Startup Vermont, a coalition of entrepreneurs, advisors, funders and larger corporations from across the Green Mountain state, today announced the opening of registration for the inaugural Startup Vermont Partnership Conference (SVPC), to be held at IBM’s Essex Junction, VT, campus on June 19.

The Startup Vermont Partnership Conference was developed to bring entrepreneurs and small business owners together with Vermont’s leading business success stories, to share experience and learning, and ultimately contribute to economic growth in the Green Mountain State.

For conference details and to register, please click here: Startup VT Conference Registration. Attendance will be limited to 150 participants and all participants must be preregistered.

“When Startup America was formed, we immediately saw Vermont as a natural hub in the Northeast region, based on the state’s reputation for nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit in companies ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to NRG Systems,” explained Cairn Cross, Managing Director of Fresh Tracks Capital, speaking on behalf of the Startup Vermont coalition. “This first Startup Vermont conference is a forum for new ideas to find support and ramp up more quickly than has traditionally been possible, with help from experienced and successful businesses.”

The daylong event will begin with panels focused around three industry sectors – Technology, Consumer Products and Food Systems/Farm to Plate – and later feature breakout sessions on critical issues for startups:

•    Intellectual property management: I have a fabulous business idea, but how can I protect it?
•    Finding capital: I’ve maxed out my borrowing capacity – how can I source additional capital?
•    Business development best practices: I know there are clients who would use my product, but I can’t find them!
•    Sourcing and hiring talent: Vermont has a great talent pool, so I’ve heard; but how do I find the right person for this position I need to fill?
•    Understanding and implementing social media strategies: To tweet or not to tweet?

Leading companies such as Allscripts, Biotek, Burton, IBM and MyWebGrocer will make best practice collaborative presentations. Mark Hanny, IBM VP, Independent Software Ventures and Development, will deliver the keynote address. Confirmed participants in the three industry sector tracks include the following:

•    Technology: Stephen Luce, Distinguished Engineer & Chief Technical Executive, IBM Vermont; Rebecca Roose, Senior Product Marketing Manager, MyWebGrocer; Richard Elmore, VP, Strategic Initiatives, Allscripts; Briar Alpert, President and CEO, Biotek; Moderator: Cairn Cross, Fresh Tracks Capital

•    Consumer Products: Donna Carpenter, President, Burton Snowboards; Joe Perrotto, CEO, DR Power; Paul Comey, VP Environmental Affairs, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters; Chico Lager, former CEO Ben and Jerry’s; Ed Kiniry, Founder, Tubbs Snowshoes; Moderator: Jeremy Kent, Burton

•    Food Systems/Farm to Plate: Eric Becker, Chief Investment Officer, Clean Yield Asset Management; Jeff Jones, Managing Director, Vermont Hydroponic Produce; Earl Cronk, Senior Category Manager for Produce, Price Chopper; Robin Morris, Founder, Mad River Food Hub; Moderator: Jacob Park, Green Mountain College

Confirmed participants in the afternoon breakout sessions include Ted Castle of Rhino Foods on business development; attorneys from Downs, Rachlin, Martin and Fenwick & West on intellectual property; Justin Worthley of Burton and Beth Peters of Vivid Workplace, on sourcing and hiring talent; and Rich Nadworny of Digilicious on social media strategy.

About Startup Vermont
Startup Vermont is a new coalition of entrepreneurs, mentors, advisors, funders, major corporations and service providers, formed to provide strategic and substantive resources to help entrepreneurs start and scale companies. Startup Vermont became affiliated with The Startup America Partnership on January 31, 2012 as a designated "Startup America Region."

The recent Federal JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act is arguably the most comprehensive and sweeping piece of legislation to affect private capital markets in more than 60 years.  The JOBS Act will allow private companies to “crowdfund” equity investors and will remove the longtime prohibition of General Solicitation for Regulation D private offerings aimed at accredited investors.  Join Cairn Cross from FreshTracks Capital, Brian Murphy from Dinse, Janice Shade from True Body Products and John Cronin from BISHCA as they actively speculate what this new world of fund raising will look like. This discussion will be moderated by Dave Strubler, Dean of Champlain College’s business school, and the event will include plenty of time for questions and comments from the audience.  The event is free and open to all but is primarily of interest to, entrepreneurs interested in raising capital, angel investors who invest in Regulation D private offerings, anyone interested in participating in crowdfunded equity investments, broker dealers, registered investment advisors, professional business advisors, and students.

