Stillwater, Oklahoma kicked off the 2018 North American Tech Tour with the Entrepreneurship Unconference, a 3-day event for entrepreneurs, innovators and investors.
The Stillwater Entrepreneurship Unconference was the launching point of the 2018 North American Tech Tour, a program of D.C.-based angel investor, Paul Singh and the Results Junkies.
Session topics included angel investing, strategies of intellectual property, startup valuation, and the future of the Silicon Prairie.
“We saw immediate resonance with our community’s entrepreneurial ecosystem following the Entrepreneurship Unconference,” said Justin Hazzard, Director of the Meridian Technology Center for Business Development, a mixed-use incubator serving technology-based ventures. “Hosting three days of startup workshops and presentations brought visibility and energy to the base of innovation in Stillwater.”
For the past two years, Singh (an entrepreneur, speaker, investor and self-described Airstreamer) and a team of investors and entrepreneurs, the Results Junkies, have traveled across the United States and Canada working with entrepreneurs and giving back to local startup communities.
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Singh’s tour brings functional expertise and venture capital dollars to parts of North America that don’t regularly get the same amount of attention as the well-known tech hubs.
The Tech Tour has scheduled over 25 stops this spring and is confirming more this summer.
“The real power of the Stillwater Tech Tour was the sidebar conversations and private meetings between the visiting investors and our local startups,” said Hazzard. “Outside of the conference programming, we were able to coordinate over 16 hours of meetings with our entrepreneurs and the visiting investors to discuss scalability, growth strategies, and capital injection.”
Attendees left the sessions inspired and equipped with ideas on how to improve their companies.
“During the session on startup valuation, I realized we had been assessing our development strategy wrong,” said Tony Payne, CEO of Quest Tech, a logistics dispatch and asset mapping company in Stillwater. “We were entering highly competitive markets and were not taking full advantage of the opportunity to scale up within a smaller segment of the industry.
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Justin Hazzard is the Director of the Meridian Technology Center for Business Development
The Meridian Technology Center for Business Development is dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs through networking, education, consulting and business incubation services. Assistance is available in various areas such as marketing, product planning, international business and writing business plans.
