ITEN News

Out of the way, Silicon Valley! There is a new hub for tech startups, and it isn't on the coast. It's in the Midwest.

Dice.com, a career site for tech and engineering professionals, has ranked St. Louis, Missouri, the fastest-growing tech mecca based on the increased number of job postings on their web site.

Technology jobs in the St. Louis area posted on Dice jumped 25 percent this year. Also, jobs in the St. Louis high tech sector are up 13 percent.

How did St. Louis become such a start-up city? Click here to listen to Jim Brasunas, the Executive director of the St. Louis Information Technology Entrepreneur Network which helps facilitate partnerships between entrepreneurs and investors. http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/03/22/st-louis-tech

by Jay DeLong, Startup Missouri Champion and VP of New Ventures at the St. Louis Regional Chamber.

This year at the annual South by Southwest Interactive (SWSWi), the confab for all things digital held in Austin, TX, we saw, like in the industry itself, the strongest non-Silicon Valley representation of interactive startups ever. Also known as a "Geek Spring Break," the Interactive festival (March 8 - 12) is part of the much larger SXSW festival, which included Film (March 8-16), and the long running Music festival (March 12 - 17). This year there was a particularly high concentration of companies from NYC, Pittsburg, Las Vegas and from your comrades from right here in Missouri.

Of course, much of the media attention was focused around Google Glass and the MakerBot Digitizer , but also interesting is that while SXSWi, which has helped launch such tech companies as Twitter and Foursquare, was more about hardware this year than software or social apps; and what wasn't visible much this year at all was PCs, the continuing stalwart of most IT work. Personal computers were hardly mentioned from a panel or in a headline at all.

The heavy Missouri company representation was in large part because of "ShowMe SxSW" an effort of StartUp Missouri, which entailed becoming an official SXSWi sponsor, heavily discounted badges, a roundtrip bus ride, cheap accommodations and a hosted party for a couple hundred people in Austin on Monday to highlight the importance of the startups supported by IT efforts like ITEN, T-REx and Digital Sandbox. Performing at that party were the Pernikoff Brothers, founders of Tunespeak, as they kicked off an intensive week of business development for their new platform for musicians. The party & the whole SXSW trip has given Missouri-based IT startups new access to relationships, opportunities, and knowledge they need to succeed. The party was underwritten by the St. Louis Regional Chamber, and the bus that hauled 40+ of us down here was underwritten by the Kauffman Foundation.

We had multiple companies from Missouri participate in contests, like the SXSW Accelerator Awards which had Click with Me Now, and KC-based Phone2Action, who ran the table in their category outright. Also doing well were the founders of St. Louis University-based StoryBoard, who made it to the national finals in the Student Startup Madness competition. Both Missouri IT accelerators, Capital Innovators and ThinkBig KC, posted up on the bus and at various events in Austin, as well as venture firm Cultivation Capital, creating a terrific statewide mix of ventures and funders. The BonFyre app was used by everyone on trip, as the almost perfect use case, keeping everyone connected at the scores of round-the-clock events in Austin and sharing pictures and observations.

"SXSW was great exposure for us. Our space was in the Circus Mashery Lounge, which is one of the hottest spots in all of SXSW. We were alongside companies like ESPN, Aetna, and Survey Monkey," said Ronak Sheth, evp of product & strategy from FoodEssentials. "We discussed business and partnership opportunities with over 150 companies at our booth including Whole Foods, Campbell's, Amazon and many others."

Some folks on the bus trip didn't rest a minute all week. Tim Sylvester, CEO of Integrated Roadways, said, "Being my first time down, it was definitely drinking from a fire hose." On top of meeting industry partners and customers, he met futurists and industry luminaries like video game legend Richard Garriott, founder of Ultima Series, and Astro Teller, Google's Captain of Moonshots, from the Google X project that have been responsible for incubating Google Driverless and Google Glass. "Astro asked me to sign up at Solve for X, the external face of the Moonshots project, and send him an email about what I'm doing. He mentioned that his desk is right next to Sergey Brin's, so I sent Astro back with four biz cards, for himself, Sergey, Larry, and Sebastian (leader of Driverless)...With any luck, he will like what I had to say, and make those connections for me."

