By Pradip Madan, Ryan Weber, and Rob Weber
In the US, several tech ecosystems have become centers of tech innovation in addition to the much-vaunted Silicon Valley. Silicon Alley is in NYC; Austin is known as Silicon Hills; Silicon Mountain includes Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins; Silicon Forest is in the Greater Portland region; and Silicon Prairie covers Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City (depending on who you ask). But what about the upper Midwest? Can it rightfully be called “Silicon Lakes”?
The ‘Silicon’ brand has not only spread through the US, but has also found limited purchase overseas, as in Silicon Wadi in Israel. More importantly, the essence of Silicon Valley has become rooted in various international regions, including the thriving tech ecosystems of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, Cheng-du, and Dalian in China; Bangalore, Pune, and Hyderabad in India; Haifa, Israel; Tsukuba, Japan; Suwon, Korea; and Hsinchu, Taiwan.
On a smaller scale, innovation hubs are also springing up from Barcelona to Buenos Aires and Paris to Johannesburg, and can be found near universities and in buildings repurposed as co-location centers for innovative tech companies.
The “Silicon” Recipe
So, what is the essence of Silicon Valley? How do you define the nature of innovative regions and hubs, beyond the “Silicon” brand? By identifying the nature of particular attributes across these hubs including culture, talent, capital, and collaboration, we can begin to see common characteristics, and what it takes to form a successful innovation hub.
1. Culture
First, you need the right culture. This attribute is best characterized by the culture Intel established in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Key traits include openness, transparency, and optimism combined with discipline, inclusion, talent and meritocracy; clear shared goals with an emphasis on value creation and collaboration; a platform to succeed with a permission to fail, and the resilience and acceptance to repeat despite failure.
At Intel, there are open cubicles for Intel’s rank and file alike, including the CEO. Measurable individual key objectives are shared with colleagues, as is encouragement to push the edge. The employees are a cultural cornucopia, including the best new college graduates (NCGs) hired from the best schools. These employees manifested the culture, and while Intel was not unique in creating it, its powerful brand did a lot to popularize it.
Today, this culture is multiplied across the many unicorns and the thousands of successful tech companies, from startups to mid-sized enterprises, that make up Silicon Valley.
2. Talent and Capital
On a physical level, the proximity of academic centers such as Stanford University and UC-Berkeley provide a fountainhead of talent and ideas in Silicon Valley. Stanford’s contribution to the development of Silicon Valley is particularly well-known and can be characterized as a successful pairing of advanced engineering and commercialization.
Commercialized advancements begat wealth, and now Silicon Valley is decades into significant wealth creation. This wealth and entrepreneurial thinking has led to a ready flow of risk capital, the availability of which is another key attribute of innovation hubs.
3. Collaboration
Complex problems benefit collaborative thinking, which benefits from diverse experiences. For many years, the complex problems of the human body have required in vitro testing of single molecular pathways for several months, testing in mouse models for 1+ years, and in clinical trials for more than 1-2 years. Realizing the need to accelerate this process by examining multiple variables at the same time, and that computational methods ranging from vertical search to structural biology could accelerate insights, Stanford University established Bio-X in 2003 as a center for interdisciplinary collaboration between the computational and life sciences.
The Innovation Ecosystem as a Rainforest
In his book “The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley”, author Victor Hwang delves into the ingredients for a healthy “innovation ecosystem”. He uses the rainforest as a metaphor to identify the success factors for tech entrepreneurship: a natural eco-system in which abundant species thrive based on autonomy, symbiosis, and survival of the fittest as core principles.
“However, the key to the mystery of Silicon Valley is the software. And that software works like a ‘rainforest’—an ecosystem that thrives because its many elements combine to create new and unexpected flora and fauna. Those elements thrive through rapid mixing, just as they do in a natural biological system.” – Victor Hwang, in Forbes |
The Rainforest Thrives in the Valley
The companies in Silicon Valley largely embody the above practices. A hundred miles away in any direction, in Central Valley, in Wine Country, or in Pebble Beach/Monterey, the atmosphere changes tangibly, and the regions are untouched by tech concepts and unicorns. It is not that the communities are deliberately or inalterably different, it’s simply that the awareness of these cultural attributes has not been as powerful or pervasive, or to put it colloquially, it’s not ‘in the air and water’. The same transitions exist around most other “Silicon” ecosystems or innovation hubs.