“There is a tremendous interest among entrepreneurs and investors in the legislative changes codified in the JOBS Act,” said Cairn Cross, Co-Founder of FreshTracks Capital, “but there is also plenty of confusion.  Although the SEC still has to promulgate rules based on the JOBS Act, we plan during our discussion to actively speculate on what challenges and opportunities will exist for entrepreneurs, investors and professional advisors because of this sweeping new regulation.”

When:  May 29th  from 7:00PM to 9:00PM
Where:  Alumni Auditorium at Champlain College.
Cost: Free
Presented by: Champlain College and Startup Vermont.

To Sign Up:   If you are a Facebook user please sign up here: https://www.facebook.com/events/280583042036337/

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The following is an exerpt from this piece.  To read the complete original article, please click here: Draker Continues Expansion, Outgrows Its "Laboratory"

Draker (www.drakerenergy.com), the global leader in turnkey solar monitoring and asset management solutions for commercial and utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems, today announced several exciting milestones and developments in the company’s evolution. To align the company’s brand identity with its growth and evolution of its products, customers and operations, the company also announced today that it is removing “Laboratories” from its name and changing its name to “Draker”. The name change precedes the renaming of Draker’s software and hardware offerings under a single Draker brand. Draker’s line of hardware formerly known as Sentalis™ and its suite of SolarWise™ software will now be offered to the global market under the new Draker PV Commercial and Draker PV Utility product names.

The following is an excerpt from the interview.  To read the complete original piece, click here: Quirky Brings Invention to the Masses

What happens once an idea makes it through your vetting process?

It moves forward into rapid product development, which is broken into 10-15 little projects that run very quickly, usually in a couple of weeks: industrial design, mechanical engineering, naming the product, colors, taglines, materials, finishes. The community works on every one of those small tasks to push the product forward. The Quirky staff of industrial designers and mechanical engineers shepherd people through to make sure there’s a cohesive product story.

You have an in-house staff of engineers and designers?

Yes, that’s fundamental to the company. We can’t successfully make invention accessible unless we can look an inventor in the eye and say with the utmost certainty, “We got you. No matter what your idea is, we can take you from soup to nuts. If you need technology to go along with it, we have technology guys. If it takes a video to explain your product, we got the video guys.” I didn’t want to hire electrical engineers on a contract basis. The people who work here are personalities that the community understands and trusts. Everyone knows JJ [Quirky's head of engineering John Jacobsen] is going to help engineer their products. JJ was a top engineer at Smart Design and engineered every Oxo product for the last ten years. That makes people confident that, if their product is engineering-heavy, they’re in good hands.How did you get from lanyard headphones to creating a community-based invention engine?

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The following is an exerpt from this piece.  To read the complete original article, please click here: EatingWell Relocates to Shelburne.

Over the last decade, EatingWell has grown from an adless quarterly to a thriving media giant, all from its offices in rural Charlotte. It lures four million unique visitors to its website each month, racks up James Beard awards for its cookbooks and articles, and recently increased print circulation from 350,000 last year to 500,000.

Some of that growth has been buoyed by Meredith Corporation, who snapped up EatingWell last summer.  At the time, some speculated (and worried) that the very local EatingWell would be moved out of state. Their worries were for naught.

"Our new owners really decided they wanted to invest in keeping us in Vermont" says Lisa Gosselin, EatingWell's editorial director. "This was also a terrific opportunity to be in a brand-new LEED-certified building." The new locale offers more space, two photo studios, a video kitchen studio, "brand-new" test kitchens and better connectivity (cell reception was poor in Charlotte).

FreshTracks’ Peak Pitch event is scheduled for March 8th at Sugarbush Resort.

Hosted by FreshTracks Capital, the Vermont Peak Pitch 2012 event will take place at the Sugarbush Ski Resort in Warren, Vermont on Thursday, March 8.  Now in its eighth year, Peak Pitch provides a relaxed, yet productive atmosphere for entrepreneurs to pitch their business ideas to investors. 

