Start Garden meets Startup Zoo in happy hour event

Start Garden is going on the road and the first place it is coming to is Kalamazoo.

Startup Zoo, an organization that brings Kalamazoo entrepreneurs together and is working to create an environment that promotes tech entrepreneurship, will host the Start Garden team in a happy hour event Sept. 5 at the Sky Deck downtown.

Kim Klap of Start Garden says the event came about after she was invited to be a judge at Kalamazoo's spring Startup Weekend. The passion of the organizers and how well the weekend ran impressed her. (She also was impressed by the involvement of Mayor Bobby Hopewell in the weekend event.) She returned to the Start Garden team and suggested they find a way to collaborate with the growing entrepreneurial scene in Kalamazoo.

Start Garden, launched in April 2012 in Grand Rapids, is the unique, Rick DeVos-driven enterprise that provides financial, intellectual and social capital -- the money, the the ideas and the connections -- a person with an idea for a business needs to see it become reality.

The $15 million seed accelerator is building "an environment for back-of-the-napkin ideas to grow," as Start Garden likes to put it.

Each week Start Garden invests in two ideas, each of them receiving $5,000. Start Garden judges pick one idea from a number presented in a public forum and the public picks the second.

All the companies that get money come back to Start Garden to talk about how it is going and what they have learned from their start up. Companies that move from idea phase to viable busines may be found to be eligible for $20,000 in a second round of funding. A $50,000 round also is available for those who may be ready for funding at that level.

At the Kalamazoo event, Rick DeVos will talk about Start Garden and there will be lightening progress updates from a number of Kalamazoo area companies that have received Start Garden's initial funding.

Klap says the evening will be a chance to promote the connection between entrepreneurs in Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids and create visibility for some Kalamazoo startups. "The two cities are so close and this is a chance to grow the entrepreneurial ecology between them -- to make the state a little bit smaller," Klap says. "We're excited about the chance of uncovering some very cool ideas here."

Local organizers are equally enthusiastic.

"You'll have a wonderful opportunity to engage with founder Rick DeVos and the entire Start Garden team, learn more about their program, and absorb the entrepreneurial community in Southwest Michigan," says Ryan Goin, co-founder of Startup Zoo.

For more details on the event, click here.

Writer: Kathy Jennings, Second Wave Media
Source: Kim Klap, Start Garden