Some of the city’s most notable entrepreneurs and small business experts tackled a big question during eKC Explained 2014, a panel discussion held Wednesday at the Kauffman Foundation as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.
The question: Is Kansas City the new capital of U.S. entrepreneurism?
In recent years, Kansas City’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has significantly improved with an impressive influx of startups fueling new jobs, said panelist Maria Meyers, founder of U.S.SourceLink and KCSourceLink, which promote entrepreneurship and economic development.
In 2012 alone, Meyers said, 12,998 jobs were created by local companies less than five years old.
“It’s the young companies that are creating jobs in this community,” she said.
Meyers further attributed KC’s fast-rising entrepreneurial profile to such factors as the founding of Kansas City Startup Village, the emergence of new accelerators, the growth of the microloan system, increased collaborations between corporations and innovative entrepreneurs and the “pipeline of ideas” from local universities and research institutions.
As a result, Kansas City is seeing more collisions between good ideas and good investors, Meyers said, with the area’s 140,000 sole proprietors of small businesses helping to lead the charge.
“It’s a huge number of people building incredible things,” she said.
Meyers was joined by five other panelists who also shared their views: Michele Markey, vice president of Kauffman FastTrac educational programs; Teri Rogers, CEO of production and creative services company Hint; Carlos Antequera, CEO of Netchemia, a provider of K-12 education talent management software; Chris Cheatham, CEO of ClaimKit, whose software organizes claim documents for insurance companies; and veteran executive search consultant Peter Lemke, co-founder and former president and CEO of EFL Associates, whose current venture is Larkspur Enterprises.
Cheatham’s advice to those poised to enter Kansas City’s escalating entrepreneurial scene was to start pitching to investors pronto. “Throw yourself into this system as fast as you can,” he said, because “no one owns the word ‘entrepreneur.’’’
“What I see today in the community is just a tremendous enthusiasm,” Lemke said.
That wasn’t always the case. Rogers recalled how in 1998, when she bought the company that would eventually become Hint, “you just had to kind of feel your own way” as a small business person, unlike the current atmosphere of entrepreneurial cooperation.
“I’m excited to continue to evolve, but to keep my base here in Kansas City,” Rogers said of Hint, whose TV programming division next year will debut a reality show on the Discovery Channel about the transgender community. “Kansas City is just full of people who are willing to help you.”
Markey recounted the origin of FastTrac, which Ewing Kauffman purchased in California and brought to Kansas City. She explained how the program’s entrepreneurial training has helped to transform the city’s small business scene, not only in the area of high-tech startups, but also for “Main Street entrepreneurship” that has broken gender stereotypes by bringing in more women.
“The unfortunate part is (women) tend to stay solo (entrepreneurs) …” Markey said. “We don’t see women growing companies, getting the same investment dollars, sitting on boards.”
Despite Kansas City’s rapid progress as a startup hub, challenges remain. Antequera said that his company’s tech talent search has encountered resistance from job candidates not wanting to move to Kansas City.
“That was a nonstarter,” Antequera said. “I was really shocked. Although we’re doing many, many great things (in Kansas City), I don’t think folks around the country know.”
So is Kansas City the nation’s new entrepreneurial capital? Think of it as a journey, Meyers said.
“It’s a journey, not a destination …” she said. “We will never be Silicon Valley. We will never be Boston. But we will be Kansas City. And we will build Kansas City on the assets that we have. And we will tell the world about the assets that we have. And we will be Kansas City proud.”
