While Pittsburgh's local tech startup scene has been the subject of great fanfare and celebration in recent years amid sustained growth, there's still plenty of work to be done to ensure the region remains competitive for aspiring startup founders who are looking for a place to build their companies.
That was one of the main takeaways from a panel discussion on Friday hosted by InnovatePGH, a public-private partnership based in Oakland that's looking to advance and champion the region's startup scene.
According to panelist Meredith Meyer Grelli, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business and the founder of Strip District-based Wigle Whiskey Distillery, encouraging students to pursue their own startup ambitions is a challenge on its own when other employers are looking to poach these students for themselves.
"The goal is to help them start a company while they're a student," Meyer Grelli said. "I have a lot of ammo to help me with that because the challenge is actually quite strong at a school like Tepper because my competition is one of those big, juicy offers from Amazon or [Boston Consulting Group Inc.] that they're going to have to turn down to go after their own company instead."
But another challenge often discussed by those in the startup community is the lack of funding available at the post-seed round level, something the panelists also took note of during the discussion.
"That's an area that we certainly need to buttress," Meyer Grelli said. "It's probably the most significant challenge, be it behind or maybe right before [branding]."
Panelist Chad Dehmer, the director of enterprise operations and UPMC Enterprises, added on, signaling out his employer as an entity that could be doing a better job to invest in local startups in need of funding at the Series A level. UPMC Enterprises is a seven-year-old investment arm of health care conglomerate UPMC that primarily funds startups in the health and life sciences space.
"To a certain extent completely on UPMC Enterprises, to a certain extent, we are not doing our job well enough to go into the universities or other areas where entrepreneurs may be moving from their seed to Series A and saying, this is what we're interested in," Dehmer said.
"This wasn't an indictment," Meyer Grelli quickly interjected.
"It is, it is; I'm not going to run away from it, it is an indictment for two reasons," Dehmer said in response. "One is just to make sure that when your students or your faculty come to us, we're not saying, 'why did you come to us, this is not what we're interested in,' but also, as we go further down the sort of ramp up of entrepreneurship, they know that, 'hey, if I have this type of technology or this type of interest, I know that when I go for my seed to my Series A, when I'm wanting to grow, UPMC Enterprises is going to be there to at least listen to me and consider us as an investment opportunity.'"
And while funding money is certainly an important factor for an innovation district, the University of Pittsburgh's Big Idea Center Director Rhonda Schuldt argued during the discussion that so too are the people who are building, running and operating at these firms. Getting these individuals to come to Pittsburgh and stay here remains to be yet another challenge in need of being solved but it's one she thinks Oakland can live up to.
"When you look at other successful health life sciences clusters, they all started because there was an asset base of universities and research that begat a startup that proliferated other startups that then grew large companies," Schuldt said. "And now they have that whole flow from just the innovation all the way to established businesses that have talent that can help support those innovators at that early stage to understand what's necessary."
