re: Challenge: Rivals II Season Thread

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BetaBlox: Fostering Innovation

deas like Front Flip are precisely the kind that seed accelerator BetaBlox is ready to attract and nurture.

BetaBlox comprehensively lends a long-term hand to local businesses at the startup stage. Its team members do all the footwork for the fledgling entrepreneur by providing such services as free Web development, graphic design and photography, and typically do so for up to a six-month period.

Three young Johnson County natives are predominantly heading up the BetaBlox team. Lead investor Weston Bergmann, along with Jonathan Yoder and Alex Altomare, all graduated from high school in 2003: Bergmann and Yoder from Blue Valley North, Altomare from Rockhurst.

Bergmann says the best way to describe what’s going on is they are re-enhanced networks. In isolation, anyone can get the hang of Web development. Well, eventually. But applicants chosen by BetaBlox have all manner of service providers at their disposal, contributing their time and knowledge to mentoring these people until they’re ready to start generating revenue.

“What’s also kind of different,” Bergmann says, “is the intangible benefits of having entrepreneurs be around each other that are working on different projects, but are all in the same stage in business as each other. We’re calling that entrepreneurial cross-pollination, to where you might talk to 100 people a day because you see a bunch of customers and you’re talking to a bunch of different service providers. But ultimately it’s a very lonely experience. By putting all the different companies under one roof while they’re blossoming, it allows them to not feel so alone in the path that they’re taking with their careers.”

The entrepreneurs that BetaBlox consults—10 companies made the cut, while 90 percent of the applications had to be turned down as it opened—congregate and bounce ideas back and forth in the comfort (and isolation) of a huge cave-like space just west of Penn Valley Community College. And BetaBlox doesn’t ask to pay rent. Everywhere you walk, you can pretty much write all over the facility. One wall of every single office is done in IdeaPaint, ready to be scribbled on for impromptu meetings.

A mentorship program with a list of 50-plus people in the Kansas City business community also allows the entrepreneurs to learn the ropes. So does a 16-week class led by ex-Black and Veatch chief financial officer and Johnson County Community College professor Geoff Heathcock. As Heathcock says, it’s not a “Mickey Mouse class” by any stretch.

Heathcock believes in what Bergmann and his crew are doing as they plan to foster innovation. He is more than willing to participate, because they’re like sponges ready to learn, and he’s a proponent of its long-term orientation. And for guys who haven’t even reached 30 yet, that thinking impresses him.

“When they have any kind of question at all, I’m going to be back there to answer their questions and I will mentor them. Because this is important to me,” Heathcock says. “Most incubators don’t have that. They have people that just come in and go out, and they don’t really have ongoing mentors. So I’ve got all the horse sense of a teacher and of a professor, and all the reality of what really needs to be done.”

Bergmann, a veteran of MTV’s Real World franchise, says BetaBlox won’t make a solitary dollar until companies reach a successful liquidation event. Consequently it’s in their best interests to stay in contact with them as much as possible.

Although details couldn’t be divulged, as of January, BetaBlox has officially given the keys to companies specializing in Web-based software and other technology-driven ideas, including some with inherent social networking coded into the software. Bergmann considers the weeks leading up to the Investor Demo Day in January, where the first batch of entrepreneurs finally pitched their ideas to a room full of investors, to be among the best of his life.

“I’ve been dreaming about how I’ve been going to help entrepreneurs since I was a little kid,” Bergmann says, “and here I am implementing a plan that I’ve been putting to paper for the past four years on a different side of the country. And it is all becoming tangible and being realized in front of my eyes.”

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