Steve Case, chairman and CEO for VC firm Revolution LLC and co-founder of AOL, traveled around the country last year, meeting with local entrepreneurs and policy leaders. The playbook compiles their insight and strategies related to entrepreneurship.
Scott Resnick, entrepreneur-in-residence for entrepreneurial group StartingBlock Madison, tweeted the playbook “might be the best resource guide on startup programming to date.”
Each section of the playbook was written by a local leader in the startup community. Aaron Olver, managing director of University Research Park and former state secretary of commerce, writes, “You do not need to live near an ocean to take the plunge into innovation and entrepreneurship.”
He highlights a number of Madison’s programs for turning business ideas into reality, also touching on the area’s cluster of regenerative medicine companies, including Cellular Dynamics International and Stratatech.
“Madison isn’t just about life science, though,” Olver wrote. “In 1979, a UW computer science grad named Judy Faulkner started a healthcare IT firm here called Epic Systems.”
That company now employs over 10,000 people in the Madison area, and hosts half the country’s health records. With the talent emigrating from Epic or graduating from UW-Madison, Olver says the area is seeing “an explosion of software and health IT startups,” noting that last year, area startups raised over $114 million, making Madison the top Midwest city for VC investment per capita.
“With life science and engineering research rolling on campus, and health IT making Madison the second most concentrated place in the country for software, Madison is positioned to become a HealthTech Capital,” Olver wrote. “We may not have saltwater, but we’ve got an ocean of opportunity.”
See the full report here: http://www.revolution.com/playbook/file/ROTR%202018%20Ecosystem%20Playbook.pdf
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