Where is the St. Louis Startup Lab?
Boulder, CO now has TechStars, and Y Combinator is in the Bay (CA)/Cambridge, MA. If you're not familiar with them, you suck.
If you're one of those poor, ignorant souls that hasn't read TechCrunch, Mashable, tech.memorandum, or anything that uses the number "2.0" more than the word "the", then what you need to now is that both groups are startup labs run by veterans of the startup world, where young teams that have put together startups are given a small amount of cash ($5000 to $15000) in exchange for 5% of their company. Funding is done in batches, and all the funded companies must move to the location of the lab, where they have a lot of hands-on contact with the people running the lab and the other startups.
The amount of money is tiny, and moving is a pretty big deal, so both labs focus on young, single people with little to tie them down. The kind of people that can move to a new city and work 20 hours a day for three months to pursue a crazy idea that might be the next MySpace or Google.
This is the kind of idea that will grow the biggest, game changing companies of the future. More and more of these labs are going to crop up, as more people sell their startups for a few million, and decide to give back to the startup world and help grow the next round of rockstars. It costs a relatively small amount of money, time and effort, but leads to potentially huge results.
Leaders in St. Louis are fond of saying our city could become a new tech hub. We have good universities and a low cost of living, we're centrally located, and we have some significant big tech companies. But too often that talk is just empty, as if waving around the words "tech" and "startup" will magically cure all ills. Here's a model that works. We have the smart young people, we have the low costs, now we just need a few successful people to put in the time and money to make it work.
BTW, I should note the inspiration for this article is the news that a friend of mine, Matt Galligan, just got accepted to TechStars with his company Socialthing. The fact that someone with that much talent and drive has to leave St. Louis to succeed should be a wake up call to the opportunity all of us are missing.
Technorati Tags: techstars, y combinator, startups, st. louis, saint louis, tech
If you're one of those poor, ignorant souls that hasn't read TechCrunch, Mashable, tech.memorandum, or anything that uses the number "2.0" more than the word "the", then what you need to now is that both groups are startup labs run by veterans of the startup world, where young teams that have put together startups are given a small amount of cash ($5000 to $15000) in exchange for 5% of their company. Funding is done in batches, and all the funded companies must move to the location of the lab, where they have a lot of hands-on contact with the people running the lab and the other startups.
The amount of money is tiny, and moving is a pretty big deal, so both labs focus on young, single people with little to tie them down. The kind of people that can move to a new city and work 20 hours a day for three months to pursue a crazy idea that might be the next MySpace or Google.
This is the kind of idea that will grow the biggest, game changing companies of the future. More and more of these labs are going to crop up, as more people sell their startups for a few million, and decide to give back to the startup world and help grow the next round of rockstars. It costs a relatively small amount of money, time and effort, but leads to potentially huge results.
Leaders in St. Louis are fond of saying our city could become a new tech hub. We have good universities and a low cost of living, we're centrally located, and we have some significant big tech companies. But too often that talk is just empty, as if waving around the words "tech" and "startup" will magically cure all ills. Here's a model that works. We have the smart young people, we have the low costs, now we just need a few successful people to put in the time and money to make it work.
BTW, I should note the inspiration for this article is the news that a friend of mine, Matt Galligan, just got accepted to TechStars with his company Socialthing. The fact that someone with that much talent and drive has to leave St. Louis to succeed should be a wake up call to the opportunity all of us are missing.
Technorati Tags: techstars, y combinator, startups, st. louis, saint louis, tech
posted by JJeffryes at 1:12 PM
2 Comments:
Go to a Metropolis meeting and bring it up. See if you can get some traction from the young adult community.
Is Metropolis still around? I haven't heard them mentioned in a long time.
Hmmmm... cramming another group into my schedule without my wife killing me or my kids forgetting who I am... challenging!
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