Yesterday, I was excited by a Forbes report which proclaimed that Madison, WI was ranked the 7th most innovative city in the country. While I don’t normally take too much stock in these types of reports (except when UW-Madison is ranked the #1 party school) I have a feeling that this report was pretty close to the truth, give or take a spot on the list.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend 3 events, Accelerate Madison (“Cloud Computing 101″), University Research Park (“What every growing business needs to know”), and Capital Entrepreneurs (for drinks). Here were my findings:
Greg Lynch, a prominent attorney at Michael Best in Madison and a wonderful resource for local early stage companies, started out his University Research Park panel discussion with the following statistics. When he moved to Madison 12 years ago there was basically one Venture Capital Fund in the form of Venture Investors (with $20M+ in managed funds) and no formalized angel networks. Today we have one Large Venture Capital Fund in the form of Venture Investors (with $200+ in managed funds), Calumet Venture Fund ($10M+ in managed funds) which is 20 feet from my office, Peak Ridge Capital AgTech Fund, the recently formed Capital Midwest Fund II in Milwaukee, and Kegonsa Capital Partners. We also have 8 well organized angel groups. These advances in our innovative city are due to lots of hard work, creative minds, as well as legislation such as the ACT 255 investor credits.
For lunch I went to Accelerate Madison, a community of entrepreneurs, educators and established businesses, dedicated to sharing successful business strategies and sound business fundamentals, founded on a common need for information technology. The group is headed up by Mark Gehring of Sharendipity. Greg Hyer, the Associate Director for the University Research Park, graciously hung out with me since I am fairly new to this community. While there I ran into Bryan Chan of Supranet and Vic Ranczynski of Venture Marketing who are GoBuzz’s outstanding mentors and who we found through the MERLIN Mentors group in Madison.
Back to our office at the Metro Innovation Center I get to walk by the open door offices of:
For a night cap, I went to my first Capital Entrepreneurs meeting which is organized by Nathan Lustig of Entrustet. I spoke with a plethora of up and coming startups such as:
Speaking with Nathan Lustig I found out that Entrustet was recently featured on the BBC and in Wired. This made me think of other Madison start-ups recently featured in the news. Companies like Networked Insights which was featured on Tech Crunch, Sharendipity who was a Tech Crunch 5o company and had a chance to meet with Mark Zuckerburg, Alice.com is mentioned all over the country, Local Dirt which was in Inc. and Entrepreneur among others, Brazen Careerist in the New York Times, and Shoutlet recently receiving $2M in funding.
While I don’t always believe in subjective rankings, I can say that the opportunity to share with and learn from so many intelligent start-ups within a short distance and time frame puts Madison within the top tier of innovative cities. It might even deserve to be ranked one spot above Boston.
Also, before my day even started yesterday, I went over to the Union Terrace for coffee and snapped this picture on my phone, how can you beat this?
Nice article- I can only guess who wrote it
Thanks for keeping us posted on all the happenings in Madison
great post! Madison is really starting to become an up and coming city in the tech scene!
“… the opportunity to share with and learn from so many intelligent start-ups within a short distance and time frame puts Madison within the top tier of innovative cities…” -> Agree with this! Great article!
Great post! Forgot about the accelerate madison meeting
Awesome article and thanks for the mention! The startup scene is really expanding. I can’t wait to see what happens over the next few years.