Following up on Sean Ammirati’s talk to the AlphaLab companies, we had an elevator pitch workshop with the AlphaLab companies to help them create and hone those important introductory sentences that describe their business to their target audience. We were fortunate to have Dave Mawhinney and Frank Demmler lead the workshop with the companies. Dave is a close friend and Advisor to the AlphaLab program, has been a serial entrepreneur in the region for over 20 years and is currently an Executive in Residence at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Frank has managed several seed funds and mentored numerous companies, currently heads up the Entrepreneurial Services group at Innovation Works and also teaches entrepreneurship at CMU. Frank has also created an online toolkit that is a valuable resource for entrepreneurs as they build their business.

The workshop was very valuable and pretty entertaining. I had a chance to role play meeting the entrepreneurs for the first time and hearing them tell me about their companies. Frank pointed out that the elevator pitch is “an arrow in the quiver” that entrepreneurs can use to communicate with investors, just as an executive summary, business plan and slide deck are other quivers. Dave emphasized that the pitch needs to include a definition of the target customer, what pain they’re feeling/what problem you’re solving and a quantification of the unique benefit being provided.

Thanks again to Dave and Frank for helping the companies hone their pitches!

Our AlphaLab companies tell us that one of the most valuable aspects of the program is the opportunity to meet and learn from fellow entrepreneurs, our advisors, and other domain experts in our network. We do this in many different ways, ranging from AlphaLab alumni group and our Interim Demo Day to networking events, but a core component of our program is the weekly group sessions with these guest speakers.

Recently, Sean Ammirati, the COO of ReadWriteWeb and an AlphaLab Advisor, talked with the companies about a variety of topics, centered around the theme of “Demo or Die.” Sean stressed the importance of reducing risk from an investor perspective during the AlphaLab program and that a key way of doing so was developing an initial release of the product and iterating rapidly on user feedback. Sean shared five tips with the companies on how to “Release Early & Often”:

1) Be “embarrassed by your first release” – LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman’s quote is a great way to capture this sentiment of releasing early.

2) Go “anti-stealth”. Sean stressed the importance of developing relationships early with the people who can help your business and that a good way to do so was to be transparent about your ideas and plans so that they can provide feedback/help early on.

3) Get really good at the elevator pitch. Usually one thinks of elevator pitches with talking to investors, but Sean emphasized that the companies need to have an elevator pitch for any interaction they’re going to have.

4) Use agile development techniques. Even with a two or three-person startup, it is important to be able to estimate and manage development. Sean talked about the notion of “velocity” and how Scrum (as a technique) could help companies measure their velocity.

5) Measure, Measure, Measure – Sean emphasized the importance of measuring the business and identifying what matters the most to measure.

Sean has been a great advisor to AlphaLab and we thank him for continuing to be a big part of the program!

When I told my friends in the Bay Area that we were moving from Palo Alto to Pittsburgh, many of them asked me about the tech scene in Pittsburgh. I tried to describe to them what I knew then about the city and the potential it had to become a tech region. Seven years later, that potential has become more evident and I am even more excited about the future of Pittsburgh, especially in technology. Sean Ammirati, CEO of mSpoke (an Innovation Works portfolio company) and an AlphaLab advisor, does a great job of describing why we love Pittsburgh in a post today on Center Networks. And he was able to make the case without even once referring to the Steelers, Penguins, or the fact that Pittsburgh is a great sports town.

Congrats to SMaSh, an Innovation Works portfolio company and South Side neighbor to AlphaLab, for its recent round of investment led by Mark Cuban.  The company has developed a platform for developing mobile applications on top of the SMS protocol which allows for greater capabilities in areas of search, transactions while taking advantage of text messaging’s widespread adoption. It’s been great working with Eric and Chanu (Smash’s co-founders) as they have built their technology and initial applications and I’m excited about the continued growth of the company, especially with the investment and involvement of Mark Cuban.

Flickr photo by Spanaut

One of the unique aspects of AlphaLab is the “Interim Demo Day” that we hold at the halfway point of the program. It is an opportunity for the companies to present their investor pitch and demo their applications – to a small audience consisting of advisors and IW’s investment team -  while still having almost two months to incorporate the feedback into their development and market plans before the Demo Day. Each company gets 15 minutes to present/demo and then is given 10 minutes of American Idol style feedback from the panel of advisors, investors and fellow entrepreneurs.

We held our Interim Demo Day on last Friday and as with our last AlphaLab group, it was a quite a success. It was a great experience for the companies to test their investor pitch, their company messaging and in many cases, to show off the significant progress they’ve already made. While many did an excellent job, every company received constructive feedback on areas to improve and focus on – not only in their investor presentations and demos but also in their business and product strategies.  The companies also had an opportunity to better understand what their fellow companies were doing and to see the progress that others have made. While the AlphaLab culture is collaborative and supportive, introducing a competitive dimension is a good motivator for the companies to push themselves harder and collectively raise the bar.

Some takeaways from the Interim Demo Day:

•    I appreciated that several companies took some risks with how they presented and demo’ed and were able to get feedback on whether it worked or not. It’ll be interesting to debrief with them this week to hear their interpretations.

•    Many of the presenters didn’t highlight the relevance of their experience and background to their company.

•    While the “judges” were usually in agreement on the feedback, there were a few cases where there was disagreement. This is one of the challenges for startup companies – investors and advisors all have different perspectives and philosophies and will sometimes emphasize different variables – thus often resulting in seemingly contradictory feedback. The key for entrepreneurs is to understand the context and reasons behind a particular piece of feedback and to decide what is most pertinent to them.

•    All of the companies will need to do more work on their business model and projections during the remainder of AlphaLab.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the companies adapt and respond to the Interim Demo Day feedback – and to their continued progress over the next two months.