Tim also met with potential investors like Vinod Kholsa, co-founder and ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems, and former partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, now a principal of Kholsa Ventures, a $1B VC and Seed firm. Tim said, "Its positive impact on my own startup and the others that went down is already being realized less than a week after return."

Still others, like Click with Me Now, have done an amazing job of leveraging the national media in attendance. Take a look at the video done by Fleishman, a great STL tie-in, as FH took a major presence at SXSWi to promote its digital media capacity.

Besides making some great friends and business contacts from our KC colleagues on the bus, we have a lot of video footage in the can, as Ed Domain & Jeff Stevens (Icarus Club & Coolfire) and others made a conscious effort to video capture the technology, action, and energy of our trip. I look forward to working together with them to professionally publish the material and keep the recent momentum going.

Next year, to get the best of SXSW - direct flights and downtown hotels - you'll have to book early, or as soon as the reservations open up in August. Sign up at www.sxsw.com/about/newsletters or make sure your startup is registered at www.startupmo.org

Finally, here are some interesting articles about SXSW published by Startup MO attendees:
1. Huffington Post by KC's Jason Grill: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-grill/sxsw_b_2884411.html
2. Silicon Prairie News Ran a piece from Cameron Cushman, of The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, here is the link: http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2013/03/what-i-learned-on-my-way-to-sxsw
3. Startup America post by Brian Handrigan: http://www.s.co/blog/impact-startup-america-had-my-business

ITEN in St. Louis is latest to launch popular program
that aids in building startup communities

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Feb. 12, 2013) – The buzz surrounding entrepreneurs and the business startup scene in the Midwest is growing louder. 1 Million Cups, a program launched by Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation last April to bring together and engage entrepreneurs in the Kansas City community, is taking its show on the road – to Missouri’s eastern edge.

Tomorrow morning, 1 Million Cups will launch in St. Louis. Innovate St. Louis, through its Information Technology Entrepreneur Network (ITEN), will serve as the program organizer, helping St. Louis entrepreneurs connect with coffee and one another each Wednesday morning at the studios of local PBS station KETC Channel 9.

St. Louis is actually the fourth city on 1 Million Cups’ expansion map. 1 Million Cups Des Moines was the first community outside Kansas City to launch, coming online during Global Entrepreneurship Week last November. 1 Million Cups then perked up Houston’s startup community Jan. 23.

“ITEN is excited to be partnering with the Kauffman Foundation to bring 1 Million Cups to St. Louis. We have seen the phenomenal growth of the program in Kansas City and how it's energizing the entire KC startup community,” said Jim Brasunas, ITEN executive director. “We hope for a similar impact in St. Louis. Our local partnership with the Nine Network (KETC) will be a unique aspect of 1 Million Cups in St. Louis.”

“National media have given much of the credit for the heightened buzz in Kansas City to the arrival of Google Fiber,” said Thom Ruhe, vice president of entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “But we believe our startup activity is also heavily fueled by 1 Million Cups. Every single week, the coffee and collaboration flow.”

For one hour each Wednesday morning, 1 Million Cups gives two early-stage startups the opportunity to present their companies to a diverse audience that includes mentors, advisers, researchers, builders, makers and aspiring and existing entrepreneurs. In the education-based forum, each startup founder presents for six minutes and then fields audience questions for 20 minutes more.

“It’s been said that communities are built on a million cups of coffee – and the conversations they create,” said Nate Olson, an analyst at the Kauffman Foundation and co-founder of 1 Million Cups. “Our hypothesis was that if Kansas City entrepreneurs had a million more cups of coffee together, we could fundamentally change the culture of entrepreneurship here.”

