That Time I Spent a Morning in Ottumwa, or Lightning Can’t Strike Twice

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So, I’m back from my yearly weekend train excursion to the base of the Rocky Mountains, refreshed and rejuvenated… or maybe that’s just the coffee talking. 98% of the train ride was perfectly smooth. Then, a coal train derailed in front of our train, and I was stuck one stop away from my car. First, before I talk about my weekend, I want to talk about the Iowa Startup Accelerator Launch Party.

The ISA Launch Party is the culmination of the 3 month Iowa Startup Accelerator program in Cedar Rapids, where the teams that made it through the grueling process show off what they have learned, boiled down to a 6-minute pitch. I have had the opportunity to observe the 8 teams that survived the Accelerator from the beginning of their journey at the end of the summer until now, and the amount of polishing and preparedness for the stage now compared to the beginning of the program is remarkable. They truly work wonders in that building in Cedar Rapids. I’m working to find video footage of the pitches and the ceremony – several people were live streaming during the event, but I’m not sure if anyone actually archived the footage.

After the program, I got to reconnect with some of the teams that I have really gotten to know over the last three months, including CareAcademy, CareDrop, and SwineTech, the last of which is presenting next week in Kansas City at the Kauffman Foundation 1 in a Million Pitch-Off Competition for some serious prize money. Our 1 Million Cups group in Cedar Rapids is going to be watching the pitch-off on Wednesday, so it’s going to be a busy day in New Bohemia.

Our Venture School group met before the ISA Launch Party for about an hour, and we got to try 90-second elevator pitches as opposed to our usual 8-minute, slide deck-powered presentations. My partner Tom gave the elevator pitch and did an excellent job explaining our retooled concept. The restaurant idea is no longer focused on the food or drink, but on the customer experience in the restaurant; what we are referring to as “huddle, cuddle, and schmooze inside the cocoon within the cocoon.” We are retooling our customer discovery questions away from food and drink specifics and trying to determine why people go to a restaurant, what brings them back, and how we can do it better. The food and drink are just expected by patrons as part of the atmosphere; what we need to do is figure out every place that we can break through and become better than our eventual competition. We still have 55 customer discovery interviews to go, and I think we are going to uncover quite a bit more information, even in just the next 20 or 25 interviews. I have a fair amount of data crunching I need to do leading up to the last few installments of Venture School on Thursday, and then Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Thinking of Thanksgiving, and because here in the upper Midwest the weather starts to turn sour this time of year, I took my yearly trip out to Denver to visit a medical resident friend and her husband before the weather window of opportunity closed. They, like I, are fans of craft beer, and Colorado is craft beer heaven. So sample we did! Last year, we drove all the way from Denver to Fort Collins to visit “The Mothership” of New Belgium brewing and took the tour of the facility. This time, we decided that we would stay in Denver proper and try at least one of the facilities in town. We made it to Great Divide Brewery on the edge of the Lower Downtown district, which was much smaller than the New Belgium facility. I had never tried any of their wares before, so it was a fun experience. We also stopped by the Wynkoop Brewery, located conveniently across from Union Station in downtown Denver.

After having fun downtown, we went to a special screening of Dumb and Dumber at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is much like FilmScene in Iowa City crossed with a traditional multiplex. We had eaten at one of the food trucks while we were downtown, so I didn’t get to try any of the food at the theater – one man can only eat so many awesome cheeseburgers in one day. They were doing some sort of cross promotion with a snowboarding video group, and they were giving any some shirts and snowboards. I unfortunately didn’t win anything, but it was a fun time anyway.

The time I spent in Denver was a ton of fun, and the train ride in was one of the most relaxing rides I’d been on in a long time. The train was almost early to pick me up in Mount Pleasant on Friday evening, and we got into Denver about half an hour early on Saturday morning. I fell asleep somewhere between Omaha and Lincoln and woke up after we had crossed into Colorado. The ride back was relatively uneventful Sunday evening leaving Denver, leaving Union Station right on time and traveling through Nebraska at full speed. I easily fell asleep a few miles before the Nebraska state line and woke up when we pulled into the station in Omaha. When it opened, I got a cup of coffee and some donut holes from the snack bar, because it looked like we were going to get back to Mount Pleasant on time. I happened to glance at Twitter and saw that between Mount Pleasant and Burlington along the California Zephyr’s route, a long coal train had hit a piece of road construction equipment and 25 of the cars had derailed.

So, we got as far as Ottumwa, and we were stuck. It took about 4 hours for a bus to arrive to pick up all of us getting off at the next few stops along the line. The folks going all the way to Chicago were taken on express buses about 90 minutes before our bus arrived. I was surprised that they were able to find us a bus that quickly – I figured that I would not get back home until after dark. Most of the work I do can be done remotely, so there really wasn’t anything I had to get back to do. I had a Venture School phone meeting scheduled, and it actually ended up coinciding with the bus ride between Ottumwa and Mount Pleasant, which helped to pass the time.

Speaking of Venture School, we were back at it again this past Thursday, giving a full presentation on our progress. We have just about revised every part of our Business Model Canvas in an effort to understand what our potential customers may want, and how our business should respond to them. We expanded on the “huddle, cuddle, and schmooze” idea and started working on key partners and resources. The plan is to fund the beginnings of the restaurant with a Kickstarter campaign with the immediate payout of gift certificates to my partner’s existing restaurants. We have also thought about other ways to fund the start of the establishment without going into any kind of bankrolled debt, including equity partners that we eventually can buy out with the Kickstarter funds. We have several meetings set up over the next week to flesh out some of these kinds of details, and I hopefully will have more to report next time.

The next couple of weeks before Thanksgiving are going to be pretty busy. This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week, and there are plenty of events going on in eastern Iowa. I’m going to be in Cedar Rapids all day on Wednesday watching the 1 in a Million pitches and coworking at Vault in the afternoon. I’m working to get several projects finished before the final Venture School push Thursday and the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Startup Weekend on the Friday through Sunday in between. I am hoping to have at least a couple of updates posted on here during the next couple of weeks. Until then!