Inside the Ecosystem: Spotlight Series · Innovation Works
He left San Francisco to build in Pittsburgh. Now he’s teaching the next generation how to start strong.
Brac Webb raised $85M, built a robotics company from scratch, and worked across 35 startups before landing inside AlphaLab. Here’s what he’s learned about the one thing most founders get wrong before they even begin.
Brac Webb has painted many blank canvases.
That’s his phrase for it, the moment before a company becomes a company, when all you have is an idea, a problem worth solving, and a terrifyingly open set of possibilities for how to get from one to the other. He’s been in that moment as a founder, as an operator who helped take a company from zero to $85 million in funding, and as an advisor working with more than 35 startups. And now he’s in it again, not as a founder himself, but as AlphaLab’s first Entrepreneur-in-Residence working across all four of the program’s tracks: software, hardware, robotics, and health.
He moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. He stayed. And if you ask him why Pittsburgh is the right place to be building right now, he’ll give you an answer that’s equal parts thesis and conviction, the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who moved from the Bay Area to the Rust Belt and never looked back.
We sat down with Brac for the second installment of Inside the Ecosystem, Innovation Works’ spotlight series on the founders, builders, and connectors shaping Pittsburgh’s innovation community. What follows is his take on what it really takes to go from zero to one, and why most founders are getting it wrong before they even start.
What He Actually Does As An EIR
Ask Brac to describe his role in one sentence, and he’ll tell you upfront: it’s going to take more than one sentence.
As AlphaLab’s first EIR spanning all four tracks, he works with founders across software, hardware, robotics, and health to navigate what he calls zero-to-one product and business model discovery. That means helping a startup figure out the problem worth solving, validate that they actually have a solution, find early traction, and build toward a repeatable model.
But the way he describes it captures something most job titles don’t. “I help startups with the next three days and the next three years,” he says. “Because you really have to have that picture in mind constantly. It’s a completely blank canvas that you’re painting, and every small adjustment changes it. You’re trying to figure out this perfect trajectory through it.”
“It’s a completely blank canvas that you’re painting, and every small adjustment changes it. You’re trying to figure out this perfect trajectory through it.”
— Brac Webb
What makes his version of the role different from what AlphaLab has had before: he’s the first to cover all four tracks simultaneously. Previous EIRs were brought in for specific domains. Brac goes everywhere.
The Other Side Of The Table
Brac has been a founder. He knows what it feels like to sit across from an advisor who gives you clean, tidy advice that has almost nothing to do with the actual situation you’re in. He has a name for it.
“I hate in-a-vacuum advice,” he says. “Pitch mechanics advice is a good example. You can give that without really understanding much of a business at all. But honestly, most of the best advice comes from understanding a business.”
It’s one of the reasons he approaches the EIR role the way he does. He sits in on program sessions, mentor board meetings, and advice sessions with outside experts. He builds enough context for each company that, when he engages, he’s working from the same information the founders are.
He describes it like a poker analogy. “If somebody leaned over and said, ‘Hey, check out this poker hand, what do you think I should do?’ You can definitely get involved enough to ask questions as an expert. But you will never know as much as the person who’s been playing that table the entire time. They know the other players. They understand how people bet. You can never fully play anybody else’s hand.”
His goal is to get as close to the table as possible without pretending he’s the one holding the cards. “I really am a fractional member of their company,” he says. “I’m working with the same context they have while they’re going through the program.”
“I hate in-a-vacuum advice. Most of the best advice comes from understanding a business, not from applying a formula to it.”
— Brac Webb
The Problem With Too Much Information
Twelve years ago, when Brac was first starting out, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup had just come out. A handful of good books existed on how to build a startup. He read them all.
Today, he says, the landscape is almost unrecognizable. “There is so much information out there about how to start a startup that if I were just starting to learn today, it’s just overwhelming. And in some ways that’s where AI is helpful, because you can have it tailor that information to you, but you still don’t know what you’re missing.”
