Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance

I have to give a massive shout out to Meredith Grelly.

um who put a ton of time in showed great leadership and was really in many ways the inspiration of startup pgh but as you said you know the event uh occurred because it was a collaborative effort across the board, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, the New Economy Collaborative, Innovation Works, Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance, Innovate PGH, the city, the county, the University of Pittsburgh, all played a central role.

And, you know, because it was an informal collaborative.

It allowed us to bring a significant number of out of region organizations, I think a total of 55 out of regional organizations.

Talk to me a bit about how much startup PGH was consistent with that, if that's at all how you view it, and give me your own sense of this format.

Yeah, I think in many ways, Chris, the distributed model is actually the point.

um you know for us it certainly was and i think you know one of the the more important lessons that i think a lot of ecosystems i i think we would include ourselves in this is that modern ecosystems are are very complex almost too complex to be governed by a single organization and so to me that was the beauty of start of pgh and in the way that we approached it you had universities um at the table with companies um at the same table with public sector partners at the city level and the government in the county level um at the same table as the ecosystem partners from life sciences from uh autonomy and robotics and from uh you know innovation uh funding uh ecosystem partners and i so i think you know in many ways that distributed model um you know really uh served as the foundation for us um as we approach startup pgh and i think you know for an ecosystem like pittsburgh um that that really you know deserves to be at at the center of a lot of these conversations I think for the companies that we brought in, for the investors that came in and saw it, and they were able in one event to talk to a life sciences lead from the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance, and then move five feet away from that individual and talk to a global leader from Carnegie Mellon University, and then take another five steps and talk to the mayor of the city of Pittsburgh.

That to me was how we designed it.