Looking For Entrepreneurial Resources? Try Jackson Hole

Quick, what’s the nation’s top mecca for entrepreneurial training and talent? Before reading this headline, I’m betting you wouldn’t have said Jackson Hole. Nor would I before talking to Liza Millet, a former Wall Street investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of Silicon Couloir, a non-profit organization in Teton County for the advancement of entrepreneurs.

I met Millet, a consummate lover of sports (she played four years of Division 1 ice hockey for Dartmouth, I learned) last September at a Summit event for the Hero Partners, where she presented on funding strategies for entrepreneurs.

At the event and afterwards she told me about the growing migration of talent to Jackson, and what it means to aspiring entrepreneurs. In a nutshell, as leaders achieve lucrative exits or reach retirement, they are no longer required to live in the nation’s high metropolis districts. Free to live wherever they please, many are choosing Jackson as a prime location for fishing, skiing, rafting and riding and a myriad of art and culture events.

By their nature, however, entrepreneurial icons rarely sit still. They often divert their business attention to angel investing, mentoring and teaching future entrepreneurs.

Millet is one of them, and is heavily involved in coalescing the area’s rich business resources toward programs to benefit the next era of entrepreneurs. As a case in point, she’s joined with former Bostonian Sandy Hessler, a former Assistant Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, to create the Start Up Institute, providing a focused training program for entrepreneurs in cooperation with Central Wyoming College.

Participants gear up for a 10-week 200-hour program that meets 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to accomplish MBA- and MFA-level projects related to the ins and outs of owning and running a business. Most days include live presentations from world-class entrepreneurs who’ve already experienced great successes or who have valuable information and experience to add. Members also learn from each other, getting candid about what they’re good at and the realities of business they hate.

“There are some tears occurring here several times a week,” says Hessler. “The community we’re creating is learning a great deal about vulnerability and trust.”

During the program entrants have use of the Institute’s sponsoring Co-Work facility, Spark Jackson Hole (www.SparkJH.com). Entrants also get 10 hours of post-program consulting from the team of resident experts that includes serial entrepreneurs and an all-star cast of Harvard, Dartmouth and Wharton grads.

“Finals” take place in the form of a live pitch event at the Center for the Arts, with pending graduates presenting their business, their story, and their three- to five-year outlooks to an audience of local business people, mentors, and yes, in some cases, prospective investors. (Millet is also a representative of the investor roster—in her day job she is a portfolio manager for Income Focus Portfolio Management.)

Start Up Institute can claim at least a handful of early successes including Vera Iconica Architecture, which hired five full-time people since founder Veronica Schreibeis graduated from the program in 2014, and she has also achieved several international speaking engagements. Likewise, GarageGrownGear.com launched its site, then its ecommerce engine, and achieved an Honorable Mention at Silicon Couloir's annual Pitch Day in August, successfully raising an initial round of seed funding that was slightly under $100K, Millet says. This company was little more than an idea when founder Amy Hatch participated in the Start Up Institute program (and as a side note, Hatch had given up her prior job just a week before the program started to commit to her entrepreneurial dreams).

Speaking of presentations, many Jackson entrepreneurs including some SUI graduates also participate in Silicon Couloir's August Pitch Day events. In this program, entrepreneurs pitch to a full-on crowd that includes some of the region's most active investors and boasts a growing list of good outcomes:

•  Yellowberry closed a 500K round in late 2014. (I profiled Yellowberry Founder Megan Grassell in this September article.) Grassell has been in a number of national media appearances, including acknowledgement as one of Time Magazine’s Most Inspirational Teens of the year for 2014. I met her last summer at—you guessed it—a Jackson Hole-based entrepreneurial event.

•  Early warning gas alert company Alert Plus has achieved an angel investment that closed just this week.

• Green waste company BioPacr won Best in Show acknowledgement at the Green Industry and Equipment Expo (GIE) in October, 2014.

• GearWise (www.GearWise.com), a platform for increasing sales of sports and athletic gear by obtaining reviews from professional athletes won the Best Pitch and Hero Partners prize in the August 2014 Pitch Day and is in the process of closing a round of funding.

• Beverage company Dustcutter (www.dustcutter.com) closed a 500K round of funding in 2014 after presenting at Pitch Day in 2013.

If your business idea is ready and your appetite is whetted, applications for the next session of the bi-annual Institute program run Jan 1 through March 15 with classes starting April 7.

Additionally, and on a bigger scale, Jackson Hole news reports note that Rocky Mountain Economic Summit co-sponsors Hero Partners (led by Founder Rob Ryan of Ascend Communications fame and co-CEOs Justin Hyde and Tyler Norton) have acquired the 780-acre golf course and resort property Teton Springs. Among other ambitions, the group intends to finish the property’s conference center and to launch a program called Hero Global Initiative (I mentioned it last month when I recently participated myself) that will create and support a global network of entrepreneurs.

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial hubs springing up in unlikely locations is not exclusive to Jackson. Reports point to locations like Kansas City (gigabit networking); Santiago, Chile (women entrepreneurs); Amsterdam (friendly tax structure); and even Istanbul (a developing economy with untapped marketing potential). But for those who favor an outdoor haven with an upbeat cultural vibe, it’s hard to top Jackson Hole.