Last month, Cortado Ventures hosted our second annual Midcon VC Summit with 360 attendees from 30 states representing $1.5 trillion. Builders, backers and supporters converged in Bentonville, AR, to collaborate on the opportunities and challenges for regional tech startups.
I was blown away by the hospitality and vibrancy of the venture ecosystem in NW Arkansas, drawing so many curious about this third wave of innovation. In a world of digital meets the physical world — where bits meet atoms — the Midcontinent is leading the way.
So many highlights, one was my fireside chat with Katie Koch, CEO of TCW. Her insights into the global market across asset classes, and ability to articulate for action, is second to none. Allocating to venture for vintage diversification and arbitrage in a downturn is a winning move, especially when seeking alpha with niche managers. CEOs who focus on fundamentals like unit economics and cash flow will survive and thrive in the venture winter.
The idea for the Midcontinent Venture Capital Summit was born from a simple idea: how do we get the region’s best builders and backers in a room together to spur nascent innovation? The Midcontinent has many advantages and is a natural home to a certain type of tech entrepreneurship. So many founders who come from legacy industries are leaving their “day jobs” to start tech companies, and angels, VCs, and allocators are looking to the region as a “domestic emerging market.” Coming together in a meaningful way supercharges this trend.
I’ll illustrate through a recent example.
Starting in the late 90s until recent memory, trends like SaaS, AI and Machine Learning dominated tech investment. Founders with strong technical backgrounds began building products to simplify lives. Much of it was focused on what we experience in our everyday lives: how to connect through social platforms, conveniently buy products, travel where we needed to go. This wave of innovation created Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and so much more.
Thanks to this consumer focused technology, we have a powerful tech stack. The second wave of innovation saw an adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) be incorporated into enterprise applications. Think Salesforce and Dropbox.
In this third wave of innovation, we are beginning to see sector-specific entrepreneurs realize a new future, where these digital transformations can be applied in novel ways to the built environment. Founders with ample industry experience are frustrated by the pace of innovation, and have amassed proprietary data sets throughout their careers.
Enter Apricot Technologies. With two decades of operating experience under hist belt, founder Trent Smith was frustrated by the reporting load that his healthcare providers experienced. His company addresses this problem with an LLM for home healthcare and hospice reporting. Now nurses can do what they do best — deliver care to patients — and reduce reporting time by 85%.
Apricot is an example of human-in-the-loop AI, proprietary data enabled SaaS that is defining this third wave of innovation. The kind of innovation that comes from an experienced operator leveraging technology.
It was at a similar gathering where Trent got the spark. This is why we created the Midcontinent Venture Capital Summit (MVCS). Any opportunity to create these moments is pure gold in venture capital. Everybody wins: founders, tech workers, angels, VCs and LPs.
MVCS saw many breakouts catered to different audiences. We had experts like Quinn Robertson train angel investors, Build in Tulsa Techstars Accelerator founders pitch VCs, Bryce Murray give insights on hiring tech talent, ecosystem builders like C. Renzi Stone and Troy Vosseller gener8tor reveal their innovative plans to attract talent and capital for critical mass, Steuart Walton on building the quality of life and essential entrepreneurial elements, and so much more.
Fortune, Lydia Fletcher, Arkansas Money & Politics, Paul Gatling, Axios, NPR and The Journal Record expertly covered the magic and why it matters. High paying jobs, economic opportunity, incredible founders and investors seeking alpha support the buzz.
Thanks to Visit Bentonville, Northwest Arkansas Council, Walton Family Foundation, Runway Group, and all our Bentonville friends who rolled out the red carpet. The atmosphere was electric. So many follow ups, so much goodwill, a lot of attention on the Midcontinent with a new outlook on the future of venture capital.
A huge thank you to our amazing Cortado Ventures team and Simone Sparks for absolutely crushing it. Incredibly hard work to make the magic happen, and it happened in a big way. And special thanks to Matt Tarver and Donald Huffner for being in the trenches with us, the ultimate convener and collaborator. Can’t forget the University of Arkansas hog call, the most memorable call-to-action in venture history. It began just a year ago (crazy), and there’s so much more to do.
