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Thank you to a great group of Big Omaha friends
An event like Big Omaha simply could not exist without the help of a tremendous number of organizations who dedicate their time and resources to making it happen. We’ve been highlighting them during our event and I would now like to thank a group we affectionately refer to as our friends …
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Kauffman’s Kander tells founders to let their startup baby grow
These days, Diana Kander has babies on the brain. And quite understandably so—the senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is six months pregnant. So naturally when she took the stage at Big Omaha on Friday morning, Kander spoke about how “toddlers and startups actually have an amazing amount of things in common.” Both…
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Marc Ecko deciphers The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments”
After he set the scene onstage with an armchair and a stiff drink, Marc Eckō this morning shared the ten rules of business he uncovered in The Notorious B.I.G.’s song, “Ten Crack Commandments”. Never let no one know how much dough you hold. “In life, we use metrics,” Eckō said. “We will count everything. Quit…
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Antonio Neves wants you to ask yourself, “Who makes you better?”
Every year since he was in sixth grade, Antonio Neves has received a nutcracker for Christmas from his mom—a reminder of the moment in his young life where he turned a corner. At Big Omaha today, he stepped away from his emcee duties to share why he has devoted so much of his time to…
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Ben Milne tells Big Omaha crowd not to “be worried about what is normal”
According to Ben Milne, one of the biggest mistakes a founder can make is to abandon the Silicon Prairie and its Midwestern roots. And he should know. Without the community surrounding his Des Moines-based company, Milne said Dwolla probably wouldn’t be thriving today. “Had we not stayed here, we would not have made the friendships…
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Speakers, organizers stress sustainability at Big Omaha
A subtle shift is being felt at Big Omaha this year. Thanks to well-marked recycle bins, art installations, and even conference speakers themselves, the event has a new focus on sustainability. “As our conference gets bigger, it was hard to watch how sustainability wasn’t a part of it,” our event coordinator Brittany Mascio said before…
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Dash challenges community to find meaning in time spent online
Anil Dash challenged the crowd at Big Omaha to recognize the ethics, legal principles and cycles of expression and economization that are developing in the tech world, and to think harder about how things should be done. “We’ve forgotten that technology has values,” said the Internet veteran, who has been blogging for almost 15 years.…
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Back to the Roots grows business to “make money and do good”
Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora, co-founders of Back to the Roots, developed their grow-at-home mushroom kits without knowing anything about mushrooms. Or even, really, food. After all, their careers after graduation from Berkeley were intended to be in investment banking and consulting. But they pressed on from their launch in 2009 to learn three key…
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Old-School Style: Omaha artist draws 8bit caricatures live at Big Omaha
Big Omaha has gone 8bit. The annual event is nearly one day in, and even at this highly innovative tech conference, there’s still room for old-school style—and Adam Nielsen is proving it. Nielsen is one of this year’s Big Omaha artists, live-drawing (yep, that’s right—live-drawing) caricatures of the 14 speakers while they’re on stage. Images…
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iTriage founder believes in pursuing what you “can’t not do”
Dr. Peter Hudson had “almost a cathartic journey” planned for Big Omaha 2013. “My thesis today is that if you experience life, and you live it to the fullest, and you do things that you’re interested in,” he said, “you will have experiences that lead you to big problems, problems that really matter.” He took…