PGH Lab criticism raises concern about access to startup resources for Black founders

Amber Thompson, founder of a tech platform designed to help weed out systematic bias against groups in organizations, was already upset when she arrived at a City of Pittsburgh-hosted event promoting PGH Lab. She left the building absolutely livid.

“Do you see this room today?” she asked in an interview with Technical.ly. “Do you see any Black women founders?” She was one of two Black women in the audience.

The Department of Innovation & Performance (I&P) program, started in 2016, has matched local startups with branches of city government for six-month collaborative projects. Thompson said she submitted a proposal, went through several interviews, and then got ghosted by the City.

Thompson said it was indicative of the frustration of being a startup founder with few connections in Pittsburgh: There isn’t an infrastructure designed for them. “You can’t hire here,” she said. “There’s no investment in startups outside of CMU here. There’s no investments in startups outside of white men here.”

PGH Lab’s mission

City officials participated in the Friday panel as part of XchangeInnovation Week.

Trever Stoll, the City’s civic innovation specialist and one of the overseers of PGH Lab, moderated the discussion about the program. Also on hand was Khyla Freeman, a training and development coordinator from the Department of Human Resources, which teamed up with Green Bean, a startup in the program’s most recent cohort to promote the underused environmentally conscious programs in city employee benefit packages. Lastly, there was Ian Magazine, whose company Airviz is monitoring air quality in and around municipal warehouses, an example of the kind of innovation PGH Lab is designed to further.

PGH Lab was former Mayor Bill Peduto’s idea, said Heidi Norman, director and chief information officer of I&P.

“What they were thinking is: We have innovators, seed startups and all kinds of things going on, right?” she said. “Well, why can’t government get into that, to where we can innovate for the public markets specifically?”

Norman said that Mayor Ed Gainey, who took office in January 2022, is equally committed to the program.

“I will say over that time it has grown,” Norman said, “and we get lots of great feedback from our alumni groups, and others about what we can, what we should do.”

Each year, I&P gathers proposals from startups. A committee of city employees reviews them and, if they pass muster, seeks out a “champion” within some arm of city government to work with the startup for a goal. It’s all volunteer work for the company, a chance to show its idea in action.

Up to nine startups a year go through the program. The crowd-financing platform Honeycomb Credit raised awareness of Urban Redevelopment Authority programs to local businesses. The simply named Dashcam for Your Bike has spotted road hazards for the Department of Mobility & Infrastructure. Kloopify, which tracks purchases by carbon footprint, did that so well for the Bureau of Procurement that the company became a long-term city contractor, Stoll told Technical.ly.

Trever Stoll poses for a photo after a PGH Lab event during XchangeInnovation Week. (Photo by Nick Keppler)

Communication missteps and wider challenges

During the event, Thompson laid out her frustration shepherding the application for her program, called de-bias, to the PGH Lab: “I went through the process, the interview, with the police department and civil service,” she said, and then “conversation just ended.”

No one from the program contacted her about the status of the application, per Thompson, even though officials had asked her to tweak it several times, as the City shuffled the idea through departments.

“As an entrepreneur or a startup, it took me a lot of time to put that proposal together for the City of Pittsburgh Police Department,” she said. Then once they said, ‘We want to bring in the civil service,’ then I had to do an extended research for the civil service. Then HR wants to come and now I have to extend it and then for communications to be shut off, it’s more impactful on me than PGH Lab.”

“Your experience of communication loss is important to us here,” Norman said. “That’s something we should do something about. You brought up a lot of inherent problems that we have, as a community, around investment.”

The question of funding inequity for entrepreneurs of color isn’t unique to Pittsburgh: Nationally, less than 2% of venture capital goes to Black founders. Yet it is especially notable in Pittsburgh, which is among US metros with the lowest rate of Black-owned businesses, and where Black founders have called out that a lack of capital and trust in mainstream institutions are common obstacles. It’s something a number of local organizations are working on, from Black Tech Nation Ventures to InnovatePGH’s Expanded Pathways to Entrepreneurship focused on the robotics industry.

Norman added, “We’re playing in, like, this one little space. But I think that everything that you said is absolutely something that we should be keeping in mind.”

Thompson told Technical.ly after the meeting that city officials often state good intentions around inclusion but the city itself lacks meaningful plans for it — which brought her back to her proposal, one that she said would turn awareness of a problem into thoughtful action. “The platform I was presenting to them was to help the police department, their civil service and HR have a data-informed process around hiring and being more intentional about their hiring practices, right?”

As for the response she got Friday? “I think it’s piss poor,” Thompson said, pointing to Stoll, the city’s civic innovation specialist, standing a head taller than most of the room, huddling with three white male audience members in another corner of the room.

“Am I crazy?” she said. “Literally, they just sat there and took notes from me for five minutes and didn’t say, ‘I’m going to talk to you,’ then they invited three white men to come talk to them?”

In an interview with Technical.ly, Stoll said the three people to whom he spoke after the meeting “had indicated literally, verbally, that they would like to continue that conversation.”

He said he was going to investigate the alleged communication breakdown between the program and Thompson’s company. He also said that minority ownership is part of the scoring system employed by the committee that picks startups for PGH Lab.

Still, criticism over inequality “is hard to hear,” he said, “but it’s important to hear, right? Like, if you are going in with efforts and with actions, and it’s missing the mark, you need to be able to hear that. You can be able to take that and then go to that person, go to that group, go back to the drawing board — whatever it is, whatever your process is — and say, how can we do better?”