He sees this as one of the clearest ways he can add value to AlphaLab founders: not just knowing the frameworks, but knowing which ones matter for a given situation, and when. “I have a tremendous amount of academic knowledge that I’ve actually applied over the past 12 years,” he says. “Being able to do that is a huge benefit. I really sympathize with how inundated they are. They don’t know what to use, and it’s almost like, just throw it all out.”
His approach: help founders identify the knowledge category they need right now, point them to the best source, and keep checking in. “We’ve had this quick talk, but if you go read this book, I think that will really help you. This is what you need to learn now.”
When The Clock Is Ticking, And The Market Is Wrong
One of the most common mistakes Brac sees at AlphaLab is a startup that has committed to a market before exploring whether that market is the right one. It sounds obvious. It’s also, he says, almost universal.
“I think it’s what everyone does unless you’ve been told at some point that you need to do it.”
He walked one AlphaLab company through exactly this. They were targeting a market that wasn’t working, and everyone involved knew something was off, but no one had taken a step back to ask whether the market itself was the problem.
What Brac did was simple: he told them to set aside everything they thought they knew about their current market, go back to the beginning, and conduct broad secondary research across every market the technology could potentially fit into. From there, they narrowed. From there, they started primary research on two markets, both different from where they started, and both with customers who were more likely to buy, at better margins, in volumes the company could actually fulfill.
“Even though the clock is ticking and the funds are burning,” he says, “taking that moment to ask whether you’re in the right market is so important for a lot of startups.”
The thing that makes this hard isn’t the work itself. It’s the bravery it takes to pause when everything feels urgent.
“Even though the clock is ticking and the funds are burning, taking that moment to ask whether you’re in the right market is so important. It’s one of the most common failure modes I see.”
— Brac Webb
The Mistake Technical Founders Keep Making
If the market exploration problem is the most common mistake Brac sees, the unit economics problem is the one that frustrates him most.
“Not really understanding how to go about unit economics is huge, especially among technical founders.”
He speaks from experience. Having been both a technical leader and an operator, he’s lived on both sides of this gap. “As the CTO of a hardware company, you are spending a lot of the money,” he says. “You’ve got to project what that thing is going to be able to sell for, and you’ve got to project what all the money and burn is to get it there. Every time you need to hit new milestones, the milestones change and the funding adjusts, and vice versa. That’s the story to investors. You should be able to sit there and put together your own financial projections. That should be familiar to you, not foreign.”
His point isn’t that founders need to be CFOs. It’s that engineering decisions and financial realities are the same conversation, and founders who treat them as separate domains are setting themselves up for problems that could have been avoided.
The Lesson That Changed Everything: OpEx Is A Customer
When Brac reflects on the most important thing building the company, Fifth Season, taught him, he lands on something that sounds deceptively simple.
OpEx is a customer.
“For a company like Fifth Season, we were building robotics, automation, machines, designing a whole operational plan,” he explains. “It kind of dawned on me as obvious, but to phrase it as OpEx is a customer — that was a reframe.”
What it meant in practice: the cross-functional team, spanning product, engineering, horticulture, and operational design, started treating operational costs not as a downstream concern but as a design constraint from day one. The customer wasn’t just the end buyer. The customer was also the economics of running the operation.
“By having OpEx as a customer, every little thing had an impact on the massive financial picture. We realized that early and corrected it early. The teams building each solution started understanding those financial impacts from the get-go.”
He connects this directly to what he sees in Pittsburgh’s hardware and industrial robotics scene. “A lot of what you’re seeing in Pittsburgh is that kind of Midwest industrial automation, and for those businesses especially, treating your operational costs as a customer can really change things.”
“OpEx is a customer. Once we made that reframe, the whole cross-functional team started understanding the financial impacts from the beginning, instead of discovering them too late.”
— Brac Webb
Why He Left San Francisco For Pittsburgh (And Stayed)
Brac moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh. He came because Pittsburgh made sense for what he was building: robotics expertise, industrial manufacturing infrastructure, and food heritage. He stayed. His conviction about Pittsburgh has only grown.