… But Takes Root in any “Silicon” Soil
What made an impact at Intel was the investments its legendary CEO, Andy Grove, personally made in training, writing books, giving lectures, taking the time to teach new college grad employees, and promoting concepts such as measurable goals, transparency, and constructive confrontation. Similar cultural emphases at companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple help drive innovation today, while the many opportunities to mingle at conferences, meetups and BarCamps, (where like-minded engineers share ideas and solve problems), and the proliferation of open courseware, enable innovation to thrive on a much larger scale.
We instilled these principles in the open workspaces in our own past company, located in three places: St. Cloud, Minneapolis (in the repurposed Grain Exchange), and in San Francisco. Commingling the Midwestern values of the founders with the lessons of Silicon Valley’s success experienced by our Board members, we created a culture of entrepreneurial success.
The open work environment of the co-working space Fueled Collective, in the historic Grain Exchange building, downtown Minneapolis. Where grain was once traded, ideas are currency.
Conversely, is there evidence that policy-based institutions do not have impact? Look around Silicon Valley for unicorns traceable to policy-based cause-and-effect. The city governments of Santa Clara (Intel headquarters), Cupertino (Apple Headquarters), Palo Alto (HP and Tesla headquarters), Mountain View (Google headquarters), or Menlo Park (Facebook headquarters) have not been the agents of change.
So, does that mean policy-driven innovation hubs do not succeed? We believe that policy-based initiatives (ultra-high-speed broadband, net neutrality, etc.) are important enablers, but without entrepreneurial zeal, they are never enough, and ultimately wither. Relatively speaking, regions such as China have benefited from the visible hand of policy initiatives, but in the end, even there, the invisible hand of entrepreneurship has been the necessary ingredient.
Silicon Lakes
The upper Midwest has the culture, the talent, and the capital to be an innovation hub. It has interdisciplinary collaboration – but it can use more. At Great North Labs we are working closely with St. Cloud State University and other local organizations to foster a similar ecosystem of interdisciplinary collaboration. We work with private and corporate LPs to seed startups in the upper Midwest, using the shared knowledge of our advisors and contacts to facilitate their success. We also educate, participate in events, and promote connections in the local tech communities. Our aim is to create a powerful innovation ecosystem in this region and connect it to the larger community of “Silicon” geography around the world. Welcome to Silicon Lakes!
Amazon (mkt cap ~$760B) recently paid more for Whole Foods ($13.7B) than the balance sheets of many mid-market grocers. This frames the obvious question for all grocers: how can your business compete long-term?
This is an especially challenging question for the smaller-cap grocers. Large companies such as Walmart (mkt cap ~$250B) and Target (mkt cap ~$40B) can afford sizable investments. To a lesser degree, the balance sheets of the next tier of grocers, like Kroger (mkt cap ~$21B), also allow them to focus on a couple of key moves and a few smaller initiatives, and to double-down if necessary.
Smaller grocery chains have to look more carefully, however. Except for mergers or sales, their balance sheets are not strong enough to complete large transactions on their own. Nor do they have the operating margin to buy with debt without materially impacting their P&Ls and carrying long-term risk to pay it down, especially if the economy takes a downward turn. With average pre-tax profits of 2% and an annual growth of 0.9% (2012-17), retained earnings can barely meet working capital growth needs, leaving limited capital for innovation.[i]
Mid-Market Innovation
Capital availability aside, the main question still remains: what should mid-market grocers do? To answer this question, let’s break it down into smaller questions and then explore those topics:
1. Without active strategic steps, can mid-market grocers survive over the next 1-2 decades? Do they have to counteract Amazon’s thrust and make similar moves to stay in business? Will they be weaker if they cannot or do not do so?
2. If they act, how should they proceed? Diversify into new markets? Consolidate with other mid-sized grocers? Or try to sell to Amazon, Walmart or Target assuming they are interested?
3. Or, should they build their own path by seeding and growing innovation, and grafting small acquisitions to accelerate growth and achieve scale down these paths?
Long-term Survival
The US grocery retail market stands at $649B today, with 3.4M (1% of the US population) employees across the 66,000+ businesses comprising this industry.[ii] Given a growing population and the fact that in times good or bad, we all must eat, demand for food is unlikely to go down, though there may be shifts in preferences (e.g., generics v. branded) depending on economic conditions.
