I don’t usually write a blog post this close to my year-end review posts, but it’s just been like that this year. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up most of the last 18 months, and especially the last 6 months. I’ve been working on this blog post one or two sentences at a time for the past few weeks, and finally got a chance yesterday and today to sit down and finish this thing, just in time to turn around and pull together the year-review and year-ahead posts that I release every December 31.
Through some amazing combination of luck and force, I’ve just about made it through my first semester leading the Undergraduate Student Incubator at The University of Iowa. I only have a handful of things left to do, including submitting grades, before I can take three weeks away from the office. It’s not really three weeks off – I’ll be working frantically on a number of other projects and chores around the house during the time away from my campus office. I haven’t really been home much of the year, so the garage is a disaster, my home office is severely unorganized, and the house could use a good deep cleaning. Cider Finder needs a major update before CiderCon at the beginning of February, and I have a handful of videos and other creative projects that have been half-finished and gathering dust for months or years.
This semester has been an amazing learning experience for me. All of my teaching experience had been over the course of weekends or, in the case of the Uganda trip, a quick three weeks. I’d never taught at this level before, and it’s been an absolute rush. I’ve certainly learned a lot about managing undergraduate students as well as the coaches and specialists that make up the teaching team. I didn’t expect to have so many meetings – I was put in charge of outreach and recruitment, which means meeting with any students who win money at any of the pitch competitions before they can be paid by the university. There were a couple of weeks in the middle of the semester when I’d have a calendar completely full of 30-minute meetings with students.
So far, the strongest link I’ve made across colleges is my link with the folks in the Engineering Library. I was able to get over to that building a couple of times this semester, and we will have a few engineering students joining the program in the spring. I started with ten students in the class when the fall semester started, 16 students in the program by the end of the fall semester, and I’m going to potentially have 25-30 students in the program when we kick off the spring semester in mid-January. I am incredibly proud of the work my team and I have been able to do to bring the incubator back to life so far, but there’s plenty of work still to do.
My students have been remarkably resilient while I blindly feel my way through learning to run a program like this. They’ve put up with a lot of change this semester and did very well during our final pitch competition last week. It was nice to give all of the students an opportunity to give a full investor pitch – with the number of students participating in the program next semester, we’re not going to be able to do that again. I don’t have a plan for the end of next semester yet. Are we going to have most of the students do elevator pitches? Are we going to have an innovation fair with tables? Stay tuned to find out!
Even though I’ve spent 30 or more hours each week working on the incubator, I’ve gotten a number of other things done. I’ve finished the Reciprocal Exchange video series that I recorded in Uganda – eight different lectures and seventeen demo day videos, plus the full demo day program that ran over four hours. In total, there are nearly 20 hours of edited video content available from that trip! It was a lot of fun editing this project, being able to go back and relive such a fun experience from this past summer. I still have a bit of work to do making that Web site more mobile-friendly, but it’s great to be able to share the footage with the people back in Arua. Also, I finally have a Web presence for EntrePartners, my nonprofit home for Startup Weekend Iowa City and Iowa City Open Coffee, among other things. The site isn’t totally done yet, but I wanted to get something online before the end of the year.
Somewhere in there, I was able to fit a quick trip to Denver into my schedule, in order to continue my Denver Startup Week attendance streak – 6 out of 11 years now. Most of the trip involved visiting cider makers who I hadn’t had a chance to visit in previous trips to Denver, because they were too far from the city center, and I didn’t have a car. I arrived around noon on Saturday and was able to get to Locust Cider and Colorado Cider Company on Saturday afternoon, a return trip to Waldschänke Cider on Saturday evening to pick up a couple of my favorite ciders, and a trip out to Old Mine Cider and to the Stem Cider Acreage on Sunday. Watching the sun set behind the Rockies while sipping a flight of cider at the Acreage was absolutely breathtaking – it truly made the entire trip.
I was only able to make it to one day of Denver Startup Week this time. Monday is usually the best day to go, since most of the social events take place then. They didn’t have the traditional breakfast program this year, opting for coffee and conversation instead. I went to a couple of sessions while I was downtown and wandered around in between, hitting some of my favorite places. The evening social was just as fun as it always was, located back downtown along the 16th Street Mall. I didn’t run into anyone I’d met in previous years – a departure from past Monday socials. I did make some great new connections, however, and the beverages were nice and cold. I also briefly stopped by the party after the party for a little bit to enjoy one more free beverage before hopping on the train back to my hotel out near the airport. I had to fly back the next day and wanted to get a good night’s sleep before returning from my final trip of the year.
It seems weird going from globetrotting to being tied to Iowa City again. It’s a different feeling than 2020, because it’s a job keeping me relatively stationary rather than a pandemic. I know that I still can go places – in fact, I’ll be heading over to Chicago for CiderCon at the end of January and down to San Antonio to run a university-themed Startup Weekend at UTSA the last weekend of March. I’m actually excited to not be traveling all the time. I have so much planned for the spring semester, and I’m already planning the incubator’s summer program, formerly known as the accelerator. There’s already some interest in the summer program from students who can’t join us in January, so I don’t think there’s going to be a problem filling the program and having everything set before April.
I don’t want to look too far into the future in this post – that’s what part 2 of my December 31 post is designed to do. However, it’s hard not to look into the future a bit. My ultimate goal for the incubator program is for 50 businesses to be part of the program in some shape or form. It looks like I’m about halfway there, but looking two or three years into the future, I think I can get the program there. It’s all about constant outreach to different parts of campus and to incoming and future students. There are great ideas everywhere – entrepreneurship isn’t just for business students. Reaching out to students in the not only the hard sciences, but also the soft sciences and the humanities is critical. Reaching out to kids visiting campus could tip the scale and convince them to choose us for undergrad rather than another school closer to home. All it takes to make this place great is persistence.
I have the persistence. Now, I’m working on the plan and the execution of the plan.
There’s a lot of work still to be done around here. I have a number of things to streamline, a number of systems still remaining to overhaul, and some great connections I want to make between the incubator and the greater entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Iowa. In the next three to five years, I think we can be producing some of the best entrepreneurs in the country, ready to take on civilization’s greatest challenges. Will most of the businesses created here disappear? Statistically speaking, yes. However, creating resilient entrepreneurs is the goal – entrepreneurs who look back fondly on their time in this program and want to give back when they are successful.
I’m optimistic. I’ll be back in two weeks or so with more optimism.