Tag: startup

Supporting Startups in Montana’s Wide-Open Spaces

Posted on by robbie

When your husband works for the U.S. Forest Service, you’ll find yourself frequently moving to places “where there are a lot of trees and not a lot of people,” says Christina Henderson, a marketing executive who knows firsthand. She and her family would often land in rural communities where the local economy had been based on natural resource extraction and was now declining — communities like Missoula, Mont., where she moved in 2011.
But instead of giving up on these hard-hit areas, Henderson was more motivated than ever to help them, primarily by embracing anyone with an enterprising spirit. “I love the promise of entrepreneurship, what it can create, and what it can mean for a rural community,” Henderson says.
It wasn’t long before Henderson got onboard with a new initiative called the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. The organization’s main goal? To support local tech entrepreneurs — and tell the story of their unlikely success in an unlikely place far from the bubble of Silicon Valley. In June, Henderson, who says she wants to show people that the Montana startup scene isn’t “all taxidermy and saddle shops,” attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit for ideas on further developing her community’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

High Tech In The Rural West

The idea of a thriving startup scene out in Big Sky Country may come as a surprise to outsiders, but Henderson believes the state is benefiting from three broad trends. The first is the way that technology has eliminated geographical barriers. “It’s been a real equalizer for rural communities,” she notes.
The second trend boosting Montana’s local ecosystem is the creative class’s increasing focus on quality of life. “The kinds of people who come to Montana value other things besides climbing [the corporate] ladder,” Henderson says. “They’re still hardworking and ambitious, but we also value things like work-life balance.”
Henderson credits the $1.8 billion sale of RightNow Technologies to software giant Oracle in 2012 as the third prong sparking Montana’s startup ecosystem. “It’s essentially a unicorn in the middle of Bozeman,” Henderson says. “It changed the minds of Montana entrepreneurs in terms of how big you can scale a company in Montana.” RightNow helped create a pool of high-quality talent in the state — people who had experience growing a startup to scale. More than a dozen former RightNow employees have spun off or created new companies, and the headline-grabbing sale also helped draw the interest of venture capitalists. “It’s hard to underestimate the impact of that one success story,” she says.

Overcoming Barriers

Of course, the state still has plenty of challenges, namely access to talent and capital, Henderson says. “For decades, the story you get told when you graduate from college in Montana is that you have to leave the state to get a job.” And changing that notion will take time. While investors’ perceptions of the state are also changing, that shift is fairly recent.
Political divides — and a heightened partisan climate nationally — can also be a difficult bridge to cross in this purple state. “We have people on all sides of the political spectrum,” Henderson says. “One of my challenges is to maintain a nonpartisan association that brings people together around this common goal.” It’s crucial that political differences don’t ever block an entrepreneur from making an important connection or accessing the resources they need.
In a state that’s almost 90 percent white, building a diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem that’s welcoming to all is also a barrier. “We have candidates come to Montana who are of color, and they get off the plane and look around and go, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’” says Henderson, adding that the ESHIP Summit helped her connect with other people around the country facing the same issue. “I really value underrepresented groups being included in entrepreneurship,” Henderson says. “I deeply care about that, and it’s not easy, and the people who have been trying to do it are really frustrated.”

That Small-Town Feel

As the executive director of the High Tech Business Alliance, Henderson’s main job is to support networking among entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. “Folks who are launching a company need access to mentors, legal and financial help, and information about exporting,” she says. Companies with fewer than five employees can join the organization for free, attend events, and meet established entrepreneurs who can offer advice and practical help.
Montana’s small-town atmosphere makes this networking easier. It’s the fourth-largest state geographically, but with roughly the same population as Delaware. Entrepreneurs and investors are increasingly willing to travel relatively long distances to help each other, and elected officials are personally cultivating relationships with local entrepreneurs.
The rugged wilderness of Montana attracts people seeking adventure and risk rather than a comfortable existence. One local entrepreneur put it this way, Henderson says: “‘I’ll go backcountry camping for weeks at a time — I’m already willing to endure hard things to do what I love.’” That spirit of adventure matches up well with entrepreneurship, Henderson says. “It’s a bit of a harder life. There are bears in the wilderness. It attracts a heartier person, and I think that lends itself to entrepreneurship.
“You have to be a little entrepreneurial if you’re willing to live in Montana,” she adds.

