and topped with a punchy salsa arbol. And though the location was unusual—our dining room shared a wall with Duolingo’s offices—the happy hour margaritas went a long way toward assuaging any bad vibes.

Though perhaps restaurant culture and the tech hustle ethos have more in common than what first comes to mind. Last fall, Duolingo’s founder Luis Von Ahn shared a LinkedIn post about his love for the critically acclaimed restaurant drama The Bear. Von Ahn liked the episode “Forks” so much that he required everyone at Duolingo to watch it. “There was a quiz,” he wrote. “An easy quiz, but I really wanted everyone to watch.”

“Forks” follows Cousin Richie’s transformation from blowhard hot dog slinger to obsequious fine-dining stooge. The show’s animating tension is Richie’s bad attitude—he has one, and something must be done about it, so his cousin and the show’s protagonist, the mysterious chef hottie Carmy, arranges for him to do a stageat a prestigious Chicago restaurant. (Stageis French for “unpaid internship.”) Richie has to wake up before dawn and is essentially hazed, doing grunt work like polishing forks by hand, for hours. Early in the episode, Richie mouths off at his boss (“You really drank this Kool-Aid, huh?” Richie says, to which his supervisor responds, “Yes, I do. Because I love this, Richie.”). In one particularly chilling scene that more closely resembles a Mao-era Struggle Session than a team meeting, a manager asks that the person responsible for leaving a smudge on a tablecloth confess. “We can smudge things,” he chides, “but we need to own up to them with immediacy, integrity and honesty.”

Around this time, Richie progresses in his stageand leaves fork polishing behind. Perhaps it’s trauma bonding, but he begins to feel like he’s a part of the restaurant family. By the time Richie graduates to waiter duties, he so embodies restaurant-style servitude that he dashes out of the restaurant to buy two diners visiting Chicago a slice of his favorite deep dish pizza, presumably with his own money. In the episode’s climax, the chef appears, and it’s Oscar-winner Olivia Colman. Peeling mushrooms side by side, the two strangers have a heart-to-heart, and Olivia Colman tells Richie about the time she took an angry walk that led her to a vacant storefront, inspiring her to open a high-end restaurant. (This is America, where God speaks only to tell you to start a business.) An assistant pulls Olivia Colman away, and as she walks out, the assistant says to Richie “Don’t be a stranger,” underscoring the fact that, no matter how well Richie has performed, the stageis temporary.

For the rest of the season, Richie has a more subdued presence, his personality flattened into quiet acquiescence; he’s always in a three-piece suit. Given a key part of Carmy’s own story is that he’s so fucked up from a former abusive workplace that he has panic attacks, I read Richie’s drastic transformation as parody. Von Ahn did not. “What do I love about it?” Von Ahn wrote on LinkedIn. “It clearly demonstrates the value of one of our operating principles, ‘Strive for Excellence.’ And it demonstrates why we all must hold each other accountable as we endeavor to make the best product possible.”

I personally stopped endeavoring to make the best product possible in October 2022, when my colleagues and I at thePost-Gazette went on strike. Pittsburgh is truly a union town, and when we walked out, we were instantly slotted into a network of labor folks, solidarity manifesting in an endless stream of pizzas delivered to our picket line. But my colleagues who remembered the guild’s previous strike, in the nineties, said this time was different. While labor-minded people cared a great deal, the general populace barely cared at all. An elder at the paper told me that, back then, Pittsburghers were known to set copies of the scab paper on fire. In 2022, they were more likely to ask the question: We still have a print newspaper? My own experience was occasionally disheartening; I found myself, too many times, explaining to self-styled wokes why crossing a picket line is unethical. One month into striking, I was newly aware of two things: our city had a rare and special working-class culture, and, at the same time, it was fading away.

