pieces were there to build a high-growth startup ecosystem in Wisconsin—they just hadn’t been properly put together up to that point.
“[Company] founders were kind of just on their own to navigate a pretty fragmented ecosystem and figure out, ‘Who is a good mentor?’” and find answers to similar questions, she says.
As Gener8tor holds programs in more cities, it expects the early-stage networks there to mature. And there can be significant benefits that come with scale, Brickerman says.
“If you’re just by yourself, it’s really hard to convince someone to be your first customer,” she says. “But if you can be surrounded with resources and social proof, a lot of the things that you need in the beginning can come a lot quicker. And so the vision as we are putting these nodes in other places is that we can then level-up that type of efficiency across a much broader region.”
