Staff

  • Omaha mayoral candidate meet and greet events are April 24 and May 3

    Leading up to the City of Omaha’s general election May 14, The Mastercraft will serve as the venue for two meet and greet events with mayoral candidates Jean Stothert (left) and Jim Suttle (right). It’s important for the future of our city to have a mayor that not only understands, but supports Omaha’s high level…

  • Ten Iowa expats in tech you should know

    Iowans are everywhere; at least that’s how it feels to me. I’m the type of person that loves to catalog and share random knowledge, and when I learn that someone has a connection to this state I make a mental note of it. Those connections – people born, raised, educated or who otherwise lived here…

  • Growing the Silicon Prairie: Connecting with our expats

    Growing the Silicon Prairie startup community has been part of our organization’s mission since its earliest days. That includes drawing attention to new startups, shining a spotlight on those making strides, sharing news about great events in the region and highlighting the folks working hard behind the scenes. When I presented “Silicon Prairie News, the…

  • Students visit to KCSV is “start of a major story yet to be written”

    As the momentum of Kansas City’s entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to grow and success stories are built, the sustainability of a thriving Silicon Prairie will depend on the quantity and quality of the talent pipeline feeding startups. Developing relationships between the local startup scene and the next generation of talent is a critical piece to our…

  • A dozen Silicon Prairie stories you may have missed in 2012

    With more than 1,300 posts published in 2012, it wasn’t easy to choose just 10 stories for our annual look at the past year’s biggest stories in the Silicon Prairie. When doing so, I kept coming across stories that even though they didn’t belong on the list, they deserved to be shared. From a Microsoft…

  • Ten Silicon Prairie startups to watch in 2013

    Eyes were on the Silicon Prairie in 2012 as the startup community in and around Kansas City, Omaha and Des Moines earned attention from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and other outlets. Startups like Dwolla, MindMixer and Hudl were mentioned in many of those stories, as their milestones have earned them…

  • With focus on VC money, story on prairie startups misses bigger picture

    The Dec. 20 issue of The New Republic magazine includes an article — published online as “Silicon Valley’s Profit-Killing Provincialism” and in print as “No Angels” — by Lydia DePillis on the trials of raising capital outside Silicon Valley. The story includes insights from John Schnipkoweit, founder of Cedar Rapids-based RecBob, and John Jackovin, founder…

  • Des Moines startup, KC high-speed internet top year’s 10 biggest stories

    An Omaha startup signed a TV deal, a Columbia, Mo. startup went from Startup Weekend to Y Combinator in eight months and a Kansas City entrepreneur who sold his company for more than $125 million last year returned to found another startup and fund others. These are three of my picks for the year’s 10…

  • A look at the story behind the New York Times Silicon Prairie story

    Over the four years that I’ve written for Silicon Prairie News, I haven’t seen an article on Omaha, Des Moines and Kansas City’s startup scene receive as much buzz and attention as the recent New York Times story, “Tech Start-Ups Find a Home on the Prairie.” Tweet after tweet, Facebook like after Facebook like and…

  • With inspiration from Brad Feld, meetups emerge in Omaha, Iowa City

    As the Silicon Prairie startup community develops, one of the ways collaboration and connections occur is through consistent opportunities to engage with one another. A strong community, moreover, is lead by a group of actors who are passionate around building our cities and region into something greater, and they take steps to make that happen.…