Pittsburgh’s union culture is inextricable from its history as a hub for steel. But since the industry’s early twentieth-century peak and subsequent decline, local officials have hunted for another one to fashion our identity after. Health care succeeded steel as the city’s dominant industry later in the century, as the workers first to be cast off from steel—more often people of color—turned to lower-paid care work, as Gabriel Winant chronicles in The Next Shift. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is now the city’s largest employer, but is classified as a nonprofit, meaning the city is missing out on tax dollars it sorely needs for social services and schools. Enter, then, a sexier and more lucrative industry: tech, which by the time I was a reporter in the city in the early 2020s, was the one local officials were courting. Spurred in part by Carnegie Mellon’s strengths in robotics and computer science programs, startups began to cluster in the 2000s, and large tech companies followed. In 2011, Google opened a campus in a former Nabisco factory. In 2015, Facebook chose Pittsburgh as a hub for its Reality Labs, now a key part of the company’s supposed transition to the metaverse. Uber began testing self-driving cars in 2016. A year later, Pittsburgh autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI got $1 billion in funding from Ford. Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood, home to Google and Duolingo, quickly gentrified.

Eager for a narrative outside of Rust Belt decay, the city has been quick to co-opt its tech wins for marketing. The stretch of robot-related companies in the former warehouse district became Robotics Row, a university neighborhood became the Pittsburgh Innovation District, and last fall, Pittsburgh-based space tech developer Astrobotic announced it would be building a Space Innovation District in the city’s North Side. A video welcoming guests to the museum at Astrobotic’s headquarters—a museum dedicated to itself—is aggressively on-the-nose, juxtaposing old footage of smokestacks with renderings of its lunar lander.

By the 2020s, the startup ecosystem was replete with accelerators and pitch competitions and summer camps teaching children to code. I was sent a press copy of a book called Silicon Heartland: Transforming the Midwest from Rust Belt to Tech Belt, which dedicated an entire chapter to Pittsburgh companies revitalizing the region, and I wondered if the celebration was perhaps premature. I thought of this a few months into our strike, when the scab paper ran a full-page photo of an action at which a few union members had blown up an inflatable Scabby the Rat mascot. Text above it read: “THIS IS NOT THE IMAGE THAT WILL DELIVER AN INVESTMENT DRIVEN, HIGH TECHNOLOGY FUTURE FOR PITTSBURGH.” Because copy editors were also on strike, the clunky verbiage hammered on below: “It will not encourage high technology companies to be located here.”

But what is the investment-driven, high technology future, and why would we want it?

Duo’s Taqueria started as a roadside stand called Duo’s Tacos, so you could almost say it gentrified itself. I suppose it goes without saying that building a tech hub and gentrification go hand-in-hand. Nonetheless, breathless national media coverage of Pittsburgh’s tech transformation has focused largely on the bourgeois amenities that accompany it, and little else. A 2017 New York Times article discussed the emergence of foodie-friendly restaurants and the hip Ace Hotel. So did theGuardian. Tellingly, one publication to run with the phrase “Steel City Renaissance” was Bon Appetit.

The general assumption, always, was that greater tech investment was translating into greater prosperity and a higher quality of life in Pittsburgh, but in my own reporting, sources never articulated for whom. Often, the pitch is directed squarely at out-of-towners. In 2018, Duolingo took out ads in San Francisco that read: “Work in tech. Buy a house. Move to Pittsburgh.”

The let’s-just-get-higher-quality-people-to-move-here school of urban redevelopment stems from long before Richard Florida invented the concept of “the creative class” (though, it’s worth noting, Florida wrote The Rise of the Creative Classwhile teaching at Pittsburgh’s own Carnegie Mellon University). Geographer Patrick Vitale argues that the “mythology of the creative class” and its supposed positive influence on cities began during the Cold War. At that time, leaders in Pittsburgh, aware that steel was already declining, began seeking to attract greater numbers of “valuable men”—then more likely to be scientists or engineers—in the first of many attempted “Renaissances” for the city. Pittsburgh, though, “was a working class city and that was considered unattractive to that quote-unquote valuable man,” Vitale told me. “I think that story is kind of timeless,” he said, only now it’s being told in reverse, the valuable man moving to Pittsburgh and not away from it, because of the things about the city “they’ve actually succeeded in creating.”

