Madison Startup Entrepreneurs Wow’d By St. Louis Venture Draft Event

You may not think about it every Sunday, Monday night and Thursday night that you’re watching your favorite NFL football team but an alarming number of pro athletes actually go bankrupt after their professional careers end. In talking with a few celebrities who have almost gone down that route, it’s not even ignorance that some may think. It’s not living beyond your means as a national celebrity, sometimes pro athletes and celebrities really get too busy to manage their money. They also get too busy to think about what happens afterwards.

We’ve all heard the sad stories too, of people like Fantasia Barrino and other stars who have turned their finances over to someone less than qualified to handle such large amounts of money. Celebrities and pro athletes assume that everyone has their best interest at heart.

Well former NFL star and entrepreneur Brandon Williams does. Williams, through his Brandon Williams Economic Development Corporation is trying to connect athletes and celebrities with entrepreneurism. He’s not talking about the kind where a celebrity quickly endorses a product and moves on. Williams is trying to connect entrepreneurs, startups, sports stars and celebrities in a new kind of ecosystem so that entrepreneurs can benefit from investment and athletes and celebrities have a plan for when their careers slow.

One of Williams initiatives is Venture Draft, a startup and entrepreneur event, pitch contest and showcase that happened in St. Louis this past weekend.

ABC Shark Tank Shark, Founder of Fubu and partner in Shark Branding, Daymond John, was one of the top level keynote speakers at the event.  We didn’t raise enough money in our last crowdfunding leg to attend ourselves, but our good friend Scott Resnick in Madison WI led a group of 6 from Madison to St. Louis for the event.

Resnick was “Wowed” by the event and wrote a great entry on his blog where he said:

The first annual Venture Draft Conference was held in St Louis this weekend. The mission of the conference was to bring professional athletes, venture capitalists and technology experts face-to-face to create business opportunities (aka allow entrepreneurs to mingle with and teach current and former NFL players about technology). A tip of the hat to the Brandon Williams Economic Development Corporation: the Venture Draft was a success.

Rarely do I experience a “wow” moment at a tech conference. However, this one was different. Maybe it was the personality of the highlighted speakers (who attended every event) or the charm of St Louis, but there was something special about Venture Draft.

My “wow” moment came right after I had the opportunity to bounce business expansion ideas off keynote speaker Henry Wong of Garage Technology Ventures at a local cigar bar. As I was walking out of the bar to a sponsored after party, Jim Sorgi struck up a conversation about his future with the Colts and time on Gilman Street. Wow, this conference was pretty cool.

Continue here to the Hardin Design & Development Blog for the rest!

Wisconsin Elected Official: Romney/Ryan Bad For Startups

Just hours ago Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney announced that seven time Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan would be his Vice Presidential running mate in 2012. While we stay out of politics for the most part here at nibletz.com, this presidential election is important to startups, founders and entrepreneurs.

Of course we are all familiar with big government bailouts that some may not necessarily agree with. However, we are also well aware of the work that the current administration has done in terms of advancing startups and entrepreneurism across the country. Most notable were the formation of the Startup America Partnership and the passing of the JOBS act.

Congressman Paul Ryan is in his seventh term as the US Representative for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget committee and is often cited for his views on economic policy.

We reached out to Madison WI Alderman, Scott Resnick who is also very active in the startup and entrepreneurial community across the state of Wisconsin, for his comment on the Ryan appointment.  Resnick told nibletz.com:”

“The Paul Ryan budget is highlighted by de-funding higher education, decreasing government grants for cutting-edge research, and increasing student loan rates. The Romney/Ryan ticket will weaken the talent pool of high quality engineers and put the US further behind other nations in adopting innovation technologies.”

We will stand alongside the bi-partisan Startup America Partnership and Startup RockOn at both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention in support of Startups as a whole.

But in going to the polls this year it’s important to see where entrepreneur and startups will be effected most.

To opine for just a moment:

Many of the entrepreneurs and founders we talk to (and we talk with hundreds per week), were almost forced into entrepreneurship as the country tries to recover from the economic crisis that was left after the previous administration. Some of these entrepreneurs have faired very well, some have been able to create stable businesses. None of them just sat around waiting for a government check.To make things harder for startups and entrepreneurs when it’s already hard enough to get a “job” would be mind boggling.

To this issue only it should be pretty clear where I will vote.

Linkage:

Check out our interview with Scott Resnick on Open Data

 

We Talk With Madison City Councilman Scott Resnick About Open Data

By day Scott Resnick is the Vice President and partner in Hardin Design & Development in Madison Wisconsin. The company is a creative app powerhouse with a client roster that includes Mercedes, Toyota,Coleman Campers and Fedex. Hardin Design & Development continues on a trajectory of explosive growth and is currently expanding to Chicago.

After that Resnick is also an influencer in Madison’s thriving tech startup scene. There are a great bunch of people that seem to know everything going on in Madison, and that’s not because it’s a small town. They have a lot of centralized startup events and even shoulder groups that meet every month who are focused on things like health tech and hacking.

The list of resources for Madison startups would be reminiscent of a city with a million people. Madison has just a quarter of that. On our two days of office hours in Madison we learned about Capital Entrepreneurs, Madison Startup Weekend, Build Madison, Forward Technology Festival and some shoulder groups. Resnick is involved with almost all of these.

If that’s not enough to keep one man busy he’s married and he’s also a Madison Alderperson or CityCouncilman (depending on what PC hat you’re wearing today).

There are a lot of causes that Resnick supports and ran on including keeping the safety, alcohol, landlord tenant laws and open data.

The first three platforms are pretty self explanatory. As for open data, Resnick wrote the legislation for Madison to open up their public data so that developers could develop apps around it.  Resnick said that any record that can be requested by open record requests can be available via open data.

Once he was able to get the data opened Madison went to work holding a Startup Weekend event to develop startups and apps surrounded by the data.


He gave us a couple examples of projects that came out of the open data hackathon. One was a startup that wanted to do pet health records. The entrepreneur went to work using pet license data available from the city to start developing the pet health records product.

Resnick told us that vendor carts are a big part of downtown Madison. Most recently the vendor cart licensing data and location for where they’re allowed to vend is kept on note cards. They have someone interested in producing an app to locate vendor carts and if this data goes electronic they can.

Madison was the second city in the nation to have their public data opened like this. New York as the first. Resnick told us there are many municipalities who have started toying with the idea but haven’t fully adopted it yet so they don’t have to necessarily give access to all the records.

Resnick is hoping the next step for Madison is to allow city API’s to go from “pushing the data to pulling the data”. When that’s available entrepreneurs will be able to create apps and startups for things like reporting a problem to a city. Resnick says many municipalities do this wrong. Most city’s use some kind of form emailed to a city manager or engineer and then the city manager or engineer uses their internal system to communicate job tickets and distribute projects.

When Resnick’s next vision for data is set in motion developers could develop an app that would allow resident’s to add their job to the queue, all of this done of course, by third party applications.

Linkage:

Check out Resnicks Day Job Here

Article from Capital Entrepreneur’s on the open data initiative

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