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Are you looking to help grow the startup community or ecosystem in your city? There are three key things that you can do to help bring more startups to your city. (Watch this Video on YouTube) Want to read instead of watch? Here’s a rough script I used for this video. I live in Sioux…

March 6th, 2019 marks the five year anniversary of 1 Million Cups in Sioux Falls. In March 2014, we held the first 1 Million Cups event at Queen City Bakery and heard from Andy Traub of Take Permission Marketing. 1 Million Cups has since expanded to more than 100 cities across the country, helping answer the question…

Mike Vetter (CEO of DataSync), Tom Eitreim (Manager of Angel Funds and Market Research at The Enterprise Institute), Dwaine Chapel (Executive Director of The Research Park at South Dakota State University) and I sat down with Jackelyn Severin from South Dakota Public Broadcasting for their Making a Living program to discuss the start of venture…

As the public face of Falls Angel Fund, I receive a lot of inquiries from entrepreneurs and would-be business owners that are looking to raise money to get their businesses off the ground. In the past couple of weeks, I have received inquiries from an entrepreneur running a medical devices startup, an entrepreneur running a…

Please note that the thoughts expressed in this article are my own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any group, organization or company that I am involved with. The next few months will be one of the busiest seasons for the entrepreneurial community in Sioux Falls in the last several years. A…

There is a lot of media coverage, hype, and trendiness around “Start Ups”. Who is the next Unicorn? Who raised the latest eight figure round? Who is disrupting what? There is a ton of advice (blogs, videos, etc.) addressing the various aspects of being a Start Up founder and how to grow your business. That’s…

If you’re an entrepreneur in the Sioux Falls area and you haven’t been to the Zeal Center for Entrepreneurship, you are missing out on a hub of support and resources for growing businesses. The Zeal building, which is on the northwest side of Sioux Falls near Southeast Tech, houses a mix of idea-stage entrepreneurs, scaling…

Imagine an organization funded by the SBA, the DoD, the Department of Commerce, and the SDGOED, chartered by USD, and operating under the names SBDC, PTAC, MTS, and SBIR. If you think that getting help from this organization must be like visiting the DMV, you would be mistaken. It turns out that the South Dakota Small…

A few weeks back, I wrote an important article focusing on the four things that the city of Sioux Falls will need if it is going to be a community that fosters new startup businesses that attract outside capital and create high-paying jobs. Since then, I have discussed capital availability, building community, and storytelling as they relate to entrepreneurship in Sioux…

Where can an entrepreneur go for guidance when their product is selling like hotcakes but they can’t keep up with demand? Or when they can’t make necessary hires because of cashflow issues? Or when the only way to bring their product to market is to build a multi-million dollar processing facility, and they don’t yet…