>> My name is Bobby Zappala.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of a nonprofit called Thrill Mill Inc.
We're a start up incubator-accelerator program.
About 2 years old now.
We work with companies across kind of all different industries.
Our approach is to say hey Pittsburgh has a lot of great young talent now.
And though we have some really great focused programs that take on companies that are,
you know, either in a certain industry or at a certain stage of development,
we don't have a lot of entrees into entrepreneurship once you kind
of get past that educational phase.
So, we operate as that first step through the door, a lot of hands on programming,
a little bit of cash, access to a great space.
It's a lot of fun, keeps me young.
So, we give, each company gets $5,000 cash.
So, it's not a lot of money.
But, the goal for us is to say listen, you've got to go raise some of your own capital.
At an early stage of development, really, what that's paying for is, you know, rent and meals,
you know, stay focused on the business and develop a model that makes sense,
and then you can go raise a little bit more money.
So, very low cash inflow.
The space itself is a 5,000 square foot wide open collaborative workspace.
And, it's intentionally designed that way.
You know, we want all the different start ups, who, as I said, come from various industries
and backgrounds and therefore you have lots of people with different skill sets,
they can share those ideas with each other, their skills with each other.
You end up getting, you know, essentially access to, you know, 50 different part time employees
because everybody's there, you know, kind of at a ground level and trying to help each other.
The space is 24-7 access.
So, they can come in there day and night.
And a lot of them really do come in at some pretty weird times.
But, that's the way they, that's the way they do things.
We have a formal entrepreneurial curriculum.
So we actually teach a ten week course.
It's taught by professors who actually come from Pitt as well as CMU and some
of the other schools in the area.
So, the idea is to say, kind of analogize it to the consultancy world where,
regardless of your level of experience in consulting, if you go to like McKenzie,
okay you're going to come in and they're going to say all right, before you start we're going
to put you through our training course.
At the end of that, you're going to understand the terminology
and methodology that we use as consultants here.
So, in having this entrepreneurial program, what we're doing is basically taking these start ups
and saying okay let's set your idea aside for a little bit.
Let's make sure you understand the fundamentals about what it takes to start a business.
And then, on the back end of that, we kind of pick back up,
get them deep into their actual business models and connect them to advisers and mentors
and people with real expertise who, by that stage,
feel much more comfortable engaging these early entrepreneurs because they have some sense
of what they're talking about at least at a fundamental level.
So, it starts as kind of more of a hands on, walking them along the process,
making sure they're not bouncing off the walls not knowing what they need to do next, and then,
engaging them more, trying to accelerate that growth by connecting them to folks
who really have industry expertise.
And, we've built up a strong mentorship base.
You know, it's a time owned process, right, I mean the more credibility you have
as an organization the more you can get people who are really good at this stuff
to lend their time and resources to try and help the companies.