Pittsburgh seed stage fund doing YC-magnitude investment + incubation, with one YC alum advisor | Hacker News Reader

Pittsburgh seed stage fund doing YC-magnitude investment + incubation, with one YC alum advisor

iwalphalab.org

15 pointskf9 comments

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?

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

They have high expectations.

a hell of a lot

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.

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...

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.

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

I think that companies that do this program are unlikely to be connected to the investors that would encourage them to leave Pittsburgh. This program is great, except if you hit a dead end with the Pittsburgh investors and aren't profitable, you're done. In other words, a company capable of leaving Pittsburgh after AlphaLab probably didn't need AlphaLab in the first place.

Slapvid morphed into Cloudant even before Demo Day and has yet to launch, although the GoDaddy domain park page is never a good sign. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/16/y-combinator-demo-day-t...

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