Former CEO of AOL Steve Case is tired of investing in Silicon Valley’s batch of startups and is instead hitting the road in search of smart ideas located elsewhere in the U.S.
In an effort to reinvigorate American entrepreneurship, Case and his investment firm, Revolution, launched a four-day-long, 1,000-mile bus tour called Rise of the Rest Road Tour, searching for new startups. With recent stops through Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Nashville, Case was joined with appearances from Governors Rick Snyder and Bill Haslam as well as chairman and founder of Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures, Dan Gilbert, and United States Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker among others.
“We wanted to shed spotlight on American entrepreneurship: the idea of getting on a bus, and driving through the heartland of America. After all, the story of entrepreneurship is tied to the heartland. 60 years ago, Detroit was the Silicon Valley of today,” Case told Forbes. “Pittsburgh was the steel capital. They were the main event. Now can they can re-emerge. It’s fascinating to see communities like Pittsburgh where there’s a specialized focus on robotics, because of the local ties with Carnegie Mellon.”
Though Case is excited by the vast opportunities nationwide, the key to successful entrepreneurship in some of these cities relies on four principles:
Leadership support: Community leaders, lawmakers and business leaders who have already achieved success in their own ventures need to prop up the city and support efforts to build an entrepreneurial community.
Investment: While Silicon Valley boasts a variety of venture capital firms to support local companies, other cities across the country are lacking the capital to get started. More firms should use Revolution’s model and begin paying attention to startups outside the California region.
Foster talent: More and more urban areas are losing talent to technology companies located on the West Coast. Cities can provide incentives to encourage young innovators and entrepreneurs to return home and support the local economy.
Build a network: Case points to “network density” as a means of enhancing local entrepreneurship. Cities like Cincinnati partner with Proctor & Gamble (which is headquartered there), as well as Detroit’s General Electric as companies that provide local resources to foster entrepreneurship. Building those relationships and creating local networks is essential to creating a tech economy.
Case contends the rest of the country is indeed rising, but it’s up to us to support the revolution and help the heartland become a part of the American innovation story.
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Tag: startups
Governmental Technology Difficulties Abound, Yet the Future Looks Bright
With a $12 billion budget for 200 major IT programs and a total of $82 billion to spend on IT projects this year, it’s really hard to understand why the government just can’t get it right with digital initiatives. After all, innovations like Facebook have taken off, whereas Healthcare.gov, well, not so much.
According to Fast Company, “the government doesn’t take the same approach to software development that startups do,” explains Matthew McCall, a health technologist who started a well-known petition urging the government to open-source Healthcare.gov when it became obvious that its problems were copious. The government has tens of billions of dollars to ensure success, yet can’t achieve it — while startups with no money often manage to create popular products.
Why does the government have such a problem with technology? Startups are focused on creating a popular product as quickly as possible and once users provide feedback, it can be changed to better suit their needs. The government does the complete opposite of this.
McCall states, “government development focuses more on gathering comprehensive requirements up front, issuing a contract for the work, and managing the contractor during the build out. This ‘big bang’ approach typically means longer development time with little to no customer validation.” Changes are only made if a requirement is no longer valid, which causes developers to no longer focus on the products usefulness.
There are a number of policies in place that make the government different from a startup, like The Paperwork Reduction Act, which prevents developers from asking the public questions about products quickly. In general, many of the governmental policies in place slow down the process of production.
Of course, the government is also more risk-averse, simply by nature because if they get hacked, it is more of a big deal than if a startup was to be hacked.
Fortunately, there’s seems to be a solution this problem. (And no surprise, it’s a start-up.)
OpenGov, a company founded by Zac Bookman and Mike Rosengarten, is helping state and local governments shed their 30-year-old spreadsheets and visualize all data simply with just a few clicks.
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Need more money to control fires? Cities using OpenGov can immediately see how much money has been spent on fire and safety and where they can reallocate money from to help reduce wildfires.
Bookman explains, “there is an epidemic in governments of all shapes and sizes across the country. If you are the mayor of a city and I ask you a basic question about your data like, How much have you spent on police hours over the last five years?’ you probably don’t know of the answer.” With OpenGov, this answer can be found easily.
Major cities like Los Angeles and Palo Alto are already using this to help with city government, as are residents, as OpenGov isn’t just for city officials. Cole explains, “it’s to our benefit as public servants to demystify budget data to rebuild trust through transparency and accountability.”
So, why didn’t the government create this solution earlier?
Often, the problem stems from the lack available talent. The best engineers want to work for companies like Google or Facebook, not the government. Those big companies have better recruitment tactics than the government does, and according to Rosengarten, “if more students understood the problems or that the potential opportunity to solve real hard challenges with the local governments, they would get more excited.”
Although governmental work will never be as sexy as, say, working for Twitter or Square, the government does offer coders with the opportunity to code for a better world.
