As part of the course this course, students will be traveling to Austin and Boulder, as well as Chicago, Detroit, and Grand Rapids, to meet with various organizations and individuals associated with their local startup communities — entrepreneurs, investors, accelerators / incubators, university faculty, and government officials. Before we embark on our travels this semester, I thought it would be good for the students to meet with people in the Kalamazoo startup community.

Today 25-30 individuals met at the WMU –Starting Gate  facilities (11:30am – 1pm) to hold a roundtable discussion about what is happening in the Kalamazoo startup scene.  The individuals included entrepreneurs (Stacy Burdette – Hacker Gals, Dan Jefferies – Newmind Group, HappyGraph), employees of startups (Sydney Hill – Maestro), community organizers in the startup scene (Ryan Goins – Startup Zoo), SBA consultants (John Schmitt – SBDC), lawyers (Steve Glista – Honigman), city officials (Jerome Kisscorni – City of Kalamazoo), professors (Dan Farrell – WMU – Management, Laurel Ofstein – WMU – Entrepreneurship), professors that have spun technology out of the university (John Patten – WMU – Engineering / Micro-LAM Technologies, PhD students – Hossein Mohammadi), accelerator administrators (Lara Hobson – Starting Gate), students that are working on starting and building their companies (Kyle Simpson – AQ Produce), and several more.

To get the roundtable session going, I provided a brief description of the course, the purpose of the course, and where we will be traveling.  The students in the course then introduced themselves and told the group why they are taking the course.  Then to get the discussion going, the rest of the group introduced themselves and provided a brief explanation of what they are doing and how they are connected with the local startup.

During the roundtable session, we discussed multiple topics for the group to better understand what is going on in the Kalamazoo startup scene as well as what might be missing to help foster more startup activity.  The topics including:

• Entrepreneurs
• Resources (it would be nice to be able to better define what resources are better than others for startups)
• Building relationships (resulting in a solid network to access resources)
• Funding – angel investing, venture capital firms

We are now getting ready for our trips, with the first one being to Detroit on February 20th. We have already setup meetings with Bizdom, Grand Circus, and Techtown.

We look forward to coming back to this Kalamazoo group on March 27th (@ 2pm) and compare this discussion with what was learned by traveling to Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Detroit, and Grand Rapids.

Here are several pictures from the event: