Rhonda Schuldt is helping to lead the next generation of Pittsburgh entrepreneurs. She started out as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Big Idea Center, part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and now serves as its director following her mid-August appointment to take the helm of the organization. She continues to coach and mentor aspiring entrepreneurial students at Pitt. Of the many strategies she offers to young founders, teaching them the importance of knowing who will benefit most from their idea is one she stresses the most.
What do you find most fascinating about the startup scene in Pittsburgh? I moved to Pittsburgh in 1994, so I’ve been here for a very long time. I stepped in at a time that we were still very much a Rust Belt community. We were a very nascent entrepreneurial community — not that we didn’t have stuff going on, but we certainly weren’t known for the entrepreneurial tech, eds and meds. So where we are today in terms of what’s fascinating is just how far we’ve come. What’s the most exciting part about Pittsburgh is we’re not necessarily trying to just replicate Silicon Valley, we are not just about what comes out of our universities at the technology level. We are in communities; we see entrepreneurship opportunities for anybody. There are so many more organizations that exist today than existed when I moved to Pittsburgh. Now we can call ourselves an entrepreneurial region. What I find fascinating more than anything is that we have this very robust entrepreneur support community. We still have a lot of needs in terms of filling what our region’s entrepreneurs needs are in (terms of) financing — there are never enough resources available — but the fact that people are rising up to the challenge and making entrepreneurship an opportunity for anyone.
Can you tell me about your first experience with an incubator? This was an organization in Kansas City. ... It was a long time ago, but it was one of my first professional (jobs) after I got my master’s degree. It was for an organization that I thought was really fascinating at the time, and I started volunteering with them first. That’s how I got to know them, and it was an organization created to be able to meet unmet and undermet needs in the community. So if you had a group of individuals who wanted to create or wanted to see something happen for a particular population, we were there for them to come to. It could be just a grassroots group of volunteers that wanted to form an organization. We were involved in family and children services primarily, very broad-based in terms of what we did, but we really dealt with family and children’s issues. We were very much an incubator. We assessed and listened to them, and we worked with them to assess what the need looked like, what other opportunities were out there in the community that could address what they wanted to be able to address and if we didn’t, then we found an organization that could really help them. We tried to broker a relationship and see if something could happen. It was a very cool experience.
How do you relax? I love to cook, I love to create. … My creative juices are in the kitchen. And then I love to escape with books. I like independent authors. I love to kind of explore people who are trying to get their own voices out there. I’m a big nerd on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited to try and find those new authors or not so new but ones that are not on the bestseller’s list. I love to just have my brain kind of take different directions. And of course, I love to be outside with family and getting outside as often as possible, particularly now that we’ve been stuck inside for so long.
Where’s an ideal weekend getaway for you? I love to go places where I can explore that place’s personality, so a lot of places that have a sense of past but also are really in the present. Anything that has to do with food. My getaway has to involve good food options, unexpected food options, independent food and beverage. I love microbreweries and little wineries, little distilleries. My husband and I love to go on those kinds of trail trips. If there’s water nearby, that’s the biggest bonus. It can be a stream, it can be an ocean, it can be a lake, it doesn’t matter. Water helps make that an ideal getaway.
If you could give an historical figure a present-day tour of Pittsburgh, where would you take them and why? Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers, we’re fiercely proud of our place in our region, so probably one of the first stops, even if the person is familiar with Pittsburgh historically, I would take them to is the History Center because it’s this sense of place in history, and who we’ve been is the backdrop to the places that I want to take them. … I would take them on a tour of our neighborhoods and share the history as I know it of those neighborhoods, but also what’s happening (now) because there is an incredible transformation that’s going on.
What is your most effective coaching strategy when it comes to encouraging young startup founders? What I really strive to get these enthusiastic minds to do is to say, I know you love this idea, but you have to set that aside and what you need to do is not be in love with this idea that you have. What you have to do is be in love with the why that idea needs to happen. You don’t start something or build something because you can. You need to do it because you should and so that means who is it you’re trying to impact with this thing that you’re wanting to create. All of the lean startups, most good entrepreneurial programs really have this lens of you’ve got to understand your customers, your stakeholders and what matters to them versus what matters to you.
BIOBOX
Title: Director, Big Idea Center
First job: “Helping my mom with her catering job before my first ‘real’ jobs in retail, the favorite being The Gap.”
Education: Undergrad in finance, University of Missouri — Columbia; interdisciplinary MBA, University of Missouri — Kansas City
Residence: Bell Acres
Family: Husband and son
Hobbies: Creating new recipes, collecting and planting any seed that doesn’t come in a packet, seeking out local goodness, collecting honey and hot sauces.
Causes: Helping people realize their possibilities
