Stitching a Midwestern Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Together

Posted by Jeff Carter
on October 11th, 2012

Flyover country. If you are a VC, it’s silly to flyover anymore.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today I am going to be up in Skokie at CATTECH V. I am looking forward to it. The event is put on by MRUN If you want to attend, you can still buy tickets at the door.

One of the things we did this year was use Shortlist to organize the conference. Shortlist was an Excelerate Labs company and is pretty cool when it comes to this sort of thing. I signed up and now have a list of people that I previously didn’t know and am going to meet. Shortlist takes the randomness out of conferences like this. If you are doing a gathering you ought to try it.

The other thing we are going to try and accomplish is to continue the dialogue all the midwestern angel groups have been having over the past couple of years. We are trying to knit a midwestern quilt. The midwestern ecosystem is developing. We are just past the inflection point where the plot thickens. Now it’s time to finish writing the book.

Each angel group in the midwest, and there are several, is unique. We look at different deals, have different procedures, and investing appetites. There can be parochial differences that make groups ethnocentric about their own areas. But our mission is the same: find great people with disruptive ideas and fund them. Then support them. Today we will try and figure out how to share deals and co-invest on deals with less friction. We already have some agreements in place. Now it’s time to get through some more details and then try it out. The more we co-operate, and the more we invest, the better for the ecosystem of the midwest.

The Tech Transfer heads of the major research institutions in the midwest will also be there. They have their own conference and talk about how they can get technical research out of their universities and into the hands of entrepreneurs more efficiently. It’s a tough problem. Being the tech transfer guy at a major U sounds like fun, but it’s fraught with bureaucratic headaches. We are getting better, and we will continue to get better at it the more we get together and talk about it. The midwest is rich in research, some of it idling on a shelf that creative entrepreneurs can turn into super programs or companies.

If you are an angel investor, or just interested in high tech stuff, I encourage you to buy a ticket. We will have 12 emerging startups pitch as well. Should be interesting.

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