You’ll forgive me, an American, for anthropomorphizing a corporation, but I can’t help but feel a hubris emanating from Pittsburgh tech companies. Perhaps it’s because Pittsburghers are still unduly flattered by the industry’s attention. In August 2022, all of us in local media were summoned to Meta’s headquarters for a rare guided tour of the secretive facility, and much of the resulting coverage, breathy and uncritical, made me feel a little embarrassed. I’d found the Meta people and their myriad layers of public relations consultants cagey and strange; when one reporter smartly asked where else in Pittsburgh Meta owned real estate, a PR person emerged in a panic, blurting, “We don’t comment on that.” The episode was a reminder that large companies don’t move to cities just because they’re cheaper; they move to cities where they can exert power. Most of the journos, while talented, worked for local outlets too small-staffed to dedicate entire desks to the tech industry, and so the resulting coverage, with a couple exceptions, read more like lifestyle content than business journalism—mine included. In this way, Meta got what they wanted: five or so articles and a TV spot about how cutting-edge VR tech is being made right here in Pittsburgh.

“Right here in Pittsburgh” is a phrase you hear a lot in these circles. It connotes a level of surprise that a city like ours has anything to offer the world. Von Ahn, for one, is very aware that his company is special and the power that grants him. The founder has spent years cultivating his image as Pittsburgh’s benevolent, good liberal tech founder, speaking out in favor of immigrant rights and abortion access. His preferred method of activism appears to be threatening to move Duolingo’s headquarters out of Pennsylvania should state politicians vote against the issues he cares about. He may be on the right side of things, but his tone is ultimately patronizing—Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania, should be grateful for his presence.

Richie’s problem was that he was ungrateful. But when he finds that gratitude, what does it get him? “Forks’” last line of dialogue is Richie hollering after Olivia Colman, but she’s already been whisked away. His stageis over.

What has Pittsburgh gotten? In 2022, Argo AI, which employed two thousand people, shut down entirely. Another AV startup, Locomation, shuttered the following year. The remaining Pittsburgh AV company, Aurora, has floated a sale to Apple. Fifth Season, the company Silicon Heartlandprofiles in its Pittsburgh chapter, is done. Over a year after Astrobotic opened its museum, it launched its first lunar lander and failed, its remains falling back to Earth in flames. Even the Ace Hotel closed.

A 2020 report from the American Enterprise Institute noted that the U.S. tech sector, rather than decentralizing into the heartland, is still concentrating in “a short list of high-cost hubs.” Meanwhile, a 2019 study from the City of Pittsburgh’s Gender Equity Commission found that black women here have higher rates of poverty and unemployment than almost every other American city of comparable size. “These findings were met by a collective ‘duh’ from Black folks here,” author Deesha Philyaw wrote in Bloomberg. “The research confirmed not only what we already know, but what we feel: Pittsburgh is not for us.” The issue, she writes, “was not because of problems with the economy, but because of ‘the failure of employers to hire Black workers who are seeking jobs.’” And while the city may have succeeded in attracting some “valuable” workers, greater numbers of those with low incomes are leaving, according to a 2022 housing needs assessment. In his 2014 paper, Decline is Renewal, Vitale writes: “While Renaissance has taken many forms over the past seventy years, it has consistently been an uneven process of investing in some sectors, spaces, and people at the expense of others.”

In January, Duolingo laid off 10 percent of its contracted workforce as it moved to automate more tasks with AI. It bears asking: Does Duolingo even work? Or, like the experience of Duo’s Taqueria, is it more about testing out basic words in a setting designed to applaud you for trying? At the end of our meal, our waitress said “Thanks for coming” in English. I hadn’t used any of our suggested vocab.