Kit Needham wants to see all of Pittsburgh's emerging entrepreneurial talent coalesce together to better diversify a budding sector of the city's economy.
As the director of Project Olympus, a highly-sought-after startup incubator based out of CMU's Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, Needham is working to ensure students, graduates, alumni and faculty at the prestigious research university are tapping into all that Pittsburgh has to offer for their emerging enterprises instead of siloing their startups to the metaphorical walls of CMU's Oakland campus.
Needham said that hosting the Project Olympus Show & Tell event, which is free and open to all, can play an important role in that work. It's an event, which most recently took place on Thursday in front of about 200 people, that features pitch deck-like presentations from those who are in Project Olympus. This allows audience members — investors, startup advocates, students and even other entrepreneurs — to better learn about the types of companies being formed by talent at CMU, as well as how these entities are looking to offer benefits to others.
"I would say over 50% of the audience are not part of CMU," Needham said. "Its [purpose] is to educate the community."
During Thursday's 26th iteration of the event since 2007, a dozen CMU-related startup founders identified the challenges or problems their firms are looking to address and how they plan to commercialize those solutions. Many have identified customers and some have even begun generating revenue. Meanwhile, others are still prototyping their products as others are conducting additional research in their ideal target base.
Next Act Fund LLC Founder Yvonne Campos concluded the presentations with a speech that most focused on how Pittsburgh's innovation ecosystem has evolved over the years to be more accepting and diverse to others often left out but noted that more work is still needed to be done. Campos highlighted her own efforts in trying to address this via her establishing of Next Act, which she said is the first women-focused angel fund in western Pennsylvania that looks to grow women's personal wealth through investments in early-stage, women-owned or -led companies.
"Women are just one of the marginalized groups within our community in particular that have been ignored," Campos said. "We know there are other groups, everybody knows it. The question is, I would challenge you — the men and women in this room — to do something about that. I challenge this group to think differently, act differently — thinking is not enough — and bear some accountability into your decision-making with regards to your own ecosystem."
The intentional efforts of opening Project Olympus up to others in Pittsburgh's innovation community are part of a growing trend at CMU that's trying to bring more outsiders in.
Earlier this month, the CMU Venture Challenge Demo Day, which is organized by the CMU Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Club, made efforts to invite those without relations to CMU to attend the event. Roshni Surpur, president of the CMU Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Club, said she worked with Adam Paulisick, one of the organizers for the xChangePgh series of innovation community events that have hosted and will continue to host such occasions on CMU's campus this year, on diversifying the event.