In other words, the industry is not small, not consolidated, and not at risk for a decline in demand. Rather, it is large, fragmented, and diverse, with fundamentally stable or growing demand. This makes it difficult for disrupters to disrupt broadly or deeply, and for adaptive innovators, it presents many options.
Evolution favors innovation and adaptability over size and scale, and nature provides useful insight into this Darwinian paradigm. While size and scale produce advantages for certain species, it is no guarantee of future success- it is a sign of successful growth, of successful past innovation. Colossal dinosaurs once dominated the planet, but the reason they rose to prominence, and the only reason their lineage persists in birds is because of adaptive innovations.
With the universal need for food, severe consolidation of grocery chains is unlikely as long as the US economy grows. And with the diversity of ecosystem players, customer preferences, and products, those who innovatively adapt will continue to grow.
Capital: Strength or Weakness?
For over a decade now, Amazon has taken advantage of its strong balance sheets and scale to gain presence in groceries. Given that Amazon’s market cap is roughly twice that of Target’s and Walmart’s combined is a material factor in its choice of strategic weapon: capital. Amazon’s investments related to grocery retailing are approximately $15B.
However, it is incorrect to assume that lots of capital means inevitable success. Many acquisitions simply fail to take root in their new home, no matter how useful the innovation. And companies such as Webvan failed under the weight of their capital because they failed to establish product-market fit incrementally and left no room for adaptive course-correction.
How to Proceed?
If Darwinism tends to prevail, then capital is not an unequivocal advantage, and the existential factor is adaptive growth, not survival.
We believe the multi-part answer is to (1) seed the eco-system for knowledge and initial product-market validation, (2) place 1-2 larger bets (at any given time for focus) based on an understanding of the market forces towards new business models or diversification, then (3) strengthen them to achieve scale, and (4) in parallel, carve out or sunset lines of business with the strongest headwinds to free up cash and focus on growth.
The outcome of such steps can put a mid-market grocer into high-growth business(es) that may not collide directly with Amazon or Walmart, and possibly even set the stage for a valuable acquisition or merger.
Topline Levers
Across these phases – seeding the ecosystem, placing 1-2 larger bets, and achieving scale – the two topline levers are greater share of wallet and new customers. These can come from new products and services.
Products (“SKUs”) such as staples and provisions, non-perishables, and fresh fruits & vegetables, all offer room for expansion. Depending on local demographics, preferences such as branded vs. non-branded, price vs. selection, organic foods, local produce, regional/ethnic items, and specialty items such as liquor and wine, define growth options.
SKU expansion does not require significant capital. Rather it requires a process that allows select experiments to be managed by the grocer, and a much longer ‘tail’ to be ‘self-managed’ by the SKU suppliers, where the grocer only provides limited ‘shelf space’ for a limited time (e.g., in-store endcaps or online kiosks) and charges for the service (and is able to do it without losing money). It is reasonable for SKU suppliers to be willing to pay for more visible use of physical space, differentiated presentation, or better ways to engage customers.
Online shopping enables choice extensions and endless aisles at a modest cost, whereas in-store options can emphasize experience. Demographic understanding of customer needs (healthy foods, organics, specialty foods, local/seasonal produce, etc.) can be assessed through affinity programs and community engagement combined with analytics. Going beyond food and provisions, adjacent businesses such as banking kiosks or medical ‘minute clinics’ can be evaluated in the same way.
Services such as partially- or pre-cooked foods, cellar management (a la VinCellar), produce delivery (a la Instacart or Peapod), meal delivery (a la Blue Apron), in-store eateries, and in-store convenient checkout without PoS lines can also be offered without material investment as vendor or partner offerings from established players and startups.
Bottomline Levers
The main bottomline levers are operational expenses such as rent, labor, and logistics including warehousing and supply chain management (e.g., inventory turns, lower margin items online); and financial items such as cash flow management or cost of debt. Many optimizations for these levers (e.g., robotic warehouses, robotic kitchen management, blockchain-based cold chain tracking, etc.) can also be enabled by partnerships with technology-based startups.
Capital Efficiency
In reviewing the above ideas, it becomes clear that many options are available in capital-efficient ways. Among these options, relationships with venture firms can facilitate access to both topline and bottomline tech-based innovation partners.
