Friday Q&A: Steve Welch, candidate for Congress

Steve Welch’s business card could be three times the size of a normal person’s.

The Penn State grad founded the Mitos Group, a biotech company that grew to over 40 employees before it was sold to a Fortune 500 company when Welch was 29. Welch then co-founded DreamIt ventures, an early-stage incubator based in the University City Science Center. And, most recently he just fathered his second child.

But 32-year-old Welch, the new-father-entrepreneur-angel investor, is looking to add another job title to his resume: congressman.

Earlier this month, he launched his candidacy for the 7th congressional district of Pennsylvania with a video on his Web site.

Welch will become the Republican challenger to Democratic representative Joe Sestak. Sestak ultimately may not be his opponent, as he is said to be considering a showdown for the Democratic Senate seat against newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter.

If elected, he would be the second youngest congressman, behind 28-year-old Aaron Schock (R- Minn.).

True to his past, Welch sees small business as the way out of the recession for the country and for Philadelphia. Welch says the level of spending and government impact on the free market is one of the primary reasons he is running. When we spoke, his second child was still on the way, and the thought that he would be born into debt was a motivation to act.

For the past year, Welch was an Eisenhower Fellow, which allowed him to travel the world taking notes on the best tactics for encouraging small business development.

“In my heart of hearts, I love seeing a need in the marketplace and rushing to fill that need. It’s the greatest rush in the world,” says Welch.

One plan he is fond of, he said, was the tactic of the government matching local early stage investments. That way, firms can decide what is the best investment, and the government can increase the flow of early stage capital with little to no additional labor or bureaucracy.

“We want the best in the world to land in Philadelphia,” he says, “that’s the greatest way to ensure long term success in this region.”

We chatted with Welch about small business in Philadelphia, and the effect of organizations like DreamIt and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

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Friday Tech Links: SEO with Duck Duck Go, 8-bit music and More

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

The blog from incubator DreamIt Ventures features some knowledge spilled at a lecture on search engine optimization by Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO of Duck Duck Go, the Valley Forge search engine we’ve covered.

After the jump, business leaders playing squash, video from the Philly Startup Leaders barbecue and six other tech stories, including our best read story of the week.

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New York is jealous of our incubators

Aside from being jealous of our World Series rings, New York is also envious of our state’s spending on incubators, specifically BFTP, even as its fate is wavering on the winds of a state budget battle.

“Pennsylvania annually puts $20 million in taxpayer dollars toward new technology businesses…. So where is New York’s equivalent?” writes Matthew Daneman of the Democrat and Chronicle, a newspaper based out of Rochester, New York. A similar article also appeared in the Buffalo News.

But do they really want the cost?

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Events highlights for the week of June 29 – July 5, 2009

When there’s only a handful of events in the region, it makes this job easy. But the truth is, we prefer a challenge.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few events scattered on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. But hey, this way, you have practically no excuse to miss any.

On Tuesday, the Philly Ruby enthusiasts of Philly.rb bring back their popular Hack Night, where you sit in comfy chairs, plop your laptop next to your latte, and get cracking on yours and others project hurdles.

SEO Grail meets Tuesday with a talk from Web development company Goldstein Media LLC’s Seth Goldstein to discuss, what else? How to massage the Google.

The following day, DreamIt Ventures will show race film “Truth in 24.” The film has all you could ask for in a race film: action, adventure, drama and not a single sign of Vin Diesel. Oh yeah, and NFL Films Director of Project Management Alan M. Brown will be there to discuss how it all went down.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Shop Talk: Scribnia out of private alpha, releases my Scribes

A screenshot of Scribnia's my Scribes feature, to be released tomorrow.

The Web runs on opinion.

We Digg, Stumble, rate and recommend everything from books to blogs and, if Scribnia gets its way, you will be able to add writers to the list.

Scribnia is a University City-based Web site that allows readers to rate and recommend authors, writers and bloggers on a one to ten scale. Users can leave comments and rank authors in categories based on their writing topic. For example, a political writer can be rated as more liberal or conservative, or a tech writer can be rated on a scale of whether they write more for the general public or for tech experts.

“Readers are actually starting not to just read one-off articles on sites like Digg, but [they are] finding authors that they care about and want to come back and read,” said co-founder Russell D’Souza.

The result is a growing database of content creators that can provide users with recommendations based on previous rankings. Rate, say, baseball writer Peter Gammons high and you may be recommended other baseball writers that Peter Gammons fans rated highly. Tomorrow, the site will roll out my Scribes, an RSS reader within Scribnia that will provide author recommendations based upon the feed items the users read.

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DreamIT-backed OurShelf to launch public beta today

DreamIT Ventures-backed OurShelf will launch a public beta today of its web-based personal goods cataloging service after several months of prototype testing, according to an announcement on the company’s Twitter account.

OurShelf’s free service allows users to borrow and lend items such as DVDs and books and keep track of what’s been lent to friends. Users can catalog and organize, share, discover and group collections of products they own or are interested in.

“I lend my books out all the time. Sometimes I borrow DVDs from friends, but [there isn't] a system to keep track of who has what and where it all ends up,” Co-founder and CEO Paul deGrandis said in an e-mail.

“With OurShelf, you can borrow and lend, or have a shared shelf in a group and keep track of where your items go.”

The company is polishing its user interface before launching the service this afternoon, deGrandis said. There will also be a launch party for OurShelf in the Poplar neighborhood’s The Institute Saturday night at 9 p.m. Can you say free beer and Nintendo Wii consoles at every table?

OurShelf currently is made up of employees working from home throughout Philadelphia, but the company has plans to re-locate to the University City Science Center.

Shop Talk: Philly’s Venture Capital market with PWC and DreamIt

Last week, along with the usual oh-my-God-I’m going-to-be-homeless economics news came word that venture capital funding has plunged 50 percent in year over year first quarter numbers.

The numbers, courtesy of a PricewaterhouseCoopers Money Tree report, had a few people mulling the end of venture capital as we know it. But Technically Philly isn’t as concerned with Silicon Valley as we are with local numbers. Has the the local venture capital market fallen off a cliff, as national numbers indicate?

Join us as we whip out some charts, talk to a few people much smarter than we are and assess the situation. After the jump, find out what is affecting our local VC market and why one investor says business has never been better.
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