Oct 8, 2026 · 23 min · 7 segments
Pittsburgh just completed its StartUp PGH event series, with fifteen partner organizations shifting their flagship annual events into a single coordinated week along with new programming. Since the…
I was scanning through the dozens of events that I'm looking at that you guys had.
Because I can imagine those who are uninitiated can seem... overwhelmed or just perplexed by so many different organizations and event types taking place.
I was in the 2010 founding days of Billy Tech Week, the same year that Boulder has its first, what they later call Startup Week.
economic development adjacent work is a more distributed network style, meaning pro entrepreneurship and technology sharing is by nature often at the people level, not necessarily the organization level.
And so that is a different marketing challenge than most marketers are used to, which is here's what my organizational goals, we have very clear top-down priorities and sets.
When you get to the ecosystem dynamic, you lose a lot of that control because it's by definition a multi-headed beast with lots of different priorities and opinions, very chaotic.
Every ecosystem thinks they're uniquely disqualified for collaborating and everyone's always fighting.
We're putting on our best and we're saying, how do we welcome new friends into the house? How do we show the work that's being taken place here? And that includes small meetups about emerging technologies that are super accessible.
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.
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.
I was scanning through the dozens of events that I'm looking at that you guys had.
Because I can imagine those who are uninitiated can seem... overwhelmed or just perplexed by so many different organizations and event types taking place.
I was in the 2010 founding days of Billy Tech Week, the same year that Boulder has its first, what they later call Startup Week.
economic development adjacent work is a more distributed network style, meaning pro entrepreneurship and technology sharing is by nature often at the people level, not necessarily the organization level.
And so that is a different marketing challenge than most marketers are used to, which is here's what my organizational goals, we have very clear top-down priorities and sets.
When you get to the ecosystem dynamic, you lose a lot of that control because it's by definition a multi-headed beast with lots of different priorities and opinions, very chaotic.
Every ecosystem thinks they're uniquely disqualified for collaborating and everyone's always fighting.
We're putting on our best and we're saying, how do we welcome new friends into the house? How do we show the work that's being taken place here? And that includes small meetups about emerging technologies that are super accessible.
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.
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.
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