Come to the public forum on Mon 3/21 to hear why some area entrepreneurs are not as enthralled as the POTUS with the efficiency of our region’s entrepreneurial continuum.
Recently, President Barack Obama visited Northeast Ohio, praising groups such as JumpStart and NorTech, while area tech entrepreneurs, who should be benefitting from these programs, have been critical. According to Crain’s, President Obama “cited economic development programs by venture developer JumpStart Inc. and regional technology advocacy group NorTech. He also talked about growth in the region’s biomedical and clean technology industries. “As a consequence, you’ve made Cleveland an emerging global leader in both fields,” he said.” (See Crain’s and The Washington Post’s article: Obama praises Cleveland as the ‘tech belt’.)
But area tech entrepreneurs such as Ron Copfer and Marc Canter have been critical, along with others, of the amount of overhead going to some of the region’s economic development organizations, relative to the amount of dollars that are eventually passed through to the tech entrepreneurs these groups were created to support. Questions have also been raised as to the number of jobs that have actually been created. Copfer, who calls himself a serial, parallel and social entrepreneur, has headed up tech start-ups since the age of 16, and beta-tested the first Mosaic browser in 1993. He has since founded Cobra Training Systems and Copfer & Associates. Entrepreneur and inventor Marc Canter [pictured] has been active in the Cleveland tech scene for the past few years since he returned after 21 years in California (he attended college at Oberlin). Canter co-founded MacroMind, which became Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Canter has since been involved in dozens of projects and has founded numerous tech start-ups and is known for his “boisterous appearances at tech conferences” and according to his Wikipedia entry, he “frequently critiques other Internet luminaries… such as Mark Zuckerberg” of Facebook.
Join the crowd at the Community Engagement Meeting With JumpStart on Mon 3/21 at Tri-C Corporate Collegte East in Beachwood in order for JumpStart to gather ideas for enhancing support for entrepreneurs and to listen to the entrepreneurial community in NEO and to answer questions about the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Register for this free event here.
To follow the string of area criticism, read Canter’s blog here.
For more information about JumpStart, click here.
One Response to “Challenging JumpStart”
Marc's Voice » 2nd week of March ’11 blogging
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