GUEST MENTOR Gabe Lozano, CEO & co-founder of LockerDome LLC: World-class startup cities are built on the backs of top-tier talent. Great people want to be surrounded by other great people.
It takes more than just talent, though. The best startup hubs are also made up of entrepreneurs who pour their energy into creating products that go to market. They don’t just win business-plan competitions. They recognize that action trumps talking.
Finally there is density, with entrepreneurs working in close quarters, offering support to one another.
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It’s a simple formula: Great people + great products + building together = great deal flow. And when successful, entrepreneurs tend to pump the money they make, plus their energy and expertise, right back into the ecosystem.
My hometown, St. Louis, is on its way to becoming such a place. It has plenty of top-tier talent and a high density of entrepreneurs who work in tandem with one another. Startups like Yurbuds, Gainsight,CrowdSource and many others are based here. Take one step into the T-REx building, a co-working space downtown, and you’ll find nearly 75 new businesses in the making.
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M.B.A.s are no longer king. The product builders – software engineers and entrepreneurs – are today’s rock stars. Here in St. Louis, programs like LaunchCode,The Disruption Department and Code Red are training the next wave of great software engineers. Local software-development events like Strange Loop, Global Game Jam, Code Until Dawn are also gaining steam.
It wasn’t always this way. In 2010, the St. Louis tech scene rarely attracted the top talent. It was so bad that I would have received more respect by telling people here that I was unemployed, and not an entrepreneur. (Unemployment at least implied that I planned to get a “real job.”) There was too much talking and not enough doing; business-plan competitions were everywhere. Plus, entrepreneurs were scattered and scarce; I had no idea where to find other entrepreneurs and wanted to leave town.
Fast forward to 2013. The brightest people are beginning to leave Fortune 500 companies to go work for scrappy startups. Top-tier talent is moving to St. Louis just to ride the wave. New products are launching on a weekly basis, resulting in an influx of high-quality startups. Walk into any downtown coffee shop and you’ll find fellow entrepreneurs hungry to change the world.
Yep, St. Louis has found its mojo.
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