Over the course of 2022, I’ve added so many different titles. International traveler. Entrepreneurial educator. Nonprofit founder. Incubator director. I already had startup founder, certified cider professional, and ecosystem builder on the list. I guess I need larger business cards, don’t I?
The past few months have been unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. After things jerked back into motion in the middle of 2021, it feels like I’ve accomplished a decade’s worth of work in the period of one year. However, this is just the beginning. While I don’t have a lot of travel left this year – I think a combined six days going around the world and back for just one trip, in addition to all of the movement around the United States this year – there are a number of things I’m going to be doing in the next few months.
This weekend, I’ll be hopping onto another plane and heading out to Colorado for Denver Startup Week. It’s my sixth year in a row attending the event (including 2020, when everything was online), and my seventh trip out there in eight years. The trip this year is going to be relatively short, just Saturday morning to Tuesday evening, and is mostly serving as a “clean up” trip to pay visits to people and places I didn’t get to last year. I have four cider makers on the list to visit, including a trip out to the Stem Cider Acreage at the north end of the Denver metro. This is also the first year in a while where I’m not staying in or near downtown Denver – I opted for a hotel out near the airport where it should be a bit quieter and easier to find a parking space for the rental car.
I’m only going to be attending Monday sessions of Denver Startup Week – most of the big social events happen on Monday, and it luckily works into my schedule the best to attend just the beginning of the week. They aren’t having a kickoff breakfast this year, just coffee and networking at the DSW HQ on the 16th Street Mall. Most of the sessions I picked are at the DSW HQ, and the others are within a few blocks, so there’s no running around from downtown out to the edges of RiNo, as in past years. It’s too bad I can’t spend more time out there this year – I’m hoping in future years, I’m able to take some advanced students along from the incubator, in order to connect them with funding opportunities and to check out some coworking spaces. If our students insist on leaving Iowa after graduation, I’d rather see them go west rather than to Chicago or the east coast.
On September 28, we’re holding an open house at the BELL, in order to raise awareness of our program and our facilities among undergraduates. The building hasn’t been utilized much at all during the last couple of years of the pandemic, so my team and I are finding ways to bring some life back to the facility. This is just step 1 in a multi-step plan to bring the program up to where it should be, among the most elite college incubator programs in the country, hopefully producing a number of amazing businesses that eventually become household names. These sorts of events, along with other social and professional events that benefit the students, both current and prospective, will create a winning culture that will translate into everything the students do with their businesses.
Shortly after that, from October 4 through November 15, I’ll be helping teach Venture School. From what I’ve heard, we have a fantastic group of applicants for this fall’s program. I had a chance to mentor teams in this program in the spring, which got me the gig coaching students in the Summer Accelerator, which eventually led to my current role as the director of the Undergraduate Student Incubator. I’m really excited to help split the teaching duties this time around and bring my knowledge of the Business Model Canvas and customer discovery to the group. If you have a business idea or something that’s incredibly early-stage and want the chance to work through it with business experts from across the state, you should apply to this cohort before the applications close.
Design Dash is happening again on October 11, and I’ll be leading the facilitation team during the event once again. If you don’t remember, this is the program run by the Iowa EdTech Collaborative and the Jacobson Institute that brings in high school students from across Iowa to run through a lightning-fast Startup Weekend-style event in only six hours. This past spring, we had dozens of students from eastern and central Iowa and their teachers create potential startups from a list of ideas and prompts we supplied, and each of the teams were able to work through the first part of the Business Model Canvas, conduct a decent amount of customer discovery, and create a poster presentation and elevator pitch in only six hours. We’re not really planning to change much this time from what we did last time, as we didn’t really get much criticism of the spring event. If you know any high school teachers here in Iowa, let them know about Design Dash!
The following weekend, I’ll be dropping in on Startup Games a handful of times, as it’s one of the main funnels for students into the incubator program. I’ve mentored during the event for a number of years now, and it’s going to be fun participating in the event now that I’m in my new role. Since a number of these students and their businesses may end up participating in the incubator, I want to get to know them a bit more than I have in the past, so I’m going to attend a bit on Friday as they are pitching their ideas and forming teams. I then plan to drop in on Saturday and potentially mentor the students a bit as they begin customer discovery and data collection. On Sunday, I will be attending the final pitches, just to see where everything ended up after a weekend of work. The top three teams are then required to meet with me in order to collect their prize money from the weekend, but I’m hoping each team will consider talking with me, even if only one team member decides to keep going with the idea.
