Yesterday
concluded the first ever Big Kansas City conference, held by Silicon
Prairie News.
Over the course of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, entrepreneurs, investors,
startups and creative folks of all kinds gathered in the Charles B. Wheeler
Downtown Airport Museum (National Airline History Museum). Discussion topics
varied from speaker to speaker, but each brought their own unique blend of
humor, insight, wisdom and knowledge.
Wednesday’s
speaker schedule started off with Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. During his speech, he
highlighted Sprint’s commitment to innovation as well as Kansas City’s growing
technology startup community. During his speech, he singled out recent SXSWi
Accelerator winner Phone2Action, a member
of the Think Big Accelerator program,
as evidence of Kansas City startup ingenuity.
 |
| Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is excited about Kansas City Startups (photo by Kenny Johnson) |
After
Dan, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave a casual, engaging and
intellectually provocative speech about starting Reddit, Internet freedom and
the Midwestern entrepreneur boom.
Other
highlights from Wednesday included charity:water founder and CEO Scott Harrison,
whose riveting images and global insight left many in the audience speechless
and reaching for Kleenex; Adam Wilson of Sphero, who explained how their team
got President Obama to use their product; Vayable CEO Jamie Wong, who presented
an engaging lecture about the most important things to remember as an
entrepreneur (#1: Build the world you want to live in.); Dan Martell of
clarity.fm, who instead of talking about anything having to do with his
business (an interesting decision), gave a lengthy speech about his brother’s
entrepreneurial struggles and eventual triumph.
 |
| charity:water CEO Scott Harrison's presentation captivated and deeply moved the audience (photo by Kenny Johnson) |
A
special edition of 1 Million Cups was conducted during lunch, with
speeches from the Leap2 search team and the founder of Startup Genome. Both
companies focus on search: Leap2 is redefining search to be more interactive,
responsive, and answer-driven; Startup Genome is creating a
crowdsourced/perpetually evolving startup directory for the entire nation.
 |
| Jamie Wong: "Build the world you want to live in" (photo by Kenny Johnson) |
The
rest of the afternoon was equally engaging, with talks from Dhani Jones of
BowTie Cause and Ryan Jones of Proxibid, an extended Q&A panel and a party
in the evening.
Some
highlights from day two of Big Kansas City include:
·
Kauffman
Foundation VP of Entrepreneurship Thom Ruhe giving a riveting speech about his
interactions and involvement with Sohael
Chowdhury, creator
of YELL Bangladesh.
·
Science
Inc. co-founder Mike Macadaan speaking about his passion and companies
innovations (plus he gave away cord tacos).
·
Code
for America Chief of Staff Abhi Nemani gave a potent lecture about civic platforms,
the wide-open market for government IT infrastructure (did you know it’s a $140
billion/year industry?), and the coming wave of open-source coding.
·
Citizen
Made CEO Rachel Brooks, whose speech about the maker movement was inspiring and
thought-provoking.
·
Graphic.ly
CEO Micah Baldwin, whose potently honest and raw insight into the importance of
taking care of oneself in the hurricane of entrepreneurialism left the room
unsettled in a very good way.
·
Yahoo!
Mobile Project Manager Bart Stein, whose contrarian tips for entrepreneurs
ruffled a few feathers in the audience, shifted thinking for others and proved
a great way to end the event.
The event was catered (and when
we say catered, we mean catered!): Table after table of
artisan sandwiches, salads, breakfast snacks, drinks, Roasterie
coffee, juice,
afternoon snacks, barbecue, and Boulevard beer at the end of the event. If you
didn’t feel like getting up to get any snacks, you needn’t worry: a bag of
snacks was taped to the underside of every chair. All the food was delicious
and provided a great setting for casual networking and conversation.
Beyond the food, attendees were
engaged throughout the conference, interacting with each other and the
speakers. It was a very approachable and relaxed environment, which was
perfectly conducive to collaboration.
The event was a very slick operation,
with livestreaming and a schedule which was honored throughout the day. Silicon
Prairie News and the affiliate sponsors obviously put a lot of thought, time,
effort and money into Big Kansas City 2013, and it showed in each and every
detail (including the live DJ). If this first year is any indication, then
Silicon Prairie has a hit on its hands.
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