There’s a lot to look forward to next year. One thing is for certain: there’s not going to be as much travel in the next 12 months as there was in the previous 12 months. On one hand, it will be nice to be home more – my garage and yard could certainly use some time and attention – and my house needs a fresh coat of paint this coming summer. I’ve wanted to turn the garage into more of a year-round usable space, but that’s going to require some work cleaning and insulating the building before I even think about putting a heater out there. It’s a huge project, and something I’ve put off for 9 years now, but 2023 is the time to finally get it done.
On the other hand, not traveling as much means that the times that I do leave home will be more intentional. I’m not nearly as able to book last-minute trips to other parts of the country, like the quick trip to Columbia, Missouri, to facilitate Startup Weekend when their original facilitator backed out at the last minute. I had to turn down a trip to facilitate a Startup Weekend in Minneapolis a couple of months ago because I was already booked that weekend with Startup Games. I don’t have a time window long enough to repeat the Uganda trip in 2023 – there are only 3 weeks between the end of the Incubator Summer Program and the beginning of the semester in August. If I’m going to facilitate Startup Weekends, we need to plan the trip at least a couple of months in advance.
Events during the week are going to be tough as well. I’ve asked the Design Dash organizing team to give me hard dates for the events they want to run this spring because multiple other groups are asking for my time. The Undergraduate Startup Incubator comes first and building alliances across campus in order to recruit more students into my program is of the utmost importance. I know that I’ll be heading to Cedar Rapids to run a Design Dash event in April, and probably will be running one in Iowa City at some point mid-semester, probably in March.
I’ve already booked my train tickets and hotel for CiderCon in Chicago at the beginning of February. I haven’t been on the train to Chicago since the corona started – CiderCon 2021 would have been in Chicago, but they moved it online. I’ve also signed up to volunteer at Cider Summit at Navy Pier – I had a blast four years ago as an attendee, and I found out after I’d already paid that if you volunteer, you get in for free. At CiderCon, I’ve signed up for some tastings – the best part of the convention. A couple of the tastings involve New York State ciders, and another covers perry, the pear equivalent to apple cider. I decided not to go on any of the tours, since I can go to Chicago and visit cideries there any time I want – I go on tours when the convention is on the coasts, because they aren’t nearly as accessible for me as Chicago, only a 4 hour train or car trip.
I’ll be facilitating at least one Startup Weekend outside of Iowa this year – I’ve been in contact with a student at UT San Antonio about bringing the program to her campus and training her along with a couple of other students how to facilitate the event themselves in the future. An organizer must organize two events before qualifying to facilitate the event, and I’m happy to fly down there a couple of times to help them create a self-sustaining program. I’m in contact with the Startup Weekend folks about other needs for facilitation – I’d love to continue checking off states as I was doing in 2021 and 2022. I just need to get those locked in significantly earlier than I did prior to July, when my schedule was a bit more open.
EntreFest is going to be held in Iowa City again in 2023, and I’ve been asked to be on the organizing committee once again. I’ve also submitted an idea for a talk – we’ll see if my idea for a discussion on building great entrepreneurial ecosystems anywhere is even considered. I’m not holding out much hope to be chosen, even though I have a lot of great insights from my experiences in 2022 that I’d be sharing with the crowd. I saw some of the decision-making that goes into picking the speakers for EntreFest, and let’s just say that I personally don’t check any of the required or optional boxes. But who knows – I might be pleasantly surprised.
I will be taking the students to EntreFest from the Incubator Summer Track and issuing the same challenge from 2022 – find every type of “actor” from Brad Feld’s book The Startup Community Way. From my experiences going to events like EntreFest and Denver Startup Week, every type of ecosystem actor shows up to large-scale entrepreneurial gatherings: everyone from creatives and builders to funders, local leaders, advisors, and media. Speaking of the Incubator Summer Track, I’ve already put together a good chunk of the material for that program – a bit of a rebuild from the Accelerator program last summer. I’ve compressed a lot of the preliminary stuff into one week, moved some presentations over to EntreFest week since most of that week is lost anyway, and have planned some needed structure into the rest of the programming. I’ve also secured a bump in pay for students going through the program, to match our peers in the Midwest.
The main change to the structure of the summer program is using Agile and Scrum to create weekly sprints. We’re going to cover the basics of Agile and Scrum during our first couple of days of the program, and then it’s up to the students to take that information and use it to plan out the work they need to do for the rest of the summer. The first week is going to have a lot more useful information and spend a lot less time on personality quizzes than we did this past summer. I’m also building in some team-building activities on Friday afternoons, to get everyone out of the building, working together to solve problems and having some fun along the way. I want this thing to function more like a professional accelerator in an effort to give the students a taste of what it’s going to be like if they take the leap and join a professional accelerator – Techstars and Y Combinator are incredibly tough and demanding, but you get out of them what you put in.
Due to my work heavily modifying the Startup Weekend model for Design Dash, I’ve been in contact with a connection through the Iowa EdTech Collaborative to use the Startup Weekend model of accountability to improve a series of global engagement programs for university leaders. This program takes departmental bigwigs over to different locations in India for cross-cultural learning on specific topics. Not only are they looking for a framework for deliverables during the trip, but they also are looking for facilitators, and they’re thinking of bringing me on in that capacity. If this works out, we’re going to have to work around my academic schedule including the Incubator Summer Track. We’ll see if I end up in India at some point in 2023!
Cider Finder will have a major update done in the next 12 months. I’ve been so busy with other projects that it hasn’t gotten the love that it deserves in the past year. I really want to get the app out of closed beta and into an open beta before the end of 2023, and it needs some serious work to get it there. I’m hoping to have something done in the next month before I go to CiderCon, so that I have something to show off to curious cider makers and enthusiasts attended events that week in Chicago. Unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to make it to GLINTCAP this year again – I was bummed that I wasn’t able to work it in this year, especially with Startup Weekend in Traverse City taking place the weekend before the competition. In future years, I may move some of the summer programming around so that I’m able to participate as a judge and spend a couple of days there in western Michigan.
There are a couple of events I’m hoping to take some students to in the coming year: first, it looks like the Young Entrepreneur Convention is on again at the end of February. If they are holding the elevator pitch competition, I have a handful of students who I think should participate. I think the networking opportunities would be good for them as well. I’m going to reach out to the organizers over there in Ames and see what I can do to help them boost their numbers. Also, I’m hoping to take a couple of students to Denver Startup Week in September. By that point, I should have one or two students who would benefit from meeting with angel investors and larger market startup founders, or have products that would be well received in that market. It will probably be an easier sell to take a group of students to Ames than it will be to take one or two students to Denver, but we’ll see.
Based on 2022, who knows what other opportunities will present themselves over the coming year! I’m building a lot of really awesome stuff right now, and if the list above is exhaustive, it will be a fantastic year. I plan to hit the ground running after taking this New Year’s weekend off – one of the few weekends I’ve put down my work over the past year. I have a stack of books to read, and there’s football on today. I deserve a little bit of time off after all the work I’ve accomplished this year, and I have a solid plan for tackling the many projects that lay ahead in the coming months.
I hope you and yours had a fantastic 2022, and I wish you all a Happy New Year.