competitive in Madison than it is in Silicon Valley. Salaries are not as high, and employees are more loyal and stick around with the company longer, Moberg said.
But there is an intangible component as well. Madison and the Midwest were good to SnowShoe, Moberg said.
“Madison is a startup community small enough that everybody is rooting for each other,” Moberg said.
And they certainly seemed to be rooting for SnowShoe. The startup earned a number of plaudits during its early years, when the company was still trying to determine its course. Moberg and a SnowShoe engineer were part of the team that won the 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon with Livebolt, which allowed users to unlock doors with iPhones. That earned them $5,000.
SnowShoe also was invited to attend an accelerator program run by Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia, according to an article in the Madison-based Wisconsin State Journal.
“We very quickly became a big fish in a small pond and had people rooting for us and trying to help us,” Moberg said.
That goodwill helped SnowShoe raise $719,000, split between a $219,000 equity investment and $500,000 in debt. The investors include Wisconsin Investment Partners and Silicon Pastures, angel groups based in Madison and Milwaukee, respectively.
Hitting the road
By the standards of Wisconsin tech, SnowShoe was becoming a big deal, but that came with a catch. A couple, actually.
Relatively small communities that are tight-knit and supportive can be great places to start, but most entrepreneurs convinced they’re on to something big will want to grow beyond their hometown. That’s true with SnowShoe, and that required it to be realistic about a startup’s prospects in the Midwest.
First, while people are more loyal (and generally nicer), there are just a lot fewer folks with the technical talent and experience scaling a company that many startups need, especially when they hit their growth spurt, Moberg said.
“The supply of accomplished developers in Wisconsin is much smaller than in San Francisco,” he said.
So is the pool of investors.
“It’s pretty hard to raise money in the Midwest,” Moberg said. “There’s not a ton of investors focused on IT startups that you would see at Techstars or in San Francisco or in New York City or in Boulder. We’re sort of the outlier, and raising that money in Wisconsin was substantially more difficult than it would have been outside the state.”
And sometimes, an atmosphere can be too supportive.
“Because the bar is higher [in Silicon Valley], you actually have to have a better product. In Wisconsin at times, it was pretty easy to drink your own Kool-Aid,” Moberg said. “People almost didn’t care what the product was, they wanted to help however possible, so you could continue down a long road that was actually going in the wrong direction and never get the feedback that what you’re doing isn’t going to work.”
That wasn’t a problem in Techstars and afterward, Moberg said. Outside Wisconsin, SnowShoe’s reputation meant little, and its ideas were judged on their merits and the company on the steep growth curves established by other successful startups.
Moberg believes SnowShoe is on its way, though, and currently it is trying to get its hardware and software into the hands of test customers. That’s involved field testing the product to see exactly how potential customers would use it.
The company also is working on raising a Series A funding round, and an announcement about that could be forthcoming.
“We’re off and running,” Moberg said.
