Marshall’s Senior Project – Mid-week Update

Although today is  Thursday, I will still call this my mid-week update simply because tomorrow is supposed to be really exciting and I will dedicate a single post to that day. This week overall has been as informative and exciting as the last. What has changed is my comfort here and my independence. I’m really glad that I elected to spend my entire project here because I feel I’m able to take on more fulfilling, long-term tasks all while becoming more familiar with the work of the partnership. At the moment it is clear that STLVW is a huge priority for the partnership and they want to make it the best it can be. In doing that, anchor tenants have become a big part of the conversation. Anchor tenants are often larger companies in the same industry as the smaller companies in the incubator, however, the STLVW incubators are not organized by industry, with the exception of Helix, which is bio/ag tech. Part of what I’ve been working on is categorizing all clients outside of Helix by industry. To be clear the goal at the moment is not re-locating them it’s just to see what the lay of the land is, someone freaked out about that the other day. What I’m finding is that outside of Ag/Biotech many of the small businesses are in business to business services such as, finance, accounting and legal services, advanced manufacturing and edTech. In an I&E meeting Tuesday the team pointed out that communication with the local chambers of commerce needs to be better and so I am making a spreadsheet of all of them. A chamber of commerce is an organization that protects the business interest, the benevolent ones at least,  of a certain community. There over 30 chambers of commerce in the St. Louis metropolitan area and the partnership hopes to work with many of them in the future. I’ve also been preparing the I&E team for upcoming global conferences on AgTech, EdTech, and FinTech.  My job first is to find the dates, prices and all the details. Then it gets really interesting. My next task was finding out what startups would be going and selecting the startups that the partnership would be most interested in working with based on industry, size, and location. Right now I’m doing this for TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam and I have about 12 potential companies. One is like Duolingo, a fun language learning app, for science called Humbot(Download it its pretty cool).  I’ve really enjoyed my project so far. By the way one of the projects I completed has become kind of popular as it was much needed.