We are in an era of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which itself mitigates capex. Examples of services include online store builders and marketplaces (e-tail), security, brand/user preference analysis and brand promotion (martech, AI), customer service platforms (chatbots, CRM, KPO), and fleet management (IoT, gig economy apps). As federated web services with APIs, integration of SaaS offerings with the grocer’s enterprise software has become less expensive. With responsive design techniques, consistent desktop and mobile presentations for omni-channel access have become easy. And with integrated dev-ops processes, their deployment and upgrades have become easier as well.
Similarly, the gig economy mitigates capex and opex. Alternatives to home delivery by Whole Foods or Walmart Grocery (earlier known as Walmart-to-Go) can be made available without capex through third parties such as Instacart and Peapod. Federated independent couriers (e.g., Dispatch[iii])provide alternatives (figure 2). Also on the innovation frontier, though groceries are not the prime use case today, third-party drone companies offer drone-based services for commercial payloads of various sizes and type.
Figure 2. Which is better – owned delivery fleets, or independents marshalled with SaaS software? The answer may lie in the clash of medallions vs. Uber.
All of these services become easier to procure through relationships with VC firms that have a high awareness of these start-ups and use cases. The VC community has been quite active in grocery-focused investments. With 100+ investments, ~429 investors, and ~47 exits, grocery-focused VC firms have been active globally. Driving growth through capital-efficient innovation is necessary for mid-market grocers to stay competitive in the industry. Venture firms can provide options for adaptation, intelligence and diversification without billion-dollar expenditures.
[i] http://www.mngrocers.com/index.php/industry/stats
[ii]https://retailowner.com/Benchmarks/Food-and-Beverage-Stores/Supermarkets-Grocery-Stores#290291-profit
[iii] Dispatch is a Great North Labs investment
Healthcare Today
Some of the smartest minds work in healthcare, life sciences and biopharma. Yet the healthcare sector struggles to bring innovation into its ecosystem. The pace of innovation adoption has been much greater in other sectors, including in communication (Facebook, Skype), learning (Google, YouTube, Coursera), shopping (Amazon), personal finance (PayPal), and entertainment (Netflix).
This is not because of a lack of innovation in the pipeline. Healthcare sector innovators are hard at work on drugs and therapeutics, devices, and operational aspects of healthcare delivery. Breakthroughs have come in genomics-based precision drugs, machine-learning-based disease detection, EMRs, payment systems, patient adherence and education tools. In healthcare, the innovation tends to be evidence-based, with scientific papers that quantify results from well-designed experiments, and a highly-skilled academic research ecosystem at their source. That aspect is unique in the healthcare sector, and the sector has other ecosystem attributes not seen in other sectors. It’s this unique ecosystem that makes market insertion, growth and adoption at scale more complex, requiring specific insight and enablement.
The Upper Midwest has substantial healthcare anchors to promote a thriving ecosystem of clinical innovation and practice. Examples include the leading research, teaching and clinical centers of the Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota; hospital systems like Minnesota Health System and CentraCare; device manufacturer Medtronic; software companies like Epic; payers such as United Healthcare; and the processors Optum and United. There are also hundreds of strong, related entities across the region. Healthcare investment is shifting from traditional hotspots like Boston, Houston, and Raleigh-Durham to Silicon Valley, and while the global ecosystem catches up, there is an opportunity to take advantage of this transition to strengthen the ecosystem in the Upper Midwest.
Strong healthcare research leads to breakthrough ideas which require mentorship and incubation to grow. Leading research institutions can organize ecosystem support, such as how the University of Minnesota encourages mentorship through their Venture Center’s Business Advisory Group which brings together entrepreneurs, funds (including Great North Capital Fund), and industry leaders to drive the successful commercialization of its academic research. This is big business, and the U of MN now generates roughly $1B per year from such efforts (two-thirds life sciences and one-third software/IT).
Geographic and industry-themed startup accelerators have also begun to proliferate in the region. Startup accelerators support early-stage, growth-driven companies through education, mentorship, and financing for a fixed period of time, among an admitted cohort of companies. The multi-city startup accelerator, Gener8tor, is managing a new Twin Cities med-tech accelerator backed by Boston Scientific, the University of Minnesota, and the Mayo Clinic. Venture studios and incubators are other forms of early-stage support available in the region. Minneapolis-based Invenshure has successfully launched multiple healthcare startups.