Peak Pitch brings together entrepreneurs and investors for a fun day of skiing, networking and fundraising. Entrepreneurs get the opportunity to deliver their “elevator pitch” to investors while riding the chairlift throughout the morning, after which everyone will meet for a networking luncheon and a “pitch off” in the afternoon. Thanks to our sponsors, this event is free to entrepreneurs who want to network and free to investors and advisors who are interested in hearing pitches from local businesses and willing to provide helpful feedback and counsel.

To register to attend the event, please click here: Peak Pitch 2012.  If you have questions about the event, or want to learn more, please email Holly Killary: holly@freshtrackscap.com

Peak Pitch 2012 Sponsors:

Champlain College BYOBiz,  Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network,  Dartmouth Regional Technology Center,  Entrepreneurship Initiative at Tuck,  Fieldstone Capital Partners,  Fleischer Jacobs Group,  Gallagher, Flynn & Company,  Harbor Light Capital Partners,  Linckia Development,     Merritt & Merritt & Moulton,  University of Vermont Ventures and Technology Commercialization,   Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies,  Vermont Community Loan Fund,  VT Department of Economic, Housing and Community Development,  and  VSJF Flexible Capital Fund,

The basic premise was to take 75 diverse people from all different backgrounds, divide them into six teams and present them with a challenge.  The teams were supposed to ideate an application or business concept that would further the specific localvore strategic initiatives promoted by VSJF’s Farm to Plate Study.  These strategic initiatives include measurably increasing Vermonters  consumption of Vermont produced food,  developing profitable farms and food processing facilities, create jobs in the food and farm economy and improve access to local healthy foods.

The day started with two great speakers, Richard Ting SVP for R/GA’s mobile and social platforms group and native Burlingtonian Liz Gerber, who is now the founder and director of Design For America.  Richard presented several short video clips to illustrate various social media marketing projects his company had undertaken for Nike as well as non profits.  Liz focused on the design process but she threw in some specific Vermont cultural references to ground her thoughts.

Then it was show time.  We were assigned to groups of 10-15 people.  Luckily I was assigned to the Arugula group which was led by Liz Gerber.  Liz is a master facilitator and she quickly broke the ice with a series of physical exercises designed to get all of us acquainted with each other but without getting bogged down in mundane details such as who our employers are or the typical things that drive these sorts of ice breaking sessions.  We quickly paired off and I was paired with Chris Lei a recent college grad who grew up in Chittenden County.  Chris has a fiancé, is a self professed “geek” and works for Union Street Media.  Our objective was to listen to the other person’s point of view regarding eating local food and try to find a problem to solve or “customer pain point.”  For Chris his problem was that he was interested in eating more local food but he had trouble with the “accessibility”.  Chris and his fiancé have the same problem most couples and American families do, they have limited time to plan what to eat.  Chris described the almost daily forage where they would go out to shop for what they were going to cook for dinner with only a limited idea of what they were looking for.  Sometimes the supermarket had local foods available but many times it did not.  Sure they might patronize a farmers market on occasion on the weekends but even then they might be stymied by what to do with the produce available.  Chris and his fiancé liked to cook but they are young and they are building their skills and did not necessarily consider themselves experts.

So now it was my turn to take what I had learned from Chris and turn it into a business model.  Luckily for me I have been thinking about this exact problem for quite a while.  I have seen various business models over the years that try to address some portion(s) of this same issue; and even though I am probably 30 years older than Chris I have felt the same “pain” Chris has felt.  I don’t have any more time than he has to figure out how to buy local and plan my meals out for the week.  Liz Gerber gave each of us some materials to aid our brainstorming: Legos, modeling clay, paper plates, markers, and my favorite: several cards from the iconic 1970s TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard” (yes that explains everything, doesn’t it?!).

