

Pittsburgh seed stage fund doing YC-magnitude investment + incubation, with one YC alum advisor - rms
http://www.iwalphalab.org/about/about.aspx

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rms
This one is very Pittsburgh. There is explicitly no Silicon Valley pitch day
and they expect their companies to stay in Pittsburgh indefinitely. Pittsburgh
has a thing where they try and encourage bright young people to stay, because
most of them leave. This is a decent attempt at encouraging people to stay in
Pittsburgh, but it's counter-productive as far as actually making profitable
companies. But hey, that's what investment from the State of Pennsylvania is
for!

One of the advisors for AlphaLab was the CEO of YC company SlapVid. Whatever
happened to them?

~~~
falsestprophet
"Companies are expected to remain in Pittsburgh after the end of the AlphaLab
program."

They have high expectations.

~~~
pius
Snobby and snarky at the same time! A profitable company can be located
anywhere. Pittsburgh actually has a burgeoning tech sector (as rms will
probably attest), and I hope this gives it an extra boost.

~~~
rms
Pittsburgh has a very different tech sector than the valley because of the
extreme lack of capital. The startups that get funded tend to be very grounded
in reality.

A lot of startups come up around UPMC in the medical devices area. The
investors that are here are extremely practica/rigidl. There's such a small
amount of capital that they can only invest in something that seems like a
sure thing, like putting a patented design for a medical device into
production. I can't blame them for that strategy, but it doesn't make Y
Combinator style companies.

This is a list of companies that got seed stage funding in Pittsburgh in
quarter 4 2007. <http://www.popcitymedia.com/timnews/vcroundup1219.aspx>

I do think that this program is good for Pittsburgh. It certainly can't hurt
and it is costing Innovation Works so little to run that they can surely
afford to do it indefinitely while operating a loss. They get money from the
state in the type of post-socialist arrangement that I think is good for
society. They have a nice incubator facility in the district of Pittsburgh
where I would most like to have an office. It's a decent sized building in the
district that has great coffeshops and lots of restaurants and bars.

If anyone from here is thinking of applying, send me an email...

~~~
iamelgringo
Wow. Medical devices are a really tough go. I had a friend out on the East
Coast burn through a quick 700k trying to develop a home test to check for
blood in a person's stool. They had the device, and had a prototype made.
Getting it approved by the FDA was the difficult part.

I was involved in doing studies for FDA drug approval. One phase of testing
after a product had already been approved required about $10 million. That was
just to test to see if the process worked on additional viruses, not just the
one the product was approved for. Getting anything approved by the FDA is a
nightmare of red tape and studies.

That's just to be able to sell your product. Getting the Medical community to
adopt a new product is very difficult. Doctors are by nature conservative, and
trying new things tends to make them nervous. That's one of the big reasons
that pharmaceutical companies market so heavily.

But, where there's muck, there's brass, I imagine. I take my hat off to anyone
that can make it in the medical startup/device field. Those people deserve all
the kudos they can get.

~~~
rms
Oh yeah, the FDA makes most of biotech much more difficult and costly, at
least the 99% of it they have jurisdiction over.