The region’s healthcare system is also significant on the demand side. For example, the cost drivers of healthcare in Minnesota reflect those in the US at large. Yet, while challenges in patient care are also similar to those of other regions, Minnesota’s efficiency is better. Healthcare spending accounts for over 16% of the US economy but is only about 13% of the Minnesota economy. So not only are Minnesota-based insights relevant, they are valuable. Innovations can be developed and piloted in Minnesota, then applied in other states. Startups developed here can be scaled nationally and, with adaptation, internationally.
Figure 1: Health Care Cost Drivers: Spending and Shares of Growth by Service, 2011 to 2013.
(Source: Minnesota Department of Health).
Change is Accelerating
Each decade brings its own set of innovations that transform industries. The healthcare industry will undergo vast changes in the next 10-20 years. The growing spate of investments and partnerships among tech innovators is signaling an increasing rate of change in this sector. The most visible examples of these innovators include Amazon, Apple, Google, Qualcomm, and Walmart. Google Ventures alone did 27 healthcare deals in 2017, up from 9 in 2013.
These companies you wouldn’t normally think of as bastions of healthcare innovation, yet they are all allocating large talent pools and budgets in the industry. Until Tesla, who would have thought that the next innovation in cars would come from Silicon Valley? More than their balance sheets, the noteworthy attributes of these companies are their culture of observing ecosystems, and their practice of inserting innovation in a stepwise and sustained manner to upend markets.
When you combine such entities with those like Berkshire Hathaway and Goldman Sachs (both of whom are partnering with Amazon in healthcare), and the financial and corporate venture groups that work with them, a disruptive landscape begins to take shape in which other innovators and incumbents alike can find new opportunities. For innovators, it means aligning their innovations with insertion points with high economic value and low resistance. For incumbents, at minimum, it means awareness and being prepared; more proactively, it means proactive engagement with capital (e.g., investments through VC firms), pilots, and adoption. For example, the Mayo Clinic has partnered with Google on leveraging its Knowledge Graph smart search algorithm for patient education, and Optum’s venture arm (based in Boston and Silicon Valley) has allocated $250M to venture investments
The range of innovations in the pipeline is equally stunning. Early examples include smartphones coupled with wearables for clinical-grade data. Today’s pipeline includes voice assistants (trained Alexa-like products) for health-related questions, machine vision for detecting physical anomalies (in skin, bones, retinae, or genes) or even bacteria in food. There are AI and visualization-enabled robotic surgery tools for doctors (e.g., Verb Surgical); machine learning in patient-specific onset detection for things like allergies and COPD; big data in early cancer detection (e.g., Freenome) and other diseases like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and autism. The Mayo Clinic and AliveCor have shown that an AI can be trained to identify people at risk for arrhythmia and sudden cardiac arrest despite normal EKG results. There is also analytics-optimized underwriting for individuals and small businesses (e.g., Oscar), Medicaid (Clover) and self-insured populations (Collective Health).
Enabling the Innovation
Applying capital to create, enable and grow innovation platforms, align disruption with practical value in startups, and engage institutions for initial adoption, deployment at scale, and sustained growth requires a deep understanding of the ecosystem and cross-disciplinary skills to navigate it. This is especially true in healthcare given the ecosystem’s unique attributes and complexity, the importance of human health, government regulation, and the depth of incumbency among some players.
Startups benefit from focused enablement of resources including mentors, partners, lab space, hardware/software development expertise, and communication and data analysis platforms. Healthcare enterprises benefit from investment partners who understand their service goals and the need to balance innovation within financial constraints and with operational realities such as the need for patient privacy and the limitations of government regulations.
At Great North Labs, we focus on bringing such forces together to apply capital and expertise effectively and efficiently. We study ecosystems and leverage experts as advisors. We bring people together at events and entrepreneur training, through referrals, and with investment, mentorship and thought leadership by our team. We apply our capital and resources locally, with a deep connection to innovation hubs nationally, and with the goal of scaling globally.
Exponential Technology
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore famously predicted that computing power would grow exponentially by doubling every two years (“Moore’s Law”). The implications of such rapidly improving computing power are now evident all around us, but back when Gordon predicted such growth it was hard to imagine a future with such incredible computing power.
