The Startup Champions Network (SCN) fall summit is in the books, and attendees carried the flavor of Augusta with them as they departed.
The network, started in 2014 to provide leaders of entrepreneurial ecosystems the support and tools to foster success, holds two summits each year. This marked the first time Augusta has been the host.
Leading the Augusta event were Eric Parker and Grace Belangia, co-founders of theClubhou.se, based in the Georgia Cyber Innovation and Technology Center. They are also behind Make Startups Augusta, a project to nurture entrepreneurship.
“I’ve heard from so many people that have been here for this event that this is one of, if not the best Startup Champions Network summits they’ve ever been,” Parker told ABD. “To the level that we’ve been able to connect people to our city and create an immersive experience where they get to feel like they’re also members of theClubhou.se.”
The summit brought an international group of speakers and attendees, including those from Botswana, Ecuador, and Quebec.
Louis-Felix Binette, with Main, a Quebec-based program to encourage and accelerate innovation, was among the international contingent. The summit in Augusta was the first he had attended. He called it an unconference, more than a show of chairs on a stage.
“The real conference is happening in between the official things that happened on stage, and what happens on stage is only there to fuel the connection between the people,” he said. “In the Imperial Theater, we heard a bunch of pitches, points of view, ways of interpreting a situation, examples of how you can change city policy, all of these different examples and condensed into small nuggets. And up to 2:30 in the morning, we were still jamming, jazzing about what we heard. What was important was not what was being said on stage, it was what was made possible in terms of conversations that couldn’t be planned.”
Parker attributed part of the success of the summit to the wide range of locations it incorporated.
“The thing that we tried our best to do was to show people the C.S.R.A. through our eyes,” he said. “We took them not only to theClubhou.se and to the Cyber Center, but we also got them on riverboats. We took them to SRP Park, we had dinner, we had a startup showcase where we had a wide variety of local startups present to them, from faith-based custom tee-shirts and candles to technology platforms.”
In the past, SCN summits have been held in much larger cities such as San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Dallas.
Harald Eisenhaur is co-founder of DEEP Ecosystems, a company based in Germany that invests in entrepreneurs that build ecosystems. He said bringing the SCN summit to Augusta was a great achievement.
“To bring such a national event to a small town like Augusta, it’s not something you see every day, so this should be valued,” he said. “The role of ecosystem building is often overlooked, not valued enough. There’s a lack of investment. Seed investments across the country are falling. In Georgia, there were, I think, six seed investments in startups this year. And in Augusta, there were none.”
Binette said Augusta was an example of how smaller metropolitan areas are vital to building entrepreneurial ecosystems.
“The one thing that I bring home from this very experience here is that the stuff that we do is not exclusive to metro areas of a million people or more,’ he said. “It’s not the critical mass of the population or the number of dollars invested that makes a difference. It’s building something with what you have, the building blocks you have, and there are no wrong answers.”
While the goal was to share what Augusta has learned about startups and entrepreneurship, Parker said summit attendees left their mark on Augusta.
“We’ve made a lot of amazing friends that can help our community really propel to another level.”
