I love the week between Christmas and the new year. You forget what day of the week it is. There’s no need for an alarm in the morning. Christmas cookies and candy are an acceptable dinner. As we drift toward the end of the year and celebrations of the new year late this evening into tomorrow morning, it’s also time to reflect on successes and setbacks from the previous 12 months. In this ninth installment of my year-end summary — can’t believe I’ve been doing this for that amount of time — there are many high points to discuss! 2023 treated me pretty well, with trips around the country, dozens of new students joining my program, and great outcomes with a number of experiments.
The year did start out with a bit of chaos at the BELL — one of the heating pipes sprung a leak between the end of fall semester 2022 and the week before I returned to set everything up for spring semester 2023. Luckily, my desk on the first floor wasn’t under the leak, but the rest of the ceiling had caved in, so I had to quickly look for a new place to work. My Marketing Specialist and Graphic Design Intern had both decided to quit at the end of the previous semester, so their office suite was empty. I figured since I had to do their jobs as well as mine last spring semester until we found replacements, I might as well take their office.
Spring 2023 was a blur, doing everything from recruiting for the Undergraduate Incubator Summer Track, to assisting with marketing questions, to creating curriculum and teaching the academic year program. I did almost no recruitment for the academic year program last spring — there just weren’t enough hours in the week. Thankfully, we still had the passive trickle of students winning small prizes at our ideation competitions meeting with me before collecting their money. Tabling and classroom visits were completely off the schedule last spring.
From 10 students registered for the class at the start of the fall 2022 semester, I’ve grown the incubator to nearly 50 students registered for the spring 2024 semester, with 45 businesses calling the BELL home. There are a small handful of students who haven’t registered just yet, so I may end up passing that milestone, meeting my goal for the end of the third year by the middle of the second year. I really began to feel like this was my “team” and not something I’d inherited from a predecessor by the time the summer program kicked off. Only a small portion of the students joining us for the first time in the spring will be from the ideation competitions — most of them are referrals from students currently in the program. My current students like the program enough to spread the word — a wave of stability and goodwill the program lacked before I arrived.
I believe that the tide turned during the Undergraduate Incubator Summer Track from May to July. I completely tore everything apart and redid the program within the time and financial constraints I had and I proved myself to the right people. Most of the students who hadn’t graduated from the university stayed on for the academic program in the fall, and a number of the new students this past fall were referred from the students who spent 11 weeks with me this past summer building awesome stuff. My coaching staff from last summer has already agreed to spend summer 2024 with me, and I’ve already had students asking when the application for the summer program will be opened.
Looking back at spring 2023, I don’t really know how I got everything done that needed to be done for both that academic semester and the summer program. The nice thing about this coming summer is that I don’t have a lot of work to do beyond recruiting some speakers and building the cohort from the expected 30-50 applications — I received 25 applications last year and did minimal outreach, spending a decent amount of time during the semester traveling to conferences and pitch competitions.
Speaking of pitch competitions, I had the chance to travel internationally again back in March, accompanying a student to Winnipeg for the Stu Clark New Venture Championships. This was my first opportunity to see what we need to do on our end to better prepare our students for highly competitive situations (and, let’s be honest, it was pretty fun getting to spend a few days in another country nearly for free.) While my student didn’t advance to the final round, he was able to make a number of connections with students from institutions across the United States and Canada. I’m hoping that there are more faculty advisors along for the ride if I have a chance to accompany a student or two to that competition again in the future.
I did have a chance to connect with other incubator directors from all over the Midwest at Chicago Pitch Madness in July, hosted at DePaul University. I was able to take four student teams — two solo founders and two co-founder teams — to this competition. Driving in Chicago traffic is one of my least favorite things to do, and since I was carting six students and all of their stuff for their booths, I was given a university Suburban for the trip. Fun fact: Suburbans just barely fit in the DePaul parking ramp, with less than 2 inches to spare when exiting. When I take the students to next year’s competition, I may rethink where I dock the land yacht during our 24 hours in the city — or maybe take solo founders in a minivan instead.
The last big trip with students this year was to Tampa, Florida, for the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization Conference in November. This was really a conference for the students, with three of the four students I took qualifying for the round of 100 semifinalists. Unfortunately, none of them made it to the final eight who pitched at the end of the event. The majority of the schools attending were there for the first time or back after a lull, as we were. There was a weird exclusionary vibe at this event — the long-time student members didn’t seem terribly interested in meeting new members. During the faculty social, this actually came up in discussion. It was actually nice that they had an event for faculty separate from students, as it forced my students to make some new friends. We’re planning to attend this again next year, and I’m hoping that they devise some faculty-specific programming for 2024.
Even though the incubator took up the vast majority of my time in 2023, I found time for several other trips and projects. CiderCon was back in Chicago in February, as it is every odd-numbered year not during a pandemic. I took the train from Mount Pleasant into downtown Chicago — the first time I’ve done this since 2019. The train still beats driving, but it’s not nearly as cost-effective as it once was. Going to Chicago and back is about the only Amtrak trip worth it anymore — a trip to and from Denver on the train is nearly as much as flying there and back on a full-service airline, and the extra two nights sleeping in your own bed is worth more than only saving a couple of bucks.
