The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, an affiliate of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, has appointed consultant and entrepreneur Lynsie Campbell to serve as the organization's first Startup Czar, a newly created position.
Campbell joins PRA with nearly two decades of experience building, launching and consulting startups in Pittsburgh and other cities around the country.
"We’re excited to welcome two-time tech founder Lynsie Campbell to the PRA team," Mark Anthony Thomas, president of PRA, said in an email statement to the Business Times. "As our new startup czar, she’ll be focused on making sure the partners in our region’s business attraction network are plugged into and engaged with founders of startup and high-growth companies. The endgame is to connect them to the resources here that fuel entrepreneurial growth so that these ventures not only launch, but scale and stay in the Pittsburgh region.”
In 2006, Campbell co-founded ShowClix, an event ticketing platform, and served as its president until 2015. She then went on to launch LaneSpotter, a mapping platform for bicyclists in need of finding the safest routes between two destinations, in 2017 before going on to serve as a startup consultant for Beetleback — a firm that helps startups scale their products or services — in 2019.
Getting to continue that work, but in a larger capacity, thrills her.
"I'd kind of been through it all, seen it all, had the highs, had the lows and I think ultimately, I've been really looking for a way to give back," Campbell said. "I've just been kind of waiting for the opportunity to arrive in Pittsburgh, where I could go into an organization and actually create change in a much bigger scale."
In addition to her current role as Startup Czar, Campbell also serves as a general partner for The Fund, a New York-based venture capital firm, and serves as one of the founding general partners for its The Fund Midwest seed-stage venture fund.
And as to the Startup Czar position — its actual scope is still being determined by Campbell, calling upon her experience, and the PRA.
"I'm just really excited for the opportunity to take all of the experience that I've had, in this city and outside the city, and help create an environment so that we have more of those really great wins, and that starts to trickle out into the ecosystem," Campbell said in relation to recent startup news out of the region like the Startup Genome report in September and Duolingo Inc.'s public listing this past summer. "I think it's those wins that are going to push us forward, so we need to help figure out how to support those (other startup founders) to get there."
