Venture Capital on the rise here

[TheGerbil]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08071/864043-28.stm

Pittsburgh was ranked second in venture capital growth by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study doesn 't look at total dollars, but rather the number of companies receiving funding (comparing 2007 to 1997). In the Pittsburgh tri-state area we had 44 companies get funding in 2007 (compared to 12 in 1997).

This is good news, obviously. It might just reflect poor performance back in 1997, I suppose, but even so we've improved a lot. Only one other region had a larger increase, and that was New Mexico.

[Evergrey]

It's a tiny amount compared to a few huge areas that have long been magnets of VC... DC, NYC, LA, Silicon Valley, Boston, etc.... but it looks like we're doing quite well compared to "peer regions" such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, etc.

btw, Pittsburgh MSA added 7,600 jobs in 2007 for a growth rate of 0.68%... a huge improvement over the past few years of post-9/11 stagnation.

[TheGerbil]

Well our total amount may be small compared to some areas, but we've had the second biggest increase over the last decade

And I'm glad to hear we added a decent number of jobs last year.

[Evergrey]

yes... as the rest of the country slowed down... we sped up... hopefully our economy can remain robust during the coming national economic storm

one sector that is booming right now is engineering

speaking of VC

http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsbur...ml?surround=lfn

"Pittsburgh's Vivisimo gets $4M from Maine venture capital firm"

Vivisimo designed the search engine www.clusty.com , which is used by the federal government's websites