Even though most of my time is taken up with events and programming on campus – you know, the things for which I’m paid – I have a number of other projects still cooking. In the spring, I’ll be back to facilitating Startup Weekends, including an event at a university in San Antonio tentatively scheduled for March. It was originally scheduled for October, but planning for the event didn’t begin until after the start of the semester, and I advised the team that they might be cutting it too close attempting to bring that event to their campus with only six weeks to plan and execute. I’m glad they were willing to move their event – it helped them, as it gave them an extra six months to work on finding a venue and raising funds to bring me to town, and it was one less thing I was trying to cram onto my calendar this fall. We shall see where else Startup Weekend will take me in the spring – I don’t have any control over where events are planned, and sometimes I’m requested as facilitator out of the pool of available talent. I had a blast going to Missouri, California, and Michigan this year!
I’m in the earliest stages of planning the third year of Startup Weekend Iowa Online, scheduled for January 19-21, 2023. I am hoping to bring a number of previous organizers from across Iowa back on board again this year. The event is going to be completely free for participants once again – the only cost I have is for the Restream.io license, so we can broadcast to multiple online platforms during the weekend. The other tools we use are completely free. Over the last two events, we’ve had nearly 100 participants – my goal for this year is to have 100 more participants build awesome things online from Thursday afternoon through Saturday evening and to give away some great prizes at the end.
Last but not least, I’m still plugging away at Cider Finder, even though I haven’t talked about it much lately. I’ve been so busy with entrepreneurial events and ecosystem building as of late, I haven’t had much time to devote to my app. As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to be visited a handful of cider makers when I’m out in Colorado this coming weekend, continuing to gather vital customer discovery at each stop I make. The app is continuing to be developed when I have the time, and I’m really hoping that I can take it out of private beta by the end of the year. Based on my current workload, however, that’s becoming less and less likely. I really do need to have something public by the time CiderCon rolls around at the beginning of February. We’ll be back in Chicago for the first time since 2019 – we would have been there in 2021, but there was that whole corona thing still going on.
It’s a difficult juggling act right now between the incubator, developing the EntrePartners nonprofit, and getting Cider Finder out to the public. There are a lot of times where I feel like I’m being pulled in a million directions, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. This is a really great problem to have, but I don’t want to burn out or let anyone down. I know that I neglected this blog for the last couple of months – with this four-part entry, now you can see why. I really do love writing, but it’s yet another thing that I need to find the time to do. I stayed up way too late the last couple of nights listening to music and cranking out all four parts of this post, along with the final report for the Reciprocal Exchange project and my quarterly Freelance Media Newsletter, which usually goes out the 15th day of the third month of each quarter.
I hope you enjoyed reading through my adventures on the other side of the world and here at home. It truly has been an amazing few months, and I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had for anything. If you ever get a chance to do something like the Reciprocal Exchange, please jump at the chance. Even if I go back to teach entrepreneurship in Africa again, I’ll never be able to fully replicate the experience I had on my first-ever international trip. The foods, the smells, the sounds – I might be able to find most of those again. However, I’m not going to have the same experiences, and those memories will be with me forever.
When I was in Africa, I joked with the folks over there that I should turn the experience into a book. I’m still contemplating doing just that. (I know some of you think I write a book every time I blog, but I digress.) I took pretty extensive notes while I was there, so it wouldn’t be hard to piece things together into a book with a decent word count. Maybe writing that should be one of my goals for 2023, since I obviously don’t have enough to do with my time. I wouldn’t mind adding “published author” to the my list at the beginning of this part of the post. I suppose we’ll see how things go over the next few months.
Now you know the story of the last three months. Three months is a long time not to post a narrative. I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again, with everything on my plate right now and the things that I’m sure to add to it in the coming days and months. Being able to say no is still a major weakness for me, but I’m working on it.
I’m not terribly great at ending these posts, either. However, I’m not working on that.
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