When you ask someone to name some of the world’s top startup ecosystems, Pittsburgh probably won’t be the first, or even the tenth, city they name.
However, that’s about to change, as local startup luminary Greg Coticchia has made it his mission to equip local entrepreneurs with the tools, resources, and structure they need to build amazing companies and establish Pittsburgh as a worthy contender in the global startup scene.
But what exactly makes Greg the right man for the job?
Tons of startup, tech, and educational experience, that’s what. With an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (where he has been an adjunct professor since 2005) and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, Greg’s academic credentials are impressive in and of itself. After schooling, he began his extensive career in tech and business working as a project manager at Duquesne Systems, one of Pittsburgh’s first software firms, in the 1980s, and since then has worked at 14 startups and served as CEO forfour different companies: Mallet Technology Inc., LogicLibrary, eBillingHub and Malcovery.
With considerable entrepreneurial and management experience under his belt, Greg has also put his skills to use by helping others interested in entrepreneurship in numerous roles. He has served as the Director of Blast Furnace, the University of Pittsburgh’s startup accelerator, until November of last year, and is now helming a new program at Carnegie Mellon University, the new Masters of Science in Product Management, which is designed to address a growing managerial gap in the tech sector.
When it comes to product, Greg is quite an expert, citing it as why so many promising startups don’t find success:
The No. 1 reason why early stage companies fail is because no one wants to buy what you have to sell. The dog doesn’t eat the dog food. And I think a lot of times people don’t do the customer discovery. They focus too much on the solution that they have and their idea and they don’t focus enough on the problem.
And when Greg isn’t starting businesses or showing others how to start their own, can you guess what he likes to do in his spare time:
I read business books and biographies about business people. Isn’t that shocking?
Clearly, this is someone who eats, breathes, and dreams business, making him the perfect contender to lead the next generation of aspiring entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh, as well as an ideal candidate to co-direct the upcoming semester of the Pittsburgh Founder Institute.
Even with his extensive entrepreneurial experience, Greg still has his work cut out for him turning Pittsburgh into the next Silicon Valley. While the city has no shortage of tech talent, according to Greg, there seems to be a major gap in the regional startup community that needs to be filled, stating:
Not all great tech companies are going to spin out of college-aged students with university intellectual property. While they have been and they will continue to be a wonderful source of early stage startups, one of the challenges in a growing startup community is: can you get more people who have had either a win or a failure or something in between start the next one? We need the person who’s in their 30s or 40s that has been through one startup or more to do it again.
However, Greg has a strong idea of how Pittsburgh can evolve from a mediocre startup ecosystem into a great startup ecosystem: by focusing on the large number of aspiring founders who have some startup experience, but haven’t yet achieved the astronomical success of entrepreneurs covered by TechCrunch and Inc.
We need to do a better job of supporting the continuum of entrepreneurship. Pittsburgh as a structure has a handful, maybe a dozen or so, really great, large, successful tech companies. And then we have a lot of sub, I call them sub $500 million companies. And we don’t have a lot in between. So it kind of looks like this hour glass of technology companies in various stages. And we need to fill out those stages.
But whatever challenges the Pittsburgh startup community faces, Greg acknowledges that the city has made considerable progress in recent years, and remains hopeful for its continued development (hopefully with the help of the Pittsburgh Founder Institute).
I think we’re at the best version of Pittsburgh in the 35 years that I’ve participated in the technology and startup community here. We’ve not yet arrived, but in terms of the journey, we’ve done a great job at getting to this point.