I saw so many friends at CiderCon and Cider Summit that week in February. During Cider Summit, I put in a couple of hours pouring for Original Sin Cider and walked away with some swag for my effort. I still had a chance to try so many different ciders at that event, as well as during the convention. Even though we were in Chicago, the New York Cider Association had a strong presence, even putting together a pop-up event with a number of their members at a nightclub around the corner from the hotel. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that the 2026 convention is somewhere in New York state — they’ve done Maryland in 2018 and Virginia in 2022, so they’re due for a New York or New England event the next time CiderCon makes it to the east coast.
Startup Weekend Iowa Online didn’t end up happening this year, but Startup Weekend Iowa City was a huge success back in June. We lined up out event to take advantage of EntreFest happening in Iowa City, but there really wasn’t a noticeable bump in attendance because of it. EntreFest didn’t do anything to help promote our event, even though we promoted EntreFest through the Startup Weekend Iowa City social media channels. NewBoCo has fallen back into their usual bad habits — only helping when there’s some sort of public relations gain to be had from the help. We had nearly 20 participants build out 5 different ideas, two of which are still moving forward as of today. The first place winner, now called Tumbleweed, actually was just accepted to the Global Insurance Accelerator over in Des Moines. Not too shabby for our little yearly event. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the awesome experience a handful of participants had at Startup Weekend Iowa City directly led to the upcoming Startup Weekend Des Moines event coming up in a couple of weeks!
If running the Undergraduate Incubator Summer Track and organizing Startup Weekend Iowa City at the same time doesn’t feel like too much work, add in a couple of talks at EntreFest. I was asked to take part in a panel discussion on entrepreneurial experiences for K-12 students. My experience helping to create and then facilitate DesignDash, as well as successful experiences with high schoolers who have participated in Startup Weekend Iowa City were the reasons I was asked to sit on that panel. I had also applied to give a solo talk on my entrepreneurial journey, highlighting my trip to teach entrepreneurship basics in Uganda in 2022. A handful of my students showed up to both sessions — they all had to attend something during each block of EntreFest as part of their experience during the Undergraduate Incubator Summer Track. I certainly didn’t have to twist their arms when it came to the social events in the evening, including an event at Reunion Brewing where they could ask an investor anything. They actually ranked the EntreFest experience as one of the highlights of the summer, and I’m planning to take the entire group up to Cedar Rapids for next year’s event.
I made it to my seventh consecutive Denver Startup Week back in September. For some reason, this year’s event felt much more subdued than previous years — there wasn’t a kickoff breakfast event, and the Monday evening social, while well attended, wasn’t as energizing as in the past. The kickoff breakfast was the thing I missed the most — I really love the cool mountain air in the morning, sipping coffee and meeting new people. I was able to make it to a networking breakfast on Wednesday morning, right before I had to check out of my hotel and return to eastern Iowa, but it just wasn’t the same. I’m contemplating skipping the 2024 event in favor of attending the Great American Beer Festival (which a handful of my cider friends attended this year.) Maybe a year away will rekindle my love for Denver Startup Week.
On a couple of occasions this year, I was asked to sit on pitch competition committees to select who makes it past the initial round. I helped with a competition in Alberta, Canada, back in the spring but was unable to make the trip to the conference. However, the organizers of that event reached out about helping with a new event in Indianapolis called the Rally Innovation Conference, and for a few hours of my time ranking pitch competitions applicants, I was given a free pass to the conference. Rally was an amazing experience — I ended up meeting other startup community builders and walked away with a couple of books to read. Most of the keynotes were amazing, and there was always something to attend during the breakout sessions. If you’re in the area, definitely check out the event in 2024.
I was also asked to help with the InnoVenture Challenge competition. Over 110 founders appled for the winner-take-all $100,000 prize, and some of the applications I read through during the first-round judging were some of the best competition applications I’d read all year. Only three businesses made it through to the final pitch competition, which I attended a couple of weeks ago in Des Moines. Between the lunch spread the College of Business had for their holiday party at noon and the spread InnoVenture Iowa put out at the pitch event that evening, I didn’t have to eat for a day or two! The three pitches were all great and the companies are each going to do great things in the future.
On top of everything else, my contributions seem to be paying off: in the first part of the year, I was named to the Techstars All Stars class of 2023, a group of the hardest-working community builders around the world being recognized for the things they do to grow their local startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems. We met a couple of times in the first half of the year but haven’t done much since then. I also earned the Entrepreneurship Center Management Certificate from InBIA after taking their 12-week online course this past semester. It was fun sitting on the student side of the seminar again during the 12 weeks — now that I’m teaching, I don’t really get that experience any more.
I really feel like I’m just scratching the surface of 2023 after 17 paragraphs. It’s pretty amazing to think about the amount of stuff I’ve been able to shove into the past 12 months. The experiences I’ve had, the lives I’ve touched, and the progress I’ve made on my career this year feels like 3-4 years rather than just one. I know that I have mentioned this in the past couple of year-end posts — ever since 2021, I feel like I’ve been catching up to where I feel I should be, especially at age 40. It’s not that there wasn’t progress prior to 2021; the speed has just increased astronomically. This year especially, I feel like my place in the ecosystem is finally defined and is finally growing at an acceptable pace. I’m absolutely loving shepherding this herd of sharks at the incubator, growing the herd by 5 times in 18 months.
2024 is going to be even better — the trajectory is there. The last pieces of the puzzle are going to start falling into place over the next year, and I can’t wait to share with you what’s already on the calendar and on the to-do list. Continue on to the next post to find out what’s in store for ‘24…