Marshall’s Senior Project – 2 Days in

After two days at SLEPD I’ve learned a lot, seen a lot and done a lot. My first day I toured the Innovation and Entrepreneurship offices at the partnership in Clayton and met everyone who I’ll be working with over the next six weeks. After meeting with everyone I was given the weekly updates from this year and selected the ongoing projects that I would like to work on these include, STLVentureWorks, Helix Fund and initiatives for Inclusion and diversity. After this, I began doing research for STLVW. Like many incubators STLVW relies on many small startups to rent out their co-working spaces for typically up to 4 years. Some incubators however, rely on one much larger company to serve as an anchor tenant to ensure a steady flow of income. This allows them to better serve the smaller ones. The partnership is looking to do this in some of the STLVW locations. I researched how similar incubators use anchor tenants and potential anchors for STLVW.

Then I spent time reading the Master Plan for 39 North, a planned business district that will be dedicated to the AgTech(Agricultural Technology) industry for which

St. Louis is one of the largest markets. Yes were still on day one. In the afternoon I went to Cortex Innovation Community where my project sponsor was a featured panelist for the Mastercard Diversity and Inclusion series that was focused on developing strategies to provide access to historically underrepresented groups in the start-up community and providing financial services to those groups

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left to right(Dennis Lower, CEO Cortex, Ray Boshara, Federal Reserve Bank, Atul Kamra SIXThirty Accelerator, Radha Gopalan, Washington University , Virginia Imster, SLEDP)

Today was spent mostly in meetings. It started with an I&E meeting which was mostly dedicated to preparing for the upcoming board meeting but we also talked about what other members of the team can have me do during my time here. Later I sat in on a partnership board meeting which was really interesting as much of the discussion was about the future of the partnership with a new mayor and new president.

I typically only read about politics for fun but it was cool to see it being discussed and how it affects the partnership in a meaningful way. I spent the rest of my day doing more research this time it was about finding commercial kitchens for startup caterers or food service companies. I’ve been compiling a list of potential churches, community centers and schools who might be willing to rent out their kitchen. I will be formally presenting my findings regarding anchor tenants to the I&E team and I have a meeting to discuss the restaurants tomorrow.

 

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