Interview with Chamber's innovation expert Evan Fay: 'We need to be a bridge builder'
Photo courtesy of Steve Johnson.
For several years, momentum around Oklahoma City’s entrepreneurship community has been growing. Every month it seems new resources become available, new initiatives are launched and local companies are being put on the national stage.
Recently, VeloCity sat down with Evan Fay, manager of innovation and entrepreneurship for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. Fay is the Chamber’s point person when it comes to connecting with entrepreneurs in OKC and has been involved with the launch of several new initiatives to help keep the community’s momentum going.
Editor’s note: This will be a two-part series. Part one, below, focuses on how the pandemic impacted our local entrepreneurship community and the 2021 Regional Startup Census. Part two will run later this month and focus on new initiatives that have launched this year and next steps that need to be taken by the larger community to help local innovation thrive.
VeloCity: The current pandemic has dominated everything this year. How do you feel like it has affected Oklahoma City’s startup community?
Fay: It has been interesting because the last two years have felt like a lot of momentum had been building for our startup ecosystem. Despite COVID, our startup community in Oklahoma City became even more connected. I think the pandemic created more desire from local founders for organizations like us to play a role and help get even more people connected.
I think we were naturally headed in that direction and there were a lot of things that led up to that. Regular meetups and new programs, like the Thunder Launchpad, are hitting their stride which has created real energy in our community.
Then COVID hit and honestly, if anything, the momentum has done nothing but grow. Entrepreneurship is a lonely sport to begin with. Now everybody is working from home and so we all kind of had to default to a founder's mentality of I've got to really go out of my way to communicate with my teammates. I have to really go out of my way to find and build community. As a result, a lot more of these “Zoom meetups” have started popping up like Entrepreneurs in Tech. As bad as this past year has been, it has been exciting to see Oklahoma City’s entrepreneurial community come together and use it as an opportunity for growth.
What role do you think the Chamber should play in helping build a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem?
We need to be a bridge builder between entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, corporate innovation teams and entrepreneur support organizations to achieve results that no single entity can by itself. We have the power of being a convener. I talk to founders and ecosystem builders all the time who just want to meet others like them, who are interested in what they’re interested in, and who want to build with them. We are seen as a resource to help connect those dots and to find the right resources and people to help scale a business in the most frictionless way possible.
Read a recent Q&A with Quest to Learn Founder Ryan Bupp.
One of the newest initiatives the Chamber has launched has been the annual OKC Regional Startup Census. 2020 was the first year for this and the 2021 census is currently live for founders to fill out. Talk a little about how this project came about.
The Startup Census has been pivotal to us in just a short amount of time. It started when I read Inc Magazine’s Surge Cities list in 2019 – a list of the top 50 cities to grow and sustain a startup environment - and Oklahoma City ranked No. 37. One of the things that they specifically called out was the dollars of venture capital that were invested in Oklahoma City the year prior. I think the number they threw out was $6.5 million. And I thought to myself, I know for a fact there was more than that. After doing some research, it was easy to tell no one here is reporting their deals and that was a major factor in our ranking. Ultimately, we wanted to find a way to measure the startup activity here so we developed the Startup Census. I figured that if venture deals were being underreported, and we aren’t doing a good enough job of telling our own story as a city, there is probably a wealth of information that we as a community don’t know about our startup ecosystem. So the census is an initiative that seeks to change that – to give the community insights into who’s starting companies, what industry they’re in, how they’re funded, what sort of real estate they occupy, how many people they employ, and so on. The first census was open for a month and 131 companies responded. It was a better response than we thought we were going to get.
What were some takeaways from last year’s census?
The real clear takeaway was that we don't have big enough diversity among people founding businesses. For the most part, the founder of a company in OKC is a 35-39 year old white male who has at least a bachelor’s degree. This tells me that we as a community need to invest in resources along the spectrum to encourage a more diverse set of founders to start businesses. Increase access to early-stage capital (both debt and equity), strengthen our pool of mentors, and loudly tell the stories of founders in our city who have built companies.
And overwhelmingly, the founders that completed the survey were unaware of resources that exist to help them.
Those takeaways helped launched our biggest initiatives last year. First, we started the Launch OKC Metro app in partnership with Francis Tuttle. That app is a resource navigator for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Once you sign up you can find coworking space, an incubator, a capital provider, a bank that does SBA lending, mentors, and events for entrepreneurs, technologists and founders.
Learn more about the Launch OKC Metro app.
The second thing was bringing Kiva to Oklahoma City. Kiva provides micro lending for founders that haven't been able to access traditional lines of credit or other forms of startup financing. They're small loans, up to $15,000, and 60 to 65% of the borrowers are women and minority-owned businesses. They are no-interest loans and no fees positively affect their credit. It is a building block for future types of funding and financing. Editor's note: Progress OKC, who is helping oversee the Kiva program in OKC, was recently awarded a grant from the National League of Cities and the Kaufmann Foundation to help implement Kiva here.
Lastly, we helped Cultivating Coders launch in Oklahoma City to increase the number of underserved students that have access to computer science education that could one day turn them into a technical founder.
Students from Millwood High School and Metro Tech Academy’s Springlake campus participated in the initial Cultivating Coders boot camp in 2020. Earlier this year, an adult camp was launched.
Read some takeaways from last year's OKC Regional Startup Census.
What are you hoping to get out of this year’s census?
So far the response has been great - we’ve collected more responses so far than we had at this point last year, so the hope is that there will be a larger sample size from the survey this year. We'll validate some of the things that we saw last year and strengthen some of these correlations and prove the need for continued investment and work in those areas. We also ask about COVID’s impact so I’m interested to see the results there. We asked questions like, “Did you apply for federal state local programs? Did you get everything you asked for? Did you not? How could the community have done a better job serving you and your business?” And so understanding a little bit in retrospect, the impact of COVID on these businesses is important.
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