Innovation Expo, Venture School, and Other Startup Stuff

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What a busy couple of weeks this has been! I got to reconnect with my undergraduate home department, meet and hang out with people much more fashionable than I, listen to pitches from some of the most promising start-ups in the Midwest, get ideas dismantled and rebuilt in the company of others with great ideas, and make some great new friends in the process.

I’ll start back on October 17 with the Sam Becker Memorial Communication Studies Conference. The theme of the conference was “Bodies and Technologies,” which appealed to my health communication brain cells. I didn’t know how they were going to approach the theme. I was pleasantly surprised when they used a three-pronged approach to dissecting the theme. The first speaker talked about the rhetoric of colors and sensation; something I hadn’t even thought of before. From what I remember all those years ago when I first started my training in Communication Studies is that anything can be a symbol. Normally, you think of pictures and things as being symbols and not digging deeper than that where the color of a specific object can be a symbol in itself, as well as the sensations you get when you are experiencing that object. The second speaker talked about drones, both the unmanned flying machines and how people get when they get a bit too immersed into their smartphones. The final speaker discussed prosocial behavior and his work on loneliness among groups of people.

Of all the presentations, I feel as though I was challenged the most by the first speaker, Debra Hawhee. Not only did she present a novel way of thinking about the world around all of us, but her presentation was the most engaging of the three. Checking out more of her work is on my always full to-do list.

After a quick dinner with some of the Communication Studies grad students, I made my way across the Ped Mall to the Iowa Fashion Project Red and Black Party at FilmScene. The Iowa Fashion Project is attempting to create a fashion ecosystem here in Iowa. They are going through the University of Iowa Venture School program in my cohort – I’ll talk about Venture School a bit later in this post.

As with many other events involving start-ups, I tend to bump into a lot of the same people. To my surprise, I ran into Jeremiah Stai of Verve Photography, who I haven’t seen since we both worked for the College of Public Health at the Institute for Public Health Practice. He was one of two photographers working the event, so I hung out with him in an attempt to absorb some fashion sense from those in the room much more stylish than I. Hopefully, he and I will be able to work on some projects together in the future.

I took a couple of days to work on some ongoing projects and take a bit of time for myself before things picked up again. Wednesday was the Innovation Expo in Coralville. The majority of the day involved pitches from start-ups and new businesses – basically an enormous version of the weekly 1 Million Cups program. Pitches in the middle of the day were given by more established groups that were seeking funding from a panel of investors. It was great being able to see the progression from start-ups to burgeoning companies and how much more polished the companies’ pitches were as they became more established.

Later in the afternoon, the Developer’s Showcase opened up with dozens of small businesses and start-ups hocking their wares in one place. The products were incredibly varied, from a machine that ground styrofoam into material that could be mixed with cement to create lighter building material, to a brewing system that could keep track of the process from a remote location, to a virtual reality system developed here in eastern Iowa. The teams from the Iowa Startup Accelerator also had tables in the exhibit hall, as one of their last projects before the ISA Launch Party next week, which I will cover after the fact.

The last event of the evening was the kick-off party for the University of Iowa Venture School. It was nice to meet some of the other teams before the beginning of the program, and to get together with Tom Carfrae of Tomaso’s Pizza in Cedar Rapids, my partner in this adventure, to get our ducks in a row before the whirlwind three days we had ahead of us. I had already done a great deal of pre-work for the beginning of the program, creating our presentation and going through all of the readings and videos. Before this past week, I really hadn’t had a chance to use LibreOffice all that much, so doing the work for Venture School is killing two birds with one stone – I am recording my experience with LibreOffice for my upcoming series on Ubuntu and all of its components, including LibreOffice. Even if I were still using Microsoft Office on the Mac, it has been a long time since I have put so much time in on the suite.

I got home late on Wednesday and had to be up and ready to go early on Thursday morning to kick off Venture School. What an experience it has been so far! The first three days have the majority of the content of the six week program, so that we can get a running start to our customer discovery process. The curriculum is based off of Steve Blank’s work on start-ups and I managed to find time to go through the entire series of videos before Venture School began. Each of the teams had to give a short presentation each day, so the turnaround time on our first few presentations was minimal. My partner knew this going in, and was glad to bring me on as the “technology guy” for this project.

Our partnership so far has been incredibly productive. I’m getting to learn entrepreneurship and the ins and outs of restaurant management from Tom, and I hope that he’s getting as much back from my skill set. It will be incredibly interesting to see if this wine bar concept gets enough traction to get going – so far, our customer discovery is showing us that it doesn’t matter as much what kinds of food and drink you are serving, as much as having a good “vibe” to the restaurant – is the place clean and welcoming; are the wait staff attentive and courteous; is this the kind of place you might want to spend $40 and a couple hours in the evening? Good food and craft beer/wine is just expected of an up-and-coming restaurant. Also, we have found that women have most of the influence regarding where to go eat and drink; not just for women’s groups, but for dates and other social gatherings.

We have our next Venture School class this evening, and I’m looking forward to seeing the progress that the other teams are making and whether or not anyone has decided to pivot or just call it quits. I think the potential is there for all of the teams, but the willingness to execute and change directions has to be there too. I will talk more about the other teams in a later post, because this one is ridiculously long already. I haven’t been this busy in a long time, and it feels great to connect to so many people. If you haven’t started following me on Twitter, you should. I usually do a better job staying up-to-date on that platform than I do here.