In the second part of my interview with Christian Renaud, CEO of Palisade Systems, we discussed the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Des Moines. Christian’s broad experience in the entrepreneurial space, including nearly eight years targeting and vetting new markets for Cisco Systems at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, gives him the unique perspective to benchmark the evolution of his hometown’s startup culture as well as to help cultivate its growth.
Christian cites the entrepreneurial potential of Des Moines as one of the community’s greatest attributes. This includes the energy that’s apparent locally, the workforce and the ideas that are being developed in fields like life sciences and agriculture through the research at Iowa State University, the University of Iowa and other schools. However, we have work to develop our startup community.
“We have very strong schools, we have a lot of very good ideas in relevant fields…there’s a bunch of energy,” Christian explained. ” We need to cultivate that, continue to cultivate it, it isn’t as much the ecology here as it is [in other cities].”
Our biggest challenge may be the traditional nature of the Des Moines business community. “It’s traditionally a banking and insurance and [agricultural] town which makes it more conservative and by definition risk averse.”
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This is compounded by a low-risk tolerance amongst the native investment community that focuses them, by nature, on later stage deals and makes it more difficult for new ideas to develop quickly. “Many of the investments that [the investment community is] comfortable investing in are substantially R&D complete, with marketing and sales figured out, and distribution figured out; versus funding at early stage where you’re going to help fund that build out.”
The low tolerance for risk doesn’t stop at the investment community, Christian has recognized it in local talent, as well. “I find it hard to recruit people in the Midwest, in Iowa, whereas in the Valley, working at a startup is your meal-ticket…here it’s a liability because people want stability, they want to be able to provide for their family and their mortgages and they don’t want to take risks with their employer. We need to eventually change that perception over time, it doesn’t happen all at once, but two or three good successes and it may raise some people’s eyebrows.”
One great need for our community, establishing that “conveyor belt that you get on to go get funded and to cultivate your idea,” is beginning to be rectified.
As a next step, Christian suggests that we need more deliberately-planned gatherings of those in the startup community. These “entrepreneurial support groups,” created at places like the Central Iowa Bloggers meetup, TechBrew Iowa, and the upcoming Startup Drinks, help provide peer support, raise the energy level and inspire success.
In the video below, Christian conveys his thoughts on Des Moines’ entrepreneurial ecoystem and how our community can work together to further develop it.