In March, we held our first-ever Exponential Technology and Leadership workshop to address the inevitable trends that will disrupt many industries.
Whether it’s AI, IoT, medicine, space, or even blockchain, it was evident throughout this bootcamp that proactive, exponential thinking is necessary to maintain a competitive advantage in all industries.
Participants had the opportunity to hone in on their skills development through the process of question storming, developing moonshot ideas, and rapid prototyping.
If you were unable to attend, you can still sign up for our next workshop on April 23rd.
See Tickets for April 23rd Workshop
Welcome, new Advisors!
Candice Savino – VP of Engineering at Trunk Club; Formerly Senior Director of Engineering, Groupon
Nicolas Thomley – Henry Crown Fellow at The Aspen Institute, Co-Founder & CEO of Morning Sun Financial Services, Founder of Pinnacle Service
Suk Shah – CFO at Avant; Formerly CFO at HSBC
Paul Longhenry – SVP – Strategy, Corporate, and Business Development at Tapjoy; Formerly Venture Capital Investment Director at D.E. Shaw Ventures
Top Midwestern Spots for Startups
It’s no secret that the startup ecosystem is rising in the Midwest. “…the amount of money being invested into startups is on the rise in the Midwest and throughout many other parts of the country, reaching fresh multi-year highs in 2017. Almost one full quarter into 2018, the trend appears to continue unabated.”
Read more from Crunchbase about why the Midwest is now being coined as a “goldilocks zone.”
Check out the Great North Labs Portfolio
Upcoming Classes
4/10 – Lean Startup Bootcamp
4/23 – Exponential Technology & Leadership Workshop –
4/28 – Agile Scrum Crash Course
Lean Startup Bootcamp
Follow the Lean Startup Path to create your next startup, realize your potential in Product Management as a career, and master the skills needed to find winning business models through Lecture and Labs.
Our work-friendly bootcamp is over three Tuesday sessions: 4/10, 4/17, and 4/24 from 6:00 – 8:30 pm at Great North Labs in St. Cloud.
Exponential Technology & Innovation Workshop
The implications of rapidly improving computer power are evident around us – gain a competitive advantage and avoid disruption through this workshop. Become familiar through our Intro to Exponentials, review Disruptive Technologies, expand your Exponential Leadership, and develop skills to broaden your perspective.
Monday, April 23rd from 8:00 – 4:30 pm at Fueled Collective in Minneapolis.
Learn and begin applying the foundational concepts of Agile Scrum to improve work transparency on your team. Review the history of Agile, problems that can be solved via Agile, and tackle software development complexity.
Saturday, April 28th from 9:00 – 5:00pm at Fueled Collective inMinneapolis.
Minnebar is April 14th
Great North Labs’s Managing Partners, Ryan and Rob Weber, will speak three times at this annual tech and software conference which has been a Twin Cities mainstay since 2006. The all-day event will be at Best Buy Headquarters. Tickets are free.
Tweet to Meet with Rob (@robertjweber) or with Ryan (@mnvikingsfan) at the event.
Do you know any investors interested in sharing investment opportunities? Have them contact us!
June Newsletter
Demystifying Startup HR
Head of Finance & Fund Administration- Venture Capital Firm (Remote)
Demystifying Startup HR
3 Portfolio Companies Make Inc. 5000 + Quicklly & Instacart Expand
3 Portfolio Companies Ranked on The Inc. 5000 List
iraLogix closes $22M + Branch expands with Uber
iraLogix closes $22M Series C
Flywheel lands Gates Foundation grant
Venture Capital Analyst
Orazio Buzza, Founder and CEO of Fooda – on Episode 13, “Execution is King”
$40M Fund II Raised!
Eric Martell, Founder of Pear Commerce: Episode 13, Execution is King
Great North Ventures Raises $40 Million Fund II
Investment Thesis: Fund II Strategy
Investment Theme: Community-Driven Applications
Investment Theme: Digital Transformation Through AI
Investment Theme: Solving Labor Problems
Trends in the Gig Economy + Work in the Metaverse
Portfolio raises $125M + talking fundraising with Branch CEO
Omnia Fishing closes $4M round, joins Great North portfolio!
Atif Siddiqi, Founder/CEO of Branch: Episode 11, Execution is King
Michael Martocci, CEO and Founder of SwagUp: Episode 10, Execution is King
Yardstik new to portfolio, closes $8M Series A
First venture studio startup comes out of stealth!
