Iron Yard students train at a class in Austin, Texas. Inset, CEO Peter Barth, who says the coding school isn't returning to Little Rock.
The ingredients exist to make Arkansas a place where tech-based entrepreneurship can thrive.
Public and private resources such as the Arkansas Economic Development Commission’s Innovate Arkansas program have helped bolster tech-based startups by providing quality and sustained mentorship to assist in business and financial model development, along with guidance in preparing those startups to present their products to investors.
Plus, the overall access to seed capital in Arkansas has increased dramatically with the development of nine new private investment groups in the last four years. Perhaps the last piece of the puzzle necessary to develop a truly viable tech startup ecosystem is an increased focus on the growth of local tech talent.
Peter Barth believes Little Rock can follow the model set by Greenville, South Carolina, where he launched the Iron Yard coding school.
The Iron Yard sets up shop in downtown Little Rock in May, when it will begin intensive courses in front-end engineering, rails engineering and mobile engineering. The school was recruited to Little Rock by Innovate Arkansas and serial entrepreneur/investor Kristian Andersen of Conway.
Barth launched the school in 2013 to help infuse Greenville’s budding tech startup ecosystem with homegrown talent. His Iron Yard Ventures accelerator was pumping out startups, but those companies had to look out of state for the technical talent they needed.
“If we wanted our portfolio companies to stay in Greenville, we had to fix the talent pipeline,” he said.
The tech startup ecosystems in Little Rock and northwest Arkansas face the same conundrum. The tech talent that exists in Arkansas is good, just not deep: We need a longer bench. More coders and developers are needed to staff the tech startups emerging organically and from programs such as the ARK Challenge accelerator, created with federal funds from the Economic Development Administration, which IA applied for and secured in 2012.
The ARK’s first two federally funded runs were so successful they prompted state and private investment, and installments three and four were completed last year.
Innovate Arkansas has been directly involved in talent development as well. It offered up an initial seed amount of $50,000 in support of the Arkansas Fellowship program which aims to keep Arkansas’ entrepreneurial talent at home. IA’s $50,000 was matched by awards of $25,000 each from the Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce and the Northwest Arkansas Council to help start the program, which provides two-year internships for in-state graduating college seniors at leading Arkansas companies and startups.
Essentially, the program recruits the state’s top graduating seniors to stay in Arkansas.
Still, more is needed. While most visitors to Arkansas leave pleasantly surprised at what they find here, Arkansas can’t import enough talent to keep up with its tech startup growth. Like South Carolina, Arkansas needs an infusion of homegrown talent. Lacking the high-tech resources of hotbeds such as Silicon Valley, Austin or the Research Triangle in North Carolina, growing it — and keeping local talent at home — is crucial to future growth.
“Put a fence around the state,” college coaches like to say about recruiting athletes. That could apply to tech-based entrepreneurs as well.
Enter Innovate Arkansas. Since its launch in 2008, IA has nurtured, bolstered and propped up Arkansas’ techpreneurs. It has mentored and guided them, pointed them towards funding sources, and through the ARK Challenge, the G60 pitch competition and sponsorships of events like Startup Weekend, accelerated them.
Moving forward, the development of local tech talent to staff the growing number of tech startups is priority No. 1 in the state’s tech startup community. Nurture, accelerate, but now a focus on talent development to stem the state’s historic brain drain — IA 3.0, as it were.
In concert with the state’s emphasis on developing a highly trained workforce and most recently its mandate that computer science be offered in every Arkansas high school, IA is helping set the stage for the further development of the tech startup ecosystem. While IA will continue to nurture and support tech-based startups in Arkansas, Andersen believes IA’s next role should focus on talent development.
“There are many different stages in economic development, and with each different things are needed,” he said. “Innovate Arkansas built the foundation that was necessary in year one of our tech startup development. You need an organization to do that. Early on, IA created an infrastructure where young and inexperienced entrepreneurs could get help. IA provided a sounding board, mentorship and critical advice needed for businesses to get off the ground.
“Now, the focus has to be on keeping our best and brightest at home and growing the kind of tech talent necessary to support a viable tech startup ecosystem.”
Andersen foresees corporate, internal mini-accelerators hosted by Arkansas companies that would give employees the chance to innovate in their respective fields.
The Arkansas Fellowship program, the idea for which was hatched by Andersen based on a similar program in Indiana, is doing something similar to that by placing potential innovators in Arkansas companies.
“I had witnessed the impact of the Orr Fellowship program in Indiana and thought a similar concept would be a great fit for Arkansas,” Andersen said.
The pool of qualified tech developers and coders may be shallow, for now, but Arkansas is producing plenty of entrepreneurial talent. Innovate Arkansas is helping place them in positions to succeed, and that could mean matching a commercialization-ready client firm with the right CEO or simply helping attract the technical help needed to take the next step.
Steve Bethel is CEO of Little Rock’s Angel Eye Camera Systems, a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences startup that developed a way for parents of premature babies in neonatal hospital units to monitor their kids 24/7. Bethel was hired to lead the startup’s commercialization efforts beyond UAMS, and he was partnered with Angel Eye through the IA network.
“IA especially has been helpful for Angel Eye,” he said. “It not only has shepherded us through the whole process, but has been a resource helping us attract talent. We’ve really had to rely on out-of-state development until recently.”
Angel Eye recently contracted with a Little Rock software development agency, Few, which incubates its own startups such as ARK Challenge alum Tagless Style and is the agency behind the nationally up-and-coming tech conference, Made by Few.
A decade ago, the notion of such an event based in Little Rock would’ve been considered far-fetched. And while the state still has some work to do in terms of being able to support a truly viable ecosystem, it’s getting there.
“The transformation in Arkansas has been pretty remarkable,” Andersen said.
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