In this article, we share a new program, Anvil, in partnership with InnovatePGH to provide free founder coaching to any and all Pittsburgh Area founders who are looking to scale their startup.
About Anvil
Pittsburgh is a place where the hard things get done. From creating the polio vaccine to designing the ferris wheel, from creating the world’s best way to learn a new language (Duolingo) to holding the Guinness World Record for the longest freestyle rap, and many many more things.
Pittsburgh is known as the Steel City and has evolved from forging metal on an anvil to forging innovative startups leading the way in industries such as artificial intelligence, robotics, healthcare, and life sciences.
This program is open to all Pittsburgh area founders who are serious about building and scaling their startup business.
The Anvil Founder Coaching Program will include monthly trainings covering these crucial topics for startup founders between January and June 2025:
- Productivity & Reflection is a Superpower: How to get not only a lot done, but also the most important things done. If you don’t pause to reflect, document, and learn, you will be doomed to unconsciously repeat the same cycle over and over limiting your success.
- Customer Discovery: Don’t play yourself. Use a structured framework to build a product that your target customer actually needs and will pay for.
- Problem Validation: How to narrow your niche down into a problem that is real and worth solving.
- Growth: How to use marketing and sales experiments to begin, build, and scale revenue for your startup.
- Fundraising: I’ve raised $26M+ in growth financing over the past 5 years and share what I’ve learned in my tactical fundraising playbook.
- Leadership: Leaders can be ceilings or multipliers. Here we will cover an introduction on how to bring out the best in yourself, your team, and your startup.
Thanks to the support from InnovatePGH, the program will also include:
- Monthly Office Hours to provide further support to all participating founders.
- Flexible office space at Avenu for founders to work out of during programming days. Avenu is located in the Pittsburgh Innovation District in Oakland, centered among the region's leading research institutions and home to many startups.
- Additional expert-led workshops to cover topics such as legal strategy, storytelling, mental health, building an investment-ready startup, and more.
- A wrap-up event to showcase all the founders at the end of the program to the Pittsburgh Startup Community!
“The future of Pittsburgh’s tech ecosystem depends on bold founders ready to tackle big challenges. By providing founders with actionable strategies, expert guidance, and the resources to scale, the Anvil Founder Coaching Program ensures they can turn innovative ideas into transformative companies. We’re excited to add this to a growing list of programing within the Pittsburgh Innovation District, strengthening our region’s position as a global hub for cutting-edge technology and entrepreneurship.” - Sean Luther, InnovatePGH President + CEO
All of this is completely free to all Pittsburgh Area founders who are looking to scale their startup.
Applications are live here and submissions are due by Thursday, January 23rd, at 5PM ET.
Anvil Program Schedule
The first training will take place on Wednesday, January 29th, from 3-5PM at Avenu: Meyran in the Oakland neighborhood. In-person attendance for programming is highly encouraged, but all programming will also be hosted via Zoom and recorded.
Details about the Anvil Founder Coaching Schedule are below:
- All trainings will take place on the last Wednesday of each month between 3-5PM.
- All monthly office hours will take place the Friday after each training from 10AM-Noon.
- We will have a happy hour to kick off the program on Wednesday, January 29th, from 6-7PM at Avenu: Meyran.
- Additional expert-led workshops will be added throughout the program and those exact dates will be communicated to all participating founders.
- All programming will be held at Avenu: Meyran and in-person attendance is highly encouraged. We will also have the option for founders to tune into programming via Zoom.
- Upon getting accepted to the program, all founders will receive a detailed schedule with corresponding calendar invites.
Meet Your Coach: Max Polec, PCC
Max has 10+ years of experience in startups and business where his background was in growth strategy, operations, and talent development. He has worn many, many hats from startup employee to co-founder, accelerator director to ecosystem builder, and now as trusted coach.
More about Max:
- Since Max started as an executive coach, he has worked with 300+ startup founders and business executives.
- Max is an ICF-certified coach. The International Coaching Federation acts as the gold standard globally for coaching.
- Max is a certified Executive Coach through the Center for Executive Coaching.
About InnovatePGH
InnovatePGH is a next generation public-private partnership built to accelerate Pittsburgh’s status as a global innovation city. By facilitating an inclusive and multi-sector approach, InnovatePGH ensures all innovators can participate in Pittsburgh’ innovation economy. The partnership works to accelerate Pittsburgh’s position as a global innovation hub by improving Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, providing tech-based economic development leadership and strategy, and managing a place-based Innovation District initiative in Oakland.
InnovatePGH has been partnered with The CEO Strategy since January 2024 to partner with hosting the What’s Your Business Idea? Event series providing Pittsburgh founders a platform to share what they are building via an elevator pitch to then get plugged into local resources. In 2024 alone, this event highlighted 50 founders.