Note: As we’re preparing for our Big Kansas City conference this month, we asked four-year Big Omaha veteran Megan Hunt to share her conference experience and why she’s going to Big Kansas City.

About the author: Megan Hunt is the founder of Hello Holiday, a womenswear e-commerce site working to connect emerging designers with mainstream consumers. Hunt also founded CAMP, Omaha’s first coworking space, and Princess Lasertron, a custom bridal design company.

Members of the Kansas City startup community jump in unison in the Big Omaha 2012 photo booth.

2009: “You live in Omaha? When are you going to move away?”

2013: “Oh yeah, Omaha. I hear that’s a pretty cool place.”

When I used to travel for business, my industry peers would always force themselves to feign interest in my answer to the usual first question: “Where are you from?” Oh, I’m from Omaha, I’d say. I love it there. It’s a pretty exciting place to live right now and there’s an awesome community building up right now around young entrepreneurs. “Cool,” the other person would say. “But do you think you’ll ever move to a bigger city?” This is the conversation I had countless times in airports, at conferences, in coffee shops, and I bet if you’re like me, you’ve been there, too.

I’m a type-A person. I’m an overachiever, very independent, and driven to solve problems. I think it’s true that I have the stuff of a successful entrepreneur in my DNA, but I’m also a believer in the value and importance of a close, supportive community when trying to Start Something Big, and that’s exactly what I’ve found here in our region. People who take the time to offer constructive feedback, more and more investors who are working to develop young startups, experienced peers who can always spare a few minutes on the phone or an evening with a glass of wine—this all lives here, and it’s all part of an accessible young culture of entrepreneurship that respects our growing diversity of voices and ideas.

For the past four years, all of these pieces of our community have come together in one place at Big Omaha, the Silicon Prairie’s first tech/start-up/creative culture superconference. Big Omaha is like a microcosm of everything I love most about the hardworking culture of innovation here in the Midwest. It’s access to hundreds of other people who are fighting and scrapping and soaring and succeeding with their own projects. It’s the motivation you feel when each speaker is speaking right to you, sharing honest stories about the places they’ve come from to climb to the top (sometimes to fall back down again). It’s the feeling that you’re cool enough and good enough and smart enough to pull an idea together, make a plan, and live the damn dream.

Big Omaha is like a summer camp for business, startup, tech, and design junkies. And that’s why I couldn’t miss the chance to go to Big Kansas City. My past experiences at Big Omaha have given me so much motivation that I call back to throughout the entire year. When I’m looking for inspiration in the fall and winter months, I always think back to Big Omaha. When I need help with a problem, the person I pull from my Rolodex to assist me is typically someone I connected with at Big Omaha. When spring rolls around, Big Omaha is the next thing I’m looking forward to. The opportunity to be a part of that energy three times a year now in Kansas City and Des Moines is something I knew I had to take advantage of. I owe so much to the community built here by the people in the Silicon Prairie, because I know that my own journey into entrepreneurship would never have been as successful without the support and facilitation of these voices.

There are tons of advantages to be found when you come to the Silicon Prairie to start something, and because of the work of our area entrepreneurial teams and those who support them, communities all around the world are starting to notice. The conversations of past years that I used to have in airport terminals and bathroom lines and lecture sessions have changed to reflect that, and it’s fun to live in a place in the midst of such exciting development. Combining the Midwestern work ethic we learned from our parents with the openness to collaboration and risk that we’ve developed in our generation, we have the chance now to step into the spotlight and celebrate the special brand of community and culture that’s so unique to this region. I’ll be celebrating in Kansas City, and Des Moines, and of course, Omaha.

Credits: Megan Hunt photo courtesy of Hunt. Big Omaha photo by Malone & Co. / Big Omaha.