Alison Alvarez | Source | CEO at Blastpoint

I have been in the Pittsburgh tech scene since 2007. BlastPoint is my third startup that I have been involved with. And I think the major difference is just the amount of funding and the amount of things happening. We are hitting critical mass. And, I think for a while, there was just this ‘valley of death’ in this city where going from your first revenue to getting to the point where you can really scale was really, really hard. And there is getting to be more and more things that bridge that gap. There are sources of funding that are maybe not your conventional VCs. We won a ton of money from the UpPrize competition, and that got us from the point of: ‘OK, we have our first dollar’ to the point where we are really booking companies with hundreds of thousands of customers to use our software. I don’t think we’d be there without that bridge to get us from one side to the other. And, I have been there. That bridge was not always there. Or, if it was there, it was because you were self funding or you were going elsewhere for money. The fact that money is coming from inside Pittsburgh is a huge difference. I will say, it is not enough. We need more. But it is a big difference from where we were 10 years ago.