The hypothesis is proving its validity. Attendance at 1 Million Cups in Kansas City has grown rapidly. From an initial audience of less than two dozen last April, the program hit a new attendance record of 260 late last month.

“From the very beginning, 1 Million Cups has been open to the public,” Ruhe said. “Many involved in – or wanting to be involved in – Kansas City’s entrepreneurial scene now see this as a ‘must attend’ event every single week. It’s grassroots, informal and highly effective in building connections.”

With entrepreneurs and the networks that support them taking notice, 1 Million Cups is soon to pour into even more communities. In fact, Ruhe and Olson are building a list of other cities that have expressed interest, and Kauffman Labs expects to have 1 Million Cups brewing in 20 U.S. cities by year’s end.

For more information, visit www.1millioncups.com or follow @1MillionCups on Twitter.

About the Kauffman Foundation

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation that works with partners to advance entrepreneurship in America and improve the education of children and youth. Founded by late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman, the Foundation is based in Kansas City, Mo. For more information, visit www.kauffman.org, and follow the Foundation on www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.

About ITEN

The IT Entrepreneur Network (ITEN), is an initiative of Innovate St. Louis, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation. As a catalyst of the IT ecosystem, ITEN provides unique programs, events, and access to resources that accelerate tech venture success. ITEN's programs form a venture roadmap from concept through design, prototype, launch, revenue, funding and rapid scaling. Guidance from serial entrepreneurs, subject matter experts and important community influencers helps entrepreneurs focus on essential critical tasks and avoid wasted efforts. Access to investors, key service providers and qualified talent means lower barriers to rapid growth. Designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, requiring neither payment nor equity, ITEN is a unique community asset and a proven

Media Contact:

Barbara Pruitt, 816-932-1288; bpruitt@kauffman.org, Kauffman Foundation

Brian Posnanski, 314-925-8074, brian@traffic-prm.com, Information Technology

Entrepreneur Network (ITEN)

ITEN Announces the Top Tech Startups of 2012

 

ITEN has just completed a major data project that includes gathering information from the tech startups in the St. Louis region.   Most of the ventures have cooperated and shared their proprietary data, which has enabled us to carry out a wide-ranging analysis of the tech startup activity in our region.  We are actively engaged in preparing a comprehensive report to the community of this information, which we intend to release in mid-February.

 

Using comparisons of data that include employees, investor funding, customer revenue, 2012 acceleration factors and other relevant information, we have today released an early view of the top startups in St. Louis in 2012:  The ITEN Fast 10 and the ITEN Top 10.   A video of the announcement is available at http://www.itenstl.org/video.

 

The ITEN Fast Ten are companies founded in the last 2 years that are already showing promise of becoming drivers of future economic development:

1. Splice Machine
2. Sim Machines
3. SirenGPS
4. Time2Cater
5. Evtron
6. Dorsata
7. DIMS
8. Click With Me Now
9. Rollsale
10. Material Mix

 

The ITEN Top Ten are our region's top tech startups and many of them are already making a significant difference in our community, by hiring, building strong customer revenue and attracting investment from local and national investors.   We ask you to join with ITEN as we celebrate the achievements of these companies and the entrepreneurs who've founded them:

1. Yurbuds
2. MulticoreWare
3. Norse
4. Aisle411
5. Hexagrid
6. Food Essentials
7. Trade Harbor
8. LockerDome
9. Virtual Nerd
10. Mortgate Returns

There are more than those ten top ventures worthy of recognition, so we're also naming the ITEN Next Ten to celebrate them and their accomplishments:  Systematic Revenue, BusyEvent, Makaboo, Blendics, Gremln, Off Campus Media, BizMed, Foxtrax, Greenvelope andLifestream Communications Communications.   We expect to see many of them on the Top Ten list next time.

 

Stay tuned for the full ITEN Report to the Community, coming in February.