Yep, that's the one downside. It's the price you pay for keeping significantly more equity (AlphaLab only takes 3%) in exchange for more funding ($25K).
Pittsburgh's a great place to do a startup though. It's a great city, and really cheap as cities go. Whatever money you have for starting up goes a lot farther than it would in some other places.
Whatever money you have for starting up goes a lot farther than it would in some other places.
That depends entirely on your model. Sales in midwest/south can be problematic for startups becuase the communities they live in do not adapt to change as fast as the coasts. I found this out the hard way. In addition, if growth of your startup depends on building a community, its going to be harder to get the word out if you arent on the coasts.
The cost savings are true, and they are significant, but if you cant grow your service organically, and you cant sell to prospects easily, it wont really matter in the long run, because you'll get to spend all that saved cash in marketing.
This also depends on what you're building; there are plenty of sales opportunities in the middle of the country, just probably not in the social media space. Which is pretty saturated right now, anyway. Opportunity exists where you create it.
I applaud Pennsylvania in trying to boost their state economy through programs like this.
Which I believe is a government sponsored organization though, I'm not 100% sure -- it isn't clear to me where they get their funding, but I think its from the government.
How else would you expect them to try to bring a historically industrial/manufacturing & agriculture based economy into the 21st century?
I don't live there, but I think it's great for cities and states to try to increase the diversity of their economic bases and their cultural offerings. Long term it is a potentially VERY wise investment of taxes.
I personally don't think it's great that cities take money from me by force to fund companies I may or may not think are viable. I love what these seed funds are doing, and their is no reason a private one like YC couldn't be created in PA with those restrictions on keeping people there etc. Hell, you could make it an optional tax that citizens volunteer to pay -- just like we do with campaign funding.
Pittsburgh's a great place to do a startup though. It's a great city, and really cheap as cities go. Whatever money you have for starting up goes a lot farther than it would in some other places.