PublicStuff is a digital communications system created  by Lily Liu. After spending 10 years in urban administration positions in cities such as New York City and Washington D.C., Liu realized how difficult it was for cities to provide good customer service to their residents. Many times it was difficult, inefficient, and expensive. There really was nothing that allowed cities to easily communicate with their citizens. As a result, Liu created PublicStuff which allows residents to submit real time requests in their area. PublicStuff can be accessed by the web, smartphone app, or text message, and allows the user to report issues such as potholes, broken signs, or waste management, which the local governments can then address. When the service initially launched in 2010, they only had a few early adopters. However, PublicStuff now has over 250 cities around the U.S. that have subscribed to their services. PublicStuff continues to provide an efficient, cost-effective solution which allows cities to better serve their residents.

Chuck Cohn, at one point in time, was a high school honors student who had a difficult time finding a tutor who was able to help him with his advanced placement classes and prepare for standardized tests. He looked all around, but the big name tutoring companies were many times over-priced and did not offer specialized services for specific classes. Furthermore, many of them did not have quality technology or material to provide. Chuck realized that there was an opportunity to create a company that offered quality tutoring through a live learning platform, while at the same time eliminating many of the costs that many times were associated with large tutoring companies. As a result, he founded Varsity Tutors in 2007. Varsity Tutors is a live learning platform that seeks to help students achieve their academic aspirations by providing personalized one-on-one instruction. They have also been able to create a database of test prep books, more than 200,000 practice questions, and answers and explanations for more than 150 subjects, which are all available at no cost to their users. As a company they aim to improve access to education by providing top level one-on-one instruction.

Evan Addams is a graduate of Grove City College’s entrepreneurship program. After graduation, he eventually acquired and continued to develop the nowait app. Nowait is an application that seeks to help users avoid long wait times when going to a restaurant. By using the application, users can see how long the wait is at a restaurant on any particular night, and can put their name on the wait list if they wish to do so. However, instead of having to be physically present at the restaurant, the user can wait elsewhere and show up right as their table becomes available. Nowait is able to provide this service to users by partnering with restaurants and integrating their product with the restaurants’ booking system. When Evan initially acquired nowait, they only had a couple partner restaurants, however, now they have partnered with most restaurants in the Pittsburgh areas and have began to partner with larger restaurant chains as well. Yelp recently invested in nowait, which Evan hopes will allow them to expand their business even further.

Tom Menditto is a young entrepreneur from the Pittsburgh area. He began working at the age of 14 in a variety of different areas, however, he was never able to find anything that he was passionate about. That all changed when he created his website Overcomeadhd.org. Through Overcomeadhd.org, Menditto is able to serve children with ADHD and their families. Tom himself had a very difficult childhood, and suffered from low-self esteem and suicidal thoughts. He said that medication helped, but also acknowledged that it was not the only answer. His mother, brother and other people in his life exposed him to different things such as meditation, yoga, and tai chi, which significantly helped him. Menditto now celebrates the fact that he has been both medication and symptom-free for over a decade. By creating Overcomeadhd.org, Tom Menditto has been able to help families and children with ADHD by sharing his experience as well as coaching them on different techniques he has learned over the years. Initially, he started out offering one-on-one coaching, but thanks to the success he has experienced, he has been able to offer group services as well. At one point in his life, Tom was stuck working jobs that he was not passionate about, but through Overcomeadhd.org, he has been able to find his passion and make a difference at the same time.

While attending school at Villanova University, Charlie Dolan co-founded Sequoia Waste Solutions. Charlie believed that the biggest thing going to waste in the waste management industry was good information. As a result, he decided to start Sequoia Waste Solutions. Sequoia Waste Solutions aims to provide companies and businesses with useful information on their waste management practices and provide them with ways to more efficiently and effectively dispose of and recycle waste while cutting costs in the process. Charlie says that there is a lot of data going into the waste management industry that no one is paying attention to, simply because they do not know how to process it, or because they do not have the time to process it. Sequoia can analyze the data for companies and businesses and in turn provide them with ways to make improvements in their waste and recycling processes. By providing these services, Sequoia Waste Management hopes to both lower companies’ waste management costs and reduce the amount of waste going into the ground.

Andrea Wetherald and her colleague Sara Longo met while working together for VA hospitals in the Pittsburgh area. During their time together, they realized that they were the same size and began exchanging clothes with each other. From this, their idea for Share Closet was born. Share Closet is a website and mobile app that allows its users to create a virtual closet with items that they own, and share it with their network of friends. They conducted a survey about clothes and sharing on college campuses in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and found that 80 percent of students were already sharing clothes. Furthermore, they found that the biggest barrier to sharing clothes was that the students found it awkward to tell their friends when they wanted their clothes back. Share Closet fixes this by sending online reminders to the borrower to alert them when it is time to return the clothing. It also allows the user to set their borrowing policies about washing and returning items, and traders in turn can set their own terms as well. Andrea and Sara realize that their target customers are young women, however, they hope to create an app that caters to everyone, allowing them to form a social network, through which they can share and trade clothing. The app is still in the development stage, but Andrea and Sara are confident about the future of Share Closet, and hope to one day expand into other areas such as household items and camping gear.