Meet Alyssa Cave, Director of Entrepreneurship @ Nebraska Startup Academy 

How would you describe the startup culture in Nebraska?

Nebraska’s startup culture is built around a strong sense of community and collaboration. Entrepreneurs here are looking to build resilient, responsible companies, and founders are open to accepting all the resources that can help them achieve that goal. I think there are so many founders focusing on solving real-world problems, particularly those that lean into Nebraska’s legacy industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, financial technology and healthcare. 

How do you balance taking risks and making calculated decisions in pursuit of innovation?

There are a lot of risks that you have to balance when working with startups and innovative companies. Because many of the companies that we see are at such an early stage of development, a lot of what we are betting on is the founding team, market size and potential and early signs of product-market fit. Outside of those key factors, it is important to have a regular cadence of checking in with the companies to ensure they are hitting the milestones that they need to be achieving to continue growing. It’s a very iterative approach.

How do you define success and what metrics do you pay the most attention to?

Because we are most often working with companies that are at the very early stages of product development, fundraising, building their team, finding product-market fit, etc., it is almost impossible to have the same goals or success metrics for each company. Oftentimes, the biggest underlying success metric that ends up starting the flywheel for other milestones is when companies do start finding their product-market fit. It looks different for every industry/company, but that is when companies start to really find their niche in the industry and where they should be focusing their attention, time and resources. It is a really exciting inflection point to see that ‘ah ha’ click where their product is solving a real-world problem for a big group of customers.

What are the top one or two challenges / opportunities Nebraska startups face?

Attracting and retaining top talent, particularly for highly specialized or technical roles, is a challenge we hear often from startups we work with. However, that is not unique to Nebraska. We have a number of great organizations within the state that are actively working to mitigate and resolve this very issue, which is exciting to see. As far as opportunities (there are so many that I’m excited about), I think leaning into some of those legacy industries previously mentioned that have been here in the state is a great way to leverage and cultivate innovation in a more targeted way. I am also excited to continue growing the Nebraska Startup Academy’s Corporate Pitch Day program and get more legacy corporations as well as newer players exposed to what startups are actually building in their own backyard.

What is one emerging industry or technology that you believe will have a significant impact on the Nebraska startup ecosystem in the next few years?

I personally don’t think Nebraska has to have any one industry-dominating stamp for us to be a flourishing startup ecosystem. I think we will see this next generation of entrepreneurs and startups building off of experience and resources currently in place, so the best thing we can do right now is equip founders with resources and tools to help them be the experts in their industry. For example, The Combine has done a fantastic job of providing industry-specific resources, tools and guidance for AgTech startups here in Nebraska. I would love to see resources such as that for all industries that are building critical mass here such as healthcare and medical technology, financial technology, sports technology—just to name a few.