Director, StartUp Columbus Why has Columbus struggled in recent decades to foster small businesses and entrepreneurship?“There are a lot of different reasons that people have given for it. I have my speculations, which are that we’ve had a lot of really successful large businesses. For the population, we probably have more Fortune 1,000 companies than any community our size. the size of our city...
(start us up and we’ll never stop)* Columbus is doubling down on the bet that entrepreneurship is the economic engine that will power the regional economy in the 21st century. In classic Electric City fashion, both private companies and public entities combine to form the full scope of recent local investments cultivating small-business start ups. StartUp Columbus Programs Director Ben...
Who could have imagined the seismic shift in the way we live, work, and play that occurred when Steve Jobs caught lightning in a bottle with a flash of LSD-induced genius and created the iPhone? Jobs is dead but his genius lives on. Today, iPhones shape global connection and commerce. One decade after his invention hit the market, one obvious impact of Job’s personal-freedom principle has been...
Hosting her next-to-last “Let’s Talk” community-conversation series inside the Springer Opera House in March, Mayor Teresa Tomlinson was asked by a South Columbus resident what the city was going to do to bring back the banks and retailers where the elderly woman had long deposited and spent her money. Though blunt in stating such big-box operations won’t be coming back—not to South Columbus, not...
Columbus entrepreneur Lou Childs discusses the launch of SlumberPod—“a patent-pending, portable privacy pod to help babies/toddlers to get a good night’s sleep”—at StartUp Columbus, a sleek office space in the 1000 block of Broadway that recently opened to serve as an incubator for local start-ups. ECL: You obviously crushed it on the digital launch platform with Kickstarter. [SlumperPod raised...