About our Kansas City Launch Partners: Thanks to the generous support of our Kansas City Launch Partners, Silicon Prairie News is able to bring aboard full-time team members and establish an office in Kansas City. Read about our launch partners: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Sprint, Polsinelli Shughart and AdKnowledge.
Today we’re excited to introduce our final sponsor among an amazing group of businesses and organizations whose support is making our full-time presence in Kansas City possible.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship, has been a long-time supporter of our work at Silicon Prairie News and we’re fortunate to continue our relationship in 2013 and beyond.
Thanks to our sponsor
The sponsorship helps Silicon Prairie News continue to grow. We recently hired full-time employees in Kansas City and we’re now working to expand our coverage and hold regular and major events in the Kansas City community.
I asked Jon Robinson (right), manager of entrepreneurship programs at the Kauffman Foundation, to share some of this thoughts around why the Kauffman Foundation is involved with supporting our company’s work. Here’s what he had to say:
Many of the best startup communities around the world benefit from their geography. They’re contained within a valley or clustered along a highway, a waterfront, or around the edges of a campus; entrepreneurs rub shoulders in these dense communities and benefit tremendously for it. Here on the prairie we have a lot of space. There are clusters of entrepreneurs here, to be sure, but every day at the Kauffman Foundation we see great founders building great startups in far flung locations around the region. Together, we can be incredibly strong. Silicon Prairie News is the glue that binds our community, making a huge expanse into a close-knit village of entrepreneurs.
There is no more important resource for entrepreneurs in this region. SPN celebrates and educates our entrepreneurs, recording, profiling and explaining their successes, failures and everything in between. With their gold-standard “Big” events in Omaha, Des Moines and now Kansas City, they’re doing so much to make our region an unmissable destination for entrepreneurial founders, funders and feeders from every startup community in North America. Even more importantly, they are irreplaceable in helping to make the Silicon Prairie an exciting and vibrant place to start and grow a company, and they’re a reason for these startups to stay here.
We at Kauffman could not be more excited to see SPN coming to Kansas City full-time, and we have every confidence that this is only the beginning for our region. Now, as Jeff Slobotski would say, “Go!”
Having the continued support of the Kauffman Foundation is encouraging and motivating for our team as we continue striving to help build a startup community that we can look back on years from now and be proud of.
Credits: Robinson photo from kauffman.org.
