Every Wednesday Geoff publishes "The Pull", a digest of the top news for the Iowa innovation community that week. The following is the introduction to Issue #153.
Big news, friends! We're bringing Paul Singh's Results Junkies Tech Tour to Iowa the week of July 17. Paul (formerly of 500startups, DisruptionCorp and more) is a serial entrepreneur, investor and startup ecosystem expert that has been criss-crossing the country in an Airstream camper for most of this year. Each week he drives to a different community and packs his schedule full of meetups, keynotes, round tables, office hours, etc. to get to know local founders, investors and policy makers.
We'll have him (and a few of his investor friends) with us in Iowa for a full week and we plan to make the most of it. We're working with Paul to plan the tour right now but we have a some room in the schedule if you have a great event idea (reply to this message to let us know!). Des Moines will be our main base of operations for the week but we're planning Eastern Iowa events on Thursday (7/21) in Cedar Rapids.
As we finalize the schedule we'll add it to the Iowa Tour page here. If you click the red "Count Me In!" button you'll get a notification as events are added.
We couldn't do this without the financial support of our established business community. Tremendous thanks to the Next Level Ventures/Iowa Venture Capital Association, Davis Brown Law Firm, NewBoCo and BrownWinick—Attorneys at Law for underwriting the direct expenses to bring the tour to Iowa.
One quick request: we're seeking two additional $1,000 sponsors to cover the cost of programming during that week. If you work with an organization that has the means to support innovative things like this in our community, let us know.
I'm super excited for this and 1,000 high fives to Deanna Bennett and John Jackovin for volunteering with me to pull it all together.
Geoff Wood is the founder, connector and space captain at Gravitate, a workplace community for entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers in the heart of downtown Des Moines. In addition to writing here, he hosts a podcast, speaks at conferences, organizes events and has been helping tell the story of the Iowa startup community since 2009.