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Summit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that companies with fewer than 500 employees could join High Tech Business Alliance for free. NationSwell apologizes for this error.

Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government into the Digital Age

Posted on by robbie

Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.

The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes?
Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.

What specifically are you integrating into government operations?
Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.

The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way?
There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.

Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?

The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business?
There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.

Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy?
If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.

Where does that project stand now?
We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.

The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.

In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference?
We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.

You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans?
I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.

MORE: This Is a Smart, Nonpartisan Way to Improve Local Government

4 Startups Revolutionizing How Food Is Produced in the U.S.

Posted on by robbie

Ask city dwellers what an American farmer looks like and it’s likely that they’ll describe an image reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting: a man sporting overalls and a John Deere hat, bouncing his daughter on his lap as he steers a combine through his corn fields. In truth, today’s agrarian ideal is much different. Instead of rusty tractors working the land, fields are hooked up with the same modern technology used in Silicon Valley.
As part of our continuing coverage of FarmNext’s nationwide listening tour on food and young farmers, NationSwell talked to a few tech-savvy individuals building systems that can more efficiently feed America.

Drones

Trevor Witt, a third-year student at Kansas State University in Salina, spends most of his days flying unmanned aircraft systems, or drones. He’s involved in a project in the school’s entomology department — with “the bug guys,” as he says — studying techniques for early detection of invasive species. Witt spent the summer mapping sorghum fields, looking for evidence of an aphid that can ruin an entire harvest in just a few weeks. “If you can detect that aphid early on, you can spray that specific area to get rid of it,” Witt explains. With a camera shooting in high-resolution visuals and near-infrared imagery, Witt’s drone flies over fields of crops, looking for a shiny, sugar-dense resin on the top of leaves and a black underside — the telltale sign of this aphid’s infestation.
Witt, who dates his interest in unmanned aircraft to his high school shop class, says the primary goal of his research at K-State is “dealing with information overload.” His team is “translating all this data that we can collect and make actionable solutions,” he says. “Earlier, using satellites, the data pixel had a 15-acre resolution; now data pixel resolution is sub-centimeter. It just gets significant amounts of data even in the smallest field.”
For now, the farmer must take action against the infestation himself. But eventually, perhaps a decade from now, a grower won’t have to do a thing: he’ll have another drone or self-driven tractor that can automatically spray the area. “That’s the end goal when it comes to mapping,” Witt says. Unmanned aircraft systems aren’t the end-all solution, he concedes, but it’s “an extra tool in the toolkit.”

The Henlight helps chickens maintain high egg production levels, even during winter months. Courtesy of Edward Silva.

Solar Power

To lay the optimal number of eggs, a hen needs a full 16 hours of light. That’s an impossibly high bar for small farmers to reach during the winter, when a December day at California’s Riverdog Farms, for example, only receives eight and a half hours of sunshine — causing production to drop anywhere from 30 to 60 percent. (During that time, chickens continue to consume the same amount of feed.) Most large farms employ artificial lighting to stimulate production, but the cost can be prohibitively high for small-scale farmers to invest in the technology.
Egg producers “take those seasonal changes pretty hard,” says Edward Silva, who developed a solar-powered supplemental lighting system called Henlight as an undergraduate at University of California, Davis. Programmed by software, the Henlight “comes on in the morning hours, a little before sunrise. The very darkest days, it comes on earlier,” he says. “It doesn’t wake [the chickens] up. Eventually they rustle up, but what’s happening is that laying hens receive the okay to reproduce through a gland on the top of their head.”
According to Silva, who grew up on a farm in the Central Valley, field data from one coop using the Henlight in Capay Valley, Calif. saw a 20 percent boost in egg production — laying an additional 2,253 eggs — compared to a control group. Sold at $3 a dozen, the farmer made $563, meaning that he got a return on the $450 investment in the first year.
“There’s this movement where tech in ag is becoming much more democratic,” says Silva. “Smaller farms can optimize their operations as well. With Uber, anyone can be a taxi driver; with Aribnb, anyone can open a hotel. In agriculture, with a lot of precision sensors, with smartphones and drones, the systems are allowing small-scale guys to be competitive with what’s existing on a bigger level.”