I set to work.  My idea was that there would have to be several things to solve the pain Chris has.  First he is a geek so he wanted some digital application, preferably mobile.  Second, he was overwhelmed by choices in terms of what to cook so the solution would have to simplify his choices.  Finally, he and his fiancé are busy so they can’t run all over the place to find their local ingredients.  My solution was basically My Web Grocer’s shopping meets a simplified meal planner with recipes meets the old fashioned “milk man.” Chris would be presented with some choices for each daily meal, perhaps two or three via a digital application.  He’d select one.  The mobile CSA truck (the modern version of the milkman would deliver the ingredients necessary to make the meal to his place of work or his residence within a fairly tightly defined window of time.  I took the clay and the Legos and fashioned a truck with a carrot on the side (luckily the clay was orange!).  I set the truck on the paper plate then drew in some streets on the top of the plate.  I drew a picture of a cell phone with a primitive order entry system on it and a stick figure of Chris waiting for the truck after entering his order.

Now it was time to present our ideas. Each person in our group had a similar construction using the materials at hand.  Sadly I could not think up how to use the Dukes of Hazzard cards but others did.  We each presented our idea and then the group voted.  My idea got the top vote but the votes were very close and the second place idea was Rebecca Roose’s.  She had a similar idea (although without the delivery truck).  Her front end application was better thought out though.  That made sense because she works for My Web Grocer.  Our group was pragmatic and suggested that we mash both ideas together.  We broke for lunch and then after lunch we got back together with the entire group and began hashing out more details of the idea.  A winning name, “BeetRoute” emerged.  The front end got more elegant and complicated.  The group imagined a sliding scale where on one end there was a recipe so basic the ingredients would be delivered off the truck chopped, washed and in the right quantities so that all that was required was assembly and a bit of cooking.  On the other end of the sliding scale would be a complicated recipe requiring the cook to do a tremendous amount of preparation.  If the consumer was in a hurry on a weeknight they might opt for “assembly” and if they had time to spare (perhaps on a weekend) they might opt for “epicurean” and try out a more complicated option.

The back end got more complicated too.  I imagined a way to construct a series of recipes based on what would be in season locally and then based on a front end consumer subscription model where subscribers would sign up for a minimum number of nights per week of food, BeetRoute could  forecast demand from growers and contract with them as necessary to ensure that they could “focus on growing” rather than on marketing and selling.  Of course we’d have to have contingent plans for seasonal weather shifts and crop failures which would add complexity.  We’d need a warehousing and processing facility of and rolling stock and a pretty complicated logistics system with real time communication to keep track of who was ordering and where they wanted to pick things up. Geo-locational devices would be needed to keep track of where the truck was.

Before long the afternoon had slipped away and it was time to present our idea to the entire 75 person Social Hack group.   Miraculously every group had a unique idea.  Beetroute squeaked out the largest number of votes as the best idea of the day.  Our model would create jobs, improve the accessibility and access to local foods and would help farmers grow their businesses profitably. So what did I learn out of all of this?  First, assembling a smart group of people to focus on a problem for a concentrated period of time can indeed produce a number of possible elegant solutions.  Second, experienced facilitators can keep things moving towards an end goal with a minimum amount of disruption.  Third, it’s important to keep in mind the business model when you are brainstorming ideas.

*Thank you to Stephen Mease of Champlain College for all of the images used in this blog post. * 

To read the complete newsletter, please click here: the freshtracks flurry feb 2012

Together with Vermont entrepreneurs, Lawrence Miller, Vermont Secretary of Commerce and Community Development, announced the launch of Startup Vermont on the one-year anniversary of the Startup America Partnership, a national effort to help startup businesses grow and jumpstart job creation. To date, Startup America Partnership has launched eight state affiliates, and is offering startups $1.2 billion in resources.

With support from Green Mountain College and Ashoka’s Youth Venture, Cairn Cross, Co-Founder of Fresh Tracks Capital and Startup Vermont helped conduct an initial assessment of Vermont’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“Two areas of the assessment jumped out at us as providing opportunities to support our state’s entrepreneurs,” said Mr. Cross.  “First, our group identified a mismatch between certain skills and talent available in the state as compared to the jobs available.  This is particularly acute in the technology industry.  Next, the assessment group expressed an interest in connecting and engaging small startup and early stage Vermont business enterprises with large successful Vermont businesses. We know that close connections between large established companies and startup businesses dramatically improve an economic ecosystem.”

Startup Vermont (www.startupvt.org) is a private initiative driven by Vermont entrepreneurs.  Its goal is to create a “front door” for entrepreneurs looking to start businesses in the state. 

To read more about the launch, click here: Startup Vermont Launched

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