Column by Martin Fedorko
Pennsylvania builds companies in places that don’t look like startup towns. A bakery on Market Street in York. A donkey and horse stable in Winfield. A lab in State College. A shop in Erie that’s been running since the Depression. Once in a while, an actual garage.
Building them here isn’t the hard part, and it never has been. The hard part is that most of it happens without anybody outside the Commonwealth finding out it happened at all.
No two companies look alike
There’s no template for a Pennsylvania company. That’s the first thing you notice once you’ve looked at a few hundred of them.
Wove started on a deployment in Afghanistan. Drew Wolgemuth was an Army Ranger, and the guys in his platoon kept trying to buy engagement rings from a war zone, which went about as well as it sounds. So, he set up video calls between soldiers and jewelers and had 3D-printed replicas shipped over, so a guy could hold the ring in his hand before committing to it. When Wolgemuth got out he called another Ranger, Brian Elliot. They built the company in Lancaster, where Wolgemuth’s parents had run a jewelry shop for years. NPR did a segment on them in 2023.
Phospholutions is 30 years of phosphorus research at Penn State turned into a fertilizer business. Croptix reads the light coming off a leaf to tell a grower a tree is sick before the tree looks sick. Gilson Snow is two middle school science teachers who moved into that stable in Winfield with 35 snowboards and an Airstream and now ship to more than 50 countries. The Pretzel Co. started hand-twisting on Market Street in York in 2014, and last November its gift box turned up on Oprah’s Favorite Things with “With Love, From York, PA” printed on the side. Bliley Technologies has been making frequency control components in Erie since around 1930. Kyocera bought the business in 2023 and then broke ground on a new plant in town.
A war zone, a research lab, an orchard, a stable, a bakery and a ninety-year-old machine shop. Same state. Not one of them got here the same way.
That variety is a pleasure to live inside and a problem to explain. Some states have one name that does the explaining for them, and when somebody says Austin or Boston the rest of the sentence isn’t necessary. Pennsylvania has never had a name like that, which means every conversation about what’s being built here has to start from scratch.
Nobody is coming to look
Different companies, different decades, different industries. Every one of them had to break out to get noticed.
And breaking out took something outsized. An NPR producer took an interest. A magazine editor put a box of pretzels on a list. An acquirer already knew the sector well enough to go looking in Erie.
That’s the bar as it stands. A Pennsylvania company doesn’t get seen for being good. It gets seen for being impossible to miss.
Nobody in New York or California wakes up in the morning wondering what’s for sale in central Pennsylvania. That isn’t a knock on them. Attention runs along channels that already exist, and for the most part those channels don’t run through here.
The mechanics are worth spelling out. An investor in San Francisco hears about a company because a founder they backed once makes the introduction, or because it came out of a program they follow, or because it’s 20 minutes away. Those three routes account for most of what gets funded in this country. For a lot of firms, Pennsylvania sits outside all three.
So, a company here can be excellent and still be invisible. And from a desk in Manhattan, invisible and nonexistent look about the same.
It isn’t only investors who stop finding you. A customer who would have bought the thing never hears it exists. An engineer who would have moved home for the right job never learns the job is open. A founder two counties over spends a year solving a problem somebody in this state already solved.
And the person least equipped to fix any of that is the founder. She has a product to ship and payroll to make, and telling the world about herself is the 11th item on a 10-item list. It also runs against the grain around here, where talking up your own company is considered a little impolite.
So, we raise our hand
The building side of this is in better shape than people give it credit for. Ben Franklin Technology Partners writes early checks. Penn State’s LaunchBoxes and the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Harrisburg University give founders a desk and somebody to ask. Incubators run from York to Erie. None of it is glamorous, and all of it works.
What’s thin is the telling. This is a state full of people who would rather build the thing than talk about it, and that instinct has cost our founders more than any funding gap ever has.
Getting named is not a vanity exercise. A company people have heard of closes its next customer faster. It recruits better, because a good engineer in Pittsburgh will return a call from a company they recognize. And when it goes out to raise, the fund across the table has seen the name somewhere before, which is worth more in a first meeting than any deck.
There’s a second effect that’s easy to miss. When a company here gets its due, the founder three towns over sees it and quietly recalculates what’s possible from where she’s sitting. That’s how a place starts producing more of them. Not from a program. From proof.
So, we’re going to do the talking. Over the next several weeks, Keystone Innovation Collaborative is publishing lists of Pennsylvania companies worth watching, sector by sector:
• Health and life sciences
• Advanced manufacturing
• Agricultural technology
• Energy technology
• Robotics and AI
Names, founders and the towns they’re building in. Some of those towns you’d expect. A lot of them you wouldn’t.
And if you’re building something here, tell us. We’d rather hear it from you now than find you a year from now.
If we want outside capital and national customers to look this way, somebody here has to say it loudly and then keep saying it. What’s being built in Pennsylvania is worth the trip.
The companies above aren’t unusual. Pennsylvania has been turning them out for a century, in bakeries and machine shops and stables and, at least once, on a base in Afghanistan.
This state has never struggled to build. It has struggled to be heard. That’s the work in front of us.
Martin Fedorko is managing partner of White Rose Ventures, a York-based venture capital firm focused on fueling early-stage innovation, and interim executive director of the Keystone Innovation Collaborative.
Executive Insights is a recurring feature from biznewsPA. It provides local business executives and leaders a platform for sharing advice and perspective with the business community of Central Pennsylvania. If you are interested in contributing an executive insight, email [email protected].
