This invite-only event has some impressive speakers lined up, and should be excellent for networking with local execs. Great North Labs is an organizer of the event, and Ryan Weber will be speaking. Request an invite here.

From the press release:

Digerati.org is a national platform connecting digital leaders with networking and education opportunities. The Digital Transformation Summit event is focused on digital transformation, emerging technology, and networking for Chief Executive Officers, Chief Digital Officers, and other CXOs. In a world where software is increasingly transforming the core of every industry, hard-fought lessons from the digital practitioners delivering radical transformation are indispensable to senior management at all organizations.

The event is curated and invite-only, and includes panels by some of the leading companies in Minneapolis. It will be held on July 25^th in downtown Minneapolis. Invitations inquiries can be made on the event page.

Ryan Weber is co-founder of Great North Labs, a local early-stage venture fund that invests in upper Midwest technology startups. He previously co-founded NativeX, a Minnesota based ad technology and media company that he ran for many years. Weber is helping organize the digital summit, which he says will feature an amazing lineup of local digital transformation leaders who are building forward-looking, digitally-driven enterprises.

Among the list of leaders speaking at the event are Mark Ritchie and Gene Munster. Ritchie is a politician and entrepreneur who served as Minnesota’s 21^st Secretary of State. Munster is a former analyst for Piper Jaffray, and currently heads Loup Ventures.

Bharath Lingam, CEO of [x]cube LABS, a leading digital transformation company and host of the event, said that digital transformation today is a highly visible and yet very misunderstood topic. The best way for enterprises to engage with the subject is to have “birds of the same feather” communities, where digital practitioners can meet with each other, share lessons from the trenches on how they’re solving their challenges and learn from each other. The Digital Transformation Summit is designed to accomplish exactly that.

The Digital Transformation Summit is designed to provide a great opportunity for digital leaders to network with their peers and learn from the best practitioners of the trade.

The event will also host access to a digital innovation experience area, where the guest will get to experience some of the emerging tech like deep learning, blockchain, virtual reality and sensors, hands on.

Brendan Cooper, Head of Digital at Panini and a past Digerati event speaker, has said: “The Digerati community is the best and fastest way to meet and learn from people practicing digital transformation. Success on the frontier of business change requires extraordinary insight from people that live on that frontier. This is where you get it.”

About Digerati.org

Digerati.org is a public initiative focused on evangelizing digital innovation in the Enterprise space. The organization is involved in publishing research and news on digital themes, celebrating intrapreneurship around digital and holding workshops and conferences. Digerati.org is also focused on creating user groups of Digital Leaders and Influencers that can meet up regularly to discuss and organize new initiatives.

Welcome to Silicon Lakes!

The legacy of cornfields and flyover states taints the national perception of the modern Midwest. It’s led the area to be overlooked and under-capitalized by investors who paper the coasts with venture dollars.

While the name “Silicon Prairie” attempts to characterize the tech innovation occurring in America’s heartland, it’s a broad swath including an 8-state region (the name can also refer to two other regions, one in Texas, and one in Illinois).

The upper Midwest, near the Great Lakes, has a more dense collection of innovation hubs built around legacy industrial centers including Chicago, Minneapolis, Grand Forks, Des Moines, and Madison.

As investors like Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund are turning towards the interior, bringing much-needed capital to the area, our own Pradip Madan breaks down the common characteristics of innovation hubs the world over and evaluates the upper Midwest’s potential to become “Silicon Lakes”.

Events

July 25th, Minneapolis. Ryan Weber has been instrumental in organizing the Digital Transformation Summit for Digerati. This is an exclusive, small-crowd event for local leaders to learn and network. Speakers include Weber, Managing Partner of Great North Labs; Mark Ritchie, former MN Secretary of State; and Gene Munster, formerly of Piper Jaffray and head of Loup Ventures. Keep an eye on the site as more speakers are added, and visit the link to request an invitation!

August 16th-23rd, Madison. Forward Fest is an 8-day tech and entrepreneurship festival, the largest such event in Wisconsin. Ryan Weber will be there, so reach out if you’re in Madison and want to meet up!

August 20-22nd, Grand Forks. UAS Summit & Expo. What is UAS? Unmanned Aerial Systems: drones, their controllers and operators. This summit is in its twelfth year!

Portfolio action

FactoryFix is a new addition to the GNL portfolio. It is a labor marketplace for manufacturing businesses to find and contract skilled talent. The team is based out of Chicago and includes founder Patrick O’Rahilly, co-founder of Compass Automation.

New advisors

Great North Labs welcomed four new advisors in the past month:

Alex Ryan- Founder of Bitmatter; Co-Founder/CTO of Starting 11
Julie Novack-CEO/Co-Founder PartySlate
Jackie Schneider-CRO, Field Nation; Formerly Global Vice President of Sales at Proto Labs
Shannon Wiger-VP, Spring Hill Capital; Director of Business Development at Moss and Barnett

Welcome to Silicon Lakes!

Events

Portfolio action

New advisors

Job Board