Carrie Royce (middle) hosts a Venture Fridays event at Red Nova Labs.
Carrie Royce recently resigned from the company she co-founded, Red Nova Labs, to pursue her own startups. With her involvement in the Kansas City startup community—she started Red Nova’s Venture Fridays event and spearheaded the KC Startup Crawl—we recently conducted an email interview with Royce to learn more about her journey. (Answers edited for length.)
Silicon Prairie News: What triggered your jump from Red Nova Labs into a startup?
Thanks to our sponsor
Carrie Royce: The decision wasn’t really triggered by anything in particular. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I wasn’t excited about the industry we were in, didn’t feel comfortable with our priorities, fought with my business partner. I don’t mean to sound too negative, but why else does one make a change unless she doesn’t like things as they are?
When Red Nova Labs was founded in 2009, my partner and I had aspired to emulate Bill Gross’s metacompany IdeaLabs (started in 1996). Four years and many pivots later, we were a marketing firm for the self-storage industry. I had shut down my own marketing agency in 2008 to start something different, and I felt like I was right back where I started. It just wasn’t where I wanted to end up. I kept up the Venture Fridays and KC startup community work to feed my spirit.
SPN: What would you tell other executives debating the leap?
CR: I’d hit them with this warning: Entrepreneurship is tough. You’ll think you’ve never worked so hard or taken so much shit in your whole life.
You think you’re going to be your own boss, when in truth you end up with more bosses—your partners, your shareholders, your employees and most importantly your customers. You face uncertainty and possible failure every day, no one hands you the right strategy. Your business ideas are constantly tire-kicked, no one helps you decide what to act on and what to ignore. When you’re worn out, no one pays you to take a couple of weeks off. And when people ask you how it’s going, you smile rather than confide.
On the other hand, entrepreneurship can be a major high, especially for high-energy, self-motivated, resilient types. I’d give myself two of those—maybe all three after a couple of cocktails.
SPN: What projects came your way?
CR: Some really neat opportunities have found their way to me. In the end, it all strengthened my notion that a startup is for me—specifically, a creative content cooperative and brokerage platform (code-named ShabbyHats) that I’d been thinking about for a very long time. I picked up years-old industry research, started mapping plans, began my search for a CTO. Then a couple of wrenches fell into the work…
With my break from Red Nova Labs, I ended up with the ownership rights to ShopFauna—a small startup that came out of our accelerator days. The project can be broadly defined as a lifestyle-local shop gallery platform and marketing cooperative. As time has gone by, those ideas have only become more relevant to local shop owners’ needs.
Then Prodigy Arcade landed in SparkLabKC. It’s an exciting time, but that means my other two concepts have to be shelved while this thing pans out over the next four months.
SPN: You spearheaded several initiatives, such as the Startup Crawl. Will you continue in those roles?
CR: Absolutely. I’m working with Kauffman Foundation, the KC Chamber and Adam Coomes to plan KC Startup Crawl No. 2 during One Week KC. Working with the KC startup community is a labor of love for me. I am inspired by the people involved and their unflinching optimism that the Midwest is an underdog not to be underestimated.
“Working with the KC startup community is a labor of love for me.”
SPN: What does the KC startup scene need now more than anything?
CR: I hear this question a lot. I’d point to three big issues:
1. Early-stage support
It’s what most people point to first as KC’s big entrepreneurial problem—particularly with regard to technology firms. I just seem to be a rare one who thinks the issue is seed support ($50k–$500k and well-connected, emotionally invested mentors) as opposed to $1–$5 million Series A injections and beyond. I have met a lot of would-be starters with promising ideas who don’t make it out of their heads or jobs because the early phase is the hardest to tackle financially.
2. Luring and keeping talent
It seems our civic solution to this local debility is the mission statement and brand strategy, “Be America’s most entrepreneurial city.” I hate to say this for fear of offending people I respect, but I think that’s a silly objective for this area. A brand is not what you want people to see; it’s what people perceive you to be. It’s earned over time via action and reaction.
Instead, KC should concentrate on the mission statement and brand strategy, “Be America’s most entrepreneurial city offering quality of life.” That is how the Midwest differs. Entrepreneurs here are a few minutes’ drive from offices. They’re close to nationally ranking schools. They’re mere miles from no-man’s-land getaways. They can fly to any coast in under four hours. They can afford homes and vacations and cars. On and on. Why not use what KC is—not what it wishes to be—as the message and mission to lure and keep great talent?
3. Fragmentation and fluff
There are a lot of meaningful things happening in KC, but the entities and/or figureheads behind them rarely integrate or cooperate in a meaningful, consistent measure. In my mind, solving the fragmentation problem will go a long way to fixing KC’s capital and talent issues.
Credits: Venture Fridays photo from Red Nova Labs on Meetup. Carrie Royce photo courtesy Royce.
