MyMidwest Inflight Magazine Piece

Recently I was interview for Midwest Express’ “MyMidwest” inflight magazine.  The full story is just below or you can view online at Network in Progress

NETWORK IN PROGRESS

Every start-up community has to, well, start somewhere. It helps to have the right ingredients—creativity, ambition, money— and someone like Jeff Slobotski, who is attempting to create a “Silicon Prairie” in Omaha, to bring them all together.

By Kalani Simpson

OMAHA IS BRIMMING WITH INSPIRATION. It’s the home of esteemed artist Jun Kaneko, who established a “creativity library” in the Old Market last year. It has an internationally known indie-rock scene (ask any hipster about Saddle Creek Records), and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts brings in artists from around the globe. Omaha native Jeff Slobotski sees this creativity as the foundation for a start-up community in a city that is already home to one of the world’s most successful businessmen (Warren Buffett). Slobotski has made it his mission to cultivate a Silicon Valley-like atmosphere in his hometown.

Slobotski’s own start-up, Silicon Prairie News (SPN), which is also helmed by co-founder and partner Dusty Davidson and managing editor Danny Schreiber, was responsible for Big Omaha, the 2009 conference which brought to town such innovative individuals as personal branding expert Gary Vaynerchuk; Jason Fried, co-founder and president of 37signals, a growing Web-based software company; and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, of Threadless and Digg fame. Matt Mullenweg, whose start-up Automattic is behind Word-Press.com, Akismet and Gravatar, is one of the scheduled headliners for the second edition, which takes place May 13-15.

While places like Silicon Valley and Raleigh/Durham have been building their start-up communities for years, Omaha is at the beginning stages. And the first step for any burgeoning start-up community, Slobotski says, is to stop the brain drain. Convince the best and brightest they don’t have to leave. Identify and showcase talent. Then invite the big kids—Vaynerchuk, Fried, Kalmikoff, etc.— to the table so they can see what the city has to offer and tell you how things are done. Get people together. Learn from and inspire one another. Proceed carefully, but—this is important—without fear. Slobotski says one of the most important elements for an entrepreneur-friendly environment is to have a culture that celebrates risk.

“Once we got past the point of being ‘siloed’—everyone with their heads down, working hard on their own ideas—we started to learn to embrace failure and take risks,” Slobotski says. “‘Fail fast and fail smart’ is something that isn’t natural to our culture here, but that’s changing.”

SLOBOTSKI’S CONTRIBUTION to what he calls “an entrepreneurial ecosystem” began with a $200 Flip digital camcorder and a blog. Slobotski went around town, spoke with people about their tech start-ups and web-design companies, and posted the conversations on the site. Now, Silicon Prairie News (siliconprairienews.com) gets about 15,000 unique visitors a month, and the city’s innovators, entrepreneurs, start-ups and social media addicts eat it up.

Big Omaha, SPN’s biggest project to date, sold out in its first year and fueled the fire driving the city’s entrepreneurs, who thought that maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t have to relocate to see their tech dreams come to fruition. There’s money in Omaha, Slobotski argues, and one of SPN’s missions is to connect it with the city’s creative class.

Discussions surrounding new media start-ups often sound like a bunch of buzzwords. And to some, the work of Slobotski might look like more flash than substance. (SPN has several writers and staff members, but only one paid employee, while Slobotski himself has a job as director of innovation and new media for the AIM Institute.) But for now, that’s the point. Buzz is what causes outsiders, who bring exposure and potential business with them, to take a closer look. It’s what might encourage one more entrepreneur to think about jumping into the pool. It pushes locals to keep the buzz going by supporting an entrepreneur-friendly environment. The bigger the flash, the bigger the boom.

Omaha has a few claims to fame. Buffett. Saddle Creek. Its image as a wholesome city on the plains. Slobotski is hoping that it will also be branded as the creative center of the Midwest, a place where innovation and entrepreneurship thrive. The elements are all there, so with any luck—and with people like Slobotski putting the pedal to the metal—the city’s tech community could itself soon move out of the start-up phase and become something much greater.