Insights for founders from a data guru, + FactoryFix raises a Series A!
Una Fox: Episode 9, Execution is King
Start With a Mobile App, Not a Website
2ndKitchen acquired by SoftBank-backed REEF + advice from an early Googler
Joe Sriver, 4giving: Episode 8, Execution is King
2ndKitchen Acquired by REEF
Venture studio startup jobs + advice for founders from founders
Best Advice from the Great North Annual Event: Episode 7, Execution is King
Newsletter: Do you fit our investing themes?
Jonathan Treble, PrintWithMe: Episode 6, Execution is King
Anna Mason, Revolution: Episode 5, Execution is King
Mynul Khan, FieldNation: Episode 4, Execution is King
Nick Moran, New Stack Ventures: Episode 3, Execution is King
Molly Pyle, Center on Rural Innovation (CORI): Episode 2, Execution is King
Justin Kaufenberg, Rally Ventures: Execution is King Episode 1
Newsletter: “Podcast Launched: Execution is King!”
“Execution is King” – the Great North Ventures Podcast
Newsletter: Fund II is open for business!
Unlocking the Potential of Anonymized Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Data
Fund II is open for Business!
Mike Schulte Promoted to Venture Partner
New Name + New Venture Studio
Great North Launches Startup Studio
We Don’t Need No [full-time MBA] Education
How the University of Minnesota is Embracing Startup Culture
Top Stories of 2020, iraLogix, and LaunchMN Calls for Mentors
Building Capacity for Innovation
Seizing Opportunity in a Recession, Allergy Amulet, and Twin Cities Startup Week
Recessionary times, a record-setting IPO, and Minnesota’s Resilient Startups
Minnesota's Resilient Startups
July 4th, Equitable American Dream-ing, and Robots Diagnosing COVID
Jumpstart, the Startup School, and Branch Wins a Webby!
COVID-19 Trends, the Great North response, and our Founders Survey
Giving in the Time of Coronavirus
COVID-19 Resources for Startups, State-by-State
COVID-19, the CARES Act, and startups stepping up
New Business Preservation Act
Digital Future Boardroom, PartySlate, and The Lean Startup School
Great North Labs’s Startup Summit 2020
Great North Labs's Startup Summit 2020
World Economic Forum, NoiseAware, and the Startup School reboot
Great North Labs at the World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos
Top 5 Stories of 2019
Taking the Founders Pledge, Inhabitr, and gBETA Pitch Night
Founders Pledge: Support the Organizations that Support You
BETA Showcase, Greater MN, and Launch MN comes to St. Cloud
7 Places to Spot Us at Startup Week
The Greater MN Meetup, Parallax, and Exponential Medicine
Greater MN at the big show, Neela Mollgaard heads Launch MN, and Misty’s roadtrip.
Talking VC, tech kids, and Forge North’s Horizon
June: Great North Labs’s first fund raised!
May: Innovation Ecosystems, SingularityU Kickoff, and PrintWithMe
April: Minnebar Recap, ZenLord Pro, and Supporting Entrepreneurs
MinneBar 14 Recap
Dispatch and 2ndKitchen claim Tech Madness titles
Minnesota Innovation Collaborative
March: Minnebar, Hockey + Hustlers, and Innovation Workshops
Great North Labs at CES
Dec.-Jan.: Top Posts from 2018, pepr, Glowe, and Misty Robotics
Carried Interest: Top Posts from 2018
Oct.-Nov.: Singularity University, Exponential Tech, and the State of Innovation
July: Pitchly, ForwardFest, and Where to Invest in the Midwest
Digital Transformation Summit, July 25th in Minneapolis
June: Silicon Lakes, FactoryFix, and the Digital Transformation Summit
Putting the “Silicon” in Silicon Lakes
Digital Manufacturing and Logistics
May: Team Genius, IoT, and the Future of Everything
IoT 3.0
Healthcare Innovation
March: Exponential Tech, the “Goldilocks Zone”, and Minnebar 13
February: Team Expansion, Dispatch, and Startup School Events
Great North Labs Newsletter – December 2017
A Letter To My Younger Self
Great North Labs Newsletter
Great North Labs Featured on Tech.mn
Great North Labs Featured in St Cloud Times
Great North Labs – Featured on BizJournals.com