“I do think it’s underestimated. I actually think way more so than when I first moved here, because of the AI revolution and how it’s coupled to robotics. They’ll serve each other.”
His argument is structural. The last 20-plus years of the tech industry were defined by software startups, B2B SaaS, and the venture infrastructure that supported them. That era, he says, is giving way to something different: hardware, deep tech, AI-coupled physical systems, the kinds of companies that require industrial roots, research institutions, and physical infrastructure to build.
Pittsburgh has all of it. Robotics and AI out of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, advanced materials research, healthcare and life science infrastructure, a manufacturing and food heritage that’s baked into the geography — and a cost of living that lets founders extend their runway further than almost anywhere else.
“If I were a VC, I would be looking to invest here. And I do think it’s undiscovered. That’s why I want to put a plug in for VCs — there is alpha here until the market catches up.”
He pauses, then adds something that puts a finer point on the whole thing: “I was doing a startup in San Francisco. So there you go.”
“Pittsburgh is an incredible place for the startups of today. The AI revolution is coupled to robotics, and Pittsburgh has the infrastructure, the research, and the community to be where that happens. I do think it’s undiscovered, and that’s the alpha for investors who find it first.”
— Brac Webb
Why AlphaLab, Why Now
After more than a decade in startups, Brac spent a year as an advisor at a venture studio, working on zero-to-one product and business model discovery across dozens of companies in every imaginable domain. By the time the AlphaLab opportunity came up, he had worked on roughly 35 different startup ideas.
The appeal wasn’t just the work. It was the compounding.
“You can really extrapolate across startups, and you just get better and better, more helpful, more helpful. That’s what I’ve been focused on.” He wanted to get elite at the earliest stage of company building — the blank canvas moment — and AlphaLab gave him more reps per unit of time than almost anything else could.
But there’s another side to it that he doesn’t hide. “I wanted to pay it back. Having been a founder for a while, helping other founders has already been really rewarding. And combining that with what I wanted to do work-wise, it just made sense.”
He’s also genuinely enthusiastic about what AlphaLab has built. “It’s a high-touch, incredibly positive environment. Starting a company is hard. Working on a company is hard. Having your company end at some point is hard. The founder journey, the positivity of this environment for these founders — it almost brought tears to my eyes.”
The thing he keeps coming back to is the flywheel. “People always talk about in the startup world: be good, be nice, give more than you get, rising tide of all boats. But to have a good startup community, you need a lighthouse. I think Innovation Works does that and helps Pittsburgh be that in this small community that I really do think is at a time and place that can grow.”
What Success Looks Like
When Brac thinks about what he wants to leave behind at AlphaLab, it’s not measured in exits or fundraises. It’s more foundational than that.
“I hope to make a lasting impression on what the EIR role can look like here. No two people are probably going to be the same as me as an entrepreneur helping out, based on their background and focus area. But to look at it as the kind of folks that can help across this wide breadth of different startups in different domains, connect with the entrepreneurs, and say: yeah, I’ve been there and I can help you. I can basically join your company for a little bit.”
As for what comes next, he’s genuinely uncertain and comfortable with it. He knows he’ll stay in the startup world. He knows he’ll stay in Pittsburgh. Whether that means going deep with one company or continuing to work across many, he hasn’t decided.
“I’ve been reinvigorated to stay in the startup world and be an entrepreneur. I know I’ll either be helping out a lot of startups like I am now, or diving in deep with one to help build the next great thing. And either way, I’m looking forward to doing so here in Pittsburgh.”
“I’ve been reinvigorated to stay in the startup world and be an entrepreneur. Either way, I’m looking forward to doing so here in Pittsburgh.”
— Brac Webb
Brac Webb has painted many blank canvases. The founders inside AlphaLab right now are painting theirs, and for the first time in the program’s history, they have someone in the room who has done it across software, hardware, robotics, and health — who knows which stroke to make first, and who moved from San Francisco to Pittsburgh to do it.
That’s not nothing. That might be exactly what the next great Pittsburgh company needs.
Follow Brac on LinkedIn and learn more about the AlphaLab program at alphalab.org.