Graduate student Donald Gibson in his greenhouse. Courtesy of Donald Gibson.

Genetics

Donald Gibson is trying to grow a better tomato. A graduate student at University of California, Davis is using cutting-edge biotech that would allow tomato plants to grow with far less phosphorous, a vital nutrient (along with nitrogen and potassium) that’s increasingly costly and environmentally damaging to extract for fertilizer. When lacking phosphorous, a tomato expends much of its energy expanding its root system. By identifying and switching off the gene that activates that response, the fruit could grow with much less of the nutrient.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have earned the wrath from the organic crowd for altering a plant’s fundamentals, but Gibson argues his research will make agriculture sustainable. “Today we’re seeing a major shift in advances in plant breeding. There’s been a boom in the biotech field in the last 20 or 30 years, a technology revolution and also a biological revolution. Now finally, we’re using brand new technology and adapting that to select better and better plants,” he says. “When it comes to GMOs, it’s actually getting a lot better from the consumer perspective.” Most of the innovation in the field has benefited farmers, but the next generation will benefit consumers with products like a potato that doesn’t bruise or an apple that doesn’t brown as quickly.

Data Analytics

FarmLink is employing analytics to help farmers decipher big data and turn it into actionable items, moving agriculture from maps on paper that tracked annual yields to create more precise information. “There is plenty of data out there, and the data increases every day. It’s not that we need more data,” says Kevin Helkes, FarmLink’s director of operations. “Farmers are saying they need to know what to do with that data.”
Helkes compares the farmers’ fields to a front lawn. “There’s always that part of the yard that’s higher, where the grass grows taller. It’s the same thing in the field. Farmers know that year over year, this area is higher and this area is lower,” he says. What’s new, though, is that data analytics will be able to tell a farmer how productive those high and low areas could potentially be. Instead of a grower learning the hard way that he’s been wasting money on a fallow spot of land, FarmLink can communicate in advance how much he can expect from an area.
Agriculture’s first great revolution was switching from a donkey towing a plow to a tractor trailer. Now, agriculture has reinvented itself with new improvements in genetics and feed. This is called Ag 3.0.
 
(Homepage photograph: Courtesy of Gregory Urqiaga/University of California, Davis) 
 

Can Doling Out Tough Love Empower Female Business Owners?

Posted on by robbie

Gender inequality in the workforce isn’t exactly a secret in the public eye. Yet, 88 percent of female business owners still don’t make more than $100,000 in gross revenue a year. This is where Frederique Campagne Irwin’s fourth start-up, Her Corner, can help.
The networking system has the sole purpose of growing female-owned (and, more specially, female-founded) businesses.
Her Corner was established after a meeting Irwin orchestrated back in 2011, where numerous local, female business owners sat down for dinner and discussed growth strategies. Within three months, 2,000 female business owners contacted Irwin, and the start-up has since exploded across 26 states and is predicted to grow much more in the coming years.
For women that are eager to expand their businesses, Her Corner provides resources to facilitate that expansion (i.e. contacts like contract lawyers and real estate agents for business spaces). Bi-monthly meetings are held in a member’s home, which is “an environment that is intrinsically feminine,” says Irwin.
But don’t think these get togethers consist of chitchat over wine and cheese. The no-nonsense organization gets down to the business of, well, business. “I didn’t want to talk about dogs, renovations or people’s kids,” Irwin tells the Washington Post.
Irwin explains the organization’s purpose to Serious Startups: “Her Corner creates a positive environment where we encourage our members to think bigger, to collaborate to accelerate the possibilities, and to look at networking differently – rather than coming to a large event and handing out business cards, we ask you to start with your small group and start by asking, ‘tell me about yourself and how can I help you.’”
Irwin’s unique ability to both supercharge members with a pissed-off, let’s-change-this-gender-biased-dynamic, while also providing the build-relationships-first comfort to make the necessary changes is what has this startup on a path to success.

