TEDxNavesink: Can NJ Follow in Silicon Valley's Steps?

Avi Karnani has wacky ideas. Like dropping a hedge fund job to start up a personal finance business. Or incubating a company that helps people not spend their money.

But his latest idea may be the wackiest of all –turning NJ into a hot bed of new technology, or as he calls it, an innovation ecosystem.

The Garden State is known for doing a few things well – tomatoes, blueberries, horse racing. But launching start-ups and new technologies? Um, no. We’re still stuck on Marconi and carrier pigeons.

But Karnani thinks our humble state possesses all the major ingredients for Silicon Valley type innovation – great infrastructure like roads and rails, a lot of smart people and money. “We live in the future,” Karnani said. “The 15-year-old kid in me wakes up every day and goes, ‘na ah’.”

The only problem, he says, is no one is talking about it. That is until Sept. 20 when Karnani and a list of other smart speakers take the stage at Brookdale for a locally organized TED conference called TEDxNavesink: the Next Wave.

Let’s backtrack a bit and take a look at how Avi Karnani got to be an authority on innovation. At 32 Karnani has already built an impressive portfolio, like co-founding Thrive, a credit counseling and asset building company that he sold in 2009 to Lending Tree and GetRaised, an easy-to-use website that helps underpaid people build a personalized raise request to get paid more – recently called out by Lean In as a tool to help narrow the wage gap...