McCall notes, “if government can attract and retain people who want to make a difference and are given that opportunity, I think it will go a long way.”
For the Good of the Community and the Environment, This Kansas Startup Looks to Make Hitchhiking Popular Again
If you live in an urban area, chances are, you probably use mass transit and don’t even give it a second thought. But 45 percent of Americans don’t have the option of hopping on a train or bus to get somewhere since they have no access to public transportation, Jennifer O’Brien writes for Shareable.
The concepts of the citizen-taxi apps Lyft and Uber and the carpooling app Carma appealed to O’Brien, but since she lives in Lawrence, which is located rural northeast Kansas (instead of downtown San Francisco, where public transit options abound), there are not enough participants to make these services run smoothly. So she decided to create her own system — founding the nonprofit Lawrence OnBoard.
Inspired by a podcast she heard about how hitchhiking isn’t as dangerous as its reputation would have it, and that in many countries it’s the primary mode of transportation, she decided to give the concept a contemporary update. Using Lawrence OnBoard, people can sign up to be drivers (at no cost) or as riders for a monthly membership fee.
Each person receives a background check, a photo ID, and a dry erase board on which they write their destination to display while they stand by the road waiting for a fellow Lawrence OnBoard member or any other driver to give them a lift. Once the rider has been picked up, he or she logs the trip by texting the driver’s member number or license plate to Lawrence OnBoard; O’Brien believes this kind of tracking will help ensure safety. (Although she does caution people against using the ride-sharing service at night or when traveling with young children.)
Last year, O’Brien began field-testing her idea. She sent 23 volunteers out on 121 test rides and found that 95 percent of the time, they scored a lift in less than 30 minutes. Now, Lawrence OnBoard is working to find the best locations for ride-seekers to stand, ensuring that all ethnicities, ages, and genders have equal ease of finding a ride.
And so far, the local government approves of O’Brien’s plan. In fact, city commissioners approved changes to the traffic code this month to allow Lawrence OnBoard to continue legally.
O’Brien writes, “I personally used my dry erase board to commute to town for most of the summer and I found that it was safe, easy, and reliable and saved a lot of gas. But even better, I met more of my neighbors, learned what was happening in the neighborhood and even made a couple of business deals. Building community like this is the big strength of the sharing economy and it’s something we are sadly missing when we all drive alone.”
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9 Quirky Start-Ups Tony Hsieh Is Betting On in Downtown Las Vegas
As Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh grew the company to $2 billion in annual revenue while cultivating a workplace that’s consistently ranked among the best in the country. Now he’s using his talents to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. His $50 million incubator, VegasTechFund, invests in companies that have the potential to help the area thrive. Here are nine of the projects he’s betting on and what they’re up to:
1. Mouth: The first online marketplace for artisanal, or “indie,” food.
2. Rolltech: Bowling with Big Data.
3. True & Co.: Perfect-fit bra shopping without measuring tape or fitting rooms.
4. Quarterly Co.: Subscribe to quarterly gift packages from people like the editors of Cool Hunting and Alexis Ohanian.
5. CrowdHall: A platform for virtual town hall discussions, with celebrities, politicians, or friend groups.
6. iDoneThis: A personal, daily productivity email check-in.
7. LaunchKey: Account security with biometrics, not passwords.
8. The S.P.I.R.I.T. Project: Applying technology to help at-risk youths and families in local communities.
9. NSFWCorp: Digital publishers of highly readable investigative journalism (recently acquired by Pando Daily.)
Online Money Pooling Could Build Credit History for America’s Working Poor
Money pooling is an international phenomenon that strengthens the purchasing power of the world’s poor by sharing income. But until now it’s been done exclusively offline: people travel to and from the ATM, then to and from each others’ houses. eMoneyPool is making this easier and more transparent by putting the process online. Started by brothers Francisco and Luis Cervera, the service lets users create their own pools and see when and how much each participant contributes. Because the site creates a record of each user’s commitment, it doubles as a source of credit history, empowering participants to secure loans from banks. So far 391 people have signed up; they have collectively pooled more than $280,000. Banks have expressed interest. The site could be key to newfound mobility among America’s working poor.
This Startup Helps You Crowdfund Your Life For the Next 10 Years
Founded by a team of former Googlers, Upstart is a crowdfunding platform for entrepreneurs and recent college grads that lets you raise money in exchange for a share of your future annual income. The idea represents a paradigm shift in higher education and in the way startups get funded. Many Venture capitalist firms profess to invest in entrepreneurs, but most firms are structured to invest in companies, not people. “It’s a combination of the money-raising power of crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and the professional networking benefits of LinkedIn,” according to USA Today. Perhaps the most disruptive aspect of Upstart is in the way we view continuing education. Many investors that end up backing individual entrepreneurs also sign up to mentor that person over the course of several years, which makes this new model especially appealing for those seeking an alternative to student loans.