Introducing the Newest Innovation in Higher Ed: The NanoDegree

Posted on by robbie

Pick up any newspaper today and you’ll read the doom-and-gloom statistics about out of control student debt.
But despite its problems, higher education still offers the best chance at climbing the economic ladder and helping our country remain competitive. It’s a vital industry, but certainly one ripe for disruption.
Thankfully, ex-Googler Sebastian Thrun and his company, Udacity, are taking a bold step in the right direction with “NanoDegrees,” a new kind of degree that teaches a narrow set of skills online in fields like front- and back-end coding, mobile development and data analysis.
It’s knowledge presented in small, digestible chunks by an expert (you aren’t left to fend for yourself) and, unlike most online options, it offers skills that can be clearly applied to a job for immediate motivation and tangible results. The best part? It takes less time (six to 12 months) and less money ($200 per month) to complete than almost any other type of learning out there.
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For the many young Americans for whom college has become a distant, unaffordable dream, a NanoDegree lets them harness the web to provide effective training and to begin a career. Intended to teach anyone with a mastery of basic math skills for entry-level job at a company like AT&T, it’s a plausible path for those who may not have the time, money or ability to make it through a four- or even two-year program.
NanoDegrees also have implications for the wider workforce. Today’s industries, especially digital ones, change significantly year to year; skills learned in 2009 might be irrelevant by 2014. But even well-educated adults who can afford to update their knowledge might not have the time. With the NanoDegree you can do so through a “stackable” curriculum that allows you to continually learn new, relevant skills as your career progresses.
MORE: Here’s How Starbucks is Fixing the American Education System
What really sets the NanoDegree apart, though, is the corporate partnerships. Engaging with companies in need of high-demand skills sends a strong signal that if you do the work there’s an actual payoff (a light at the end of the tunnel, so to say). Udacity’s first partner in this initiative, AT&T, said it will accept the NanoDegree as a credential for entry-level jobs and has reserved 100 internship slots for its graduates. Udacity promises further programs with corporate partners and AT&T is already encouraging more companies to get in the game to help.
Such an explicit arrangement might make purists cringe, but this isn’t traditional education. And while it may not offer all the advantages of a liberal arts degree, for example, for people seeking a realistic, viable alternative, the NanoDegree has some serious appeal. NanoDegree graduates can always read Shakespeare while on vacation from their new job, right?
 

Big Bets: How Teaching Entrepreneurship Can Keep Kids in School

Posted on by robbie

The Bay Area is known as a thriving startup community. But Suzanne McKechnie Klahr was struck by the inequality she saw there while working as a pro-bono lawyer in East Palo Alto. She wanted to make it easier for those with disadvantaged backgrounds to both get a good education and to find support for their small businesses. So in 1999 she founded BUILD, a nonprofit which gives entrepreneurial support and funding to disconnected high-schoolers with small business ideas.
BUILD now serves more than 930 students in three cities across the country, providing small business classes and start-up funding to the kids most likely to drop out of high school. “We are looking for students who were truant and had low test scores in middle school,” McKechnie Klahr says. “We want to engage them as soon as they get into 9th grade because disengagement in 9th grade is highly predictive of dropping out of high school.” Such intervention has already been successful. According to the folks at BUILD, 99 percent of seniors in the program have graduated from high school and 95 percent have been accepted to college.
MORE: With School Debt Skyrocketing, This College is Using Email to Teach Their Students Financial Literacy

This Man Took on Washington to Fight for Startups—-and Won

Posted on by robbie

Rafe Furst says he’s a “junkie” for entrepreneurship. He’s been investing in and launching small businesses since 1996, and last year he helped push through legislation that made both a whole lot easier. It’s called the JOBS  (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, signed into law on April 5, 2012, and it legalized crowdfunded investment in the United States. This gives private businesses and startup companies the ability to raise small amounts of money from many investors, rather than asking a few for larger sums. Furst believes that by allowing small businesses to cast a wide net, more will get funded and as a result, more will succeed.
This year he and fellow entrepreneur Chance Barnett launched their own online platform, crowdfunder.com, to help small business raise money through crowdfunded investment.