Pittsburgh Ventures

It was 2007 when Aaron Tainter, an associate at our firm, and I put together the first OpenCoffee Club meeting in Pittsburgh.  I  read an article about a global movement to put together a networking event for entrepeneurs/startup-types to meet with investors (large and small) in an un-conference, no agendas and name tags format.

And now our next meeting will be held tomorrow (here is our Facebook page) – Thursday, February 4th, 2010, at 9:00am at AlphaLab on the Southside.  This is something like our 12th or 15th meeting, and we have 60 confirmed attendees and  50+ other “maybes”.  You’ve come a long way, baby.

Our first meeting attracted about 8 people – and we met locally here in Sewickley near our offices at the newly-opened Crazy Mocha coffee shop.  I remember hearing a pitch about a new type of image/video based CAPTCHA coming out of CMU and a couple other interesting startup ideas.

Lynsie Camuso was one of those first OCCers (and still a regular!), and that was the first time I heard about her startup, ShowClix.  It was at an OpenCoffee Club meeting in Shadyside that I first Jeff Mullen and heard about his idea for Dynamics.

This event is growing in Pittsburgh – and if you are in the region and want to find out what is happening in our entrepreneurial ecosystem, I strongly encourage you to come.  It is very casual and will give you a chance to talk to some very interesting people.

I like to say that Pittsburgh is on “Step 2, of 10″ in terms of how we are growing our startup community.  I think we have a good balance of money/investors and entrepreneurs, but we are very nascent in terms of big, cutting-edge ideas.  It is when you get smart people together that big ideas are cooked up.  Pittsburgh needs to bring together more of the smart people we already have in order to really move the needle on becoming the next Seattle or Austin.

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