This story is part of our Inno on the Road series. You can learn more about Milwaukee startups here.
Joe Kirgues is the co-founder of gener8tor, a nationally ranked accelerator based in Milwaukee, with locations in Madison and Minneapolis.
As the head of the local chamber of commerce put it, Milwaukee's entrepreneurial spirit is written in the names of the individuals who founded our city's most iconic brands: Harley-Davidson, Kohl's, Kohler, and Miller. While each of those businesses is now a Fortune 500 leader, we're still adjusting to how you keep that founder mentality in a city dominated by big industry.
And that's how we discovered our ecosystem's advantage: the concentration of big brands located in our city could be our draw and the mechanism to engage startups in creating Milwaukee's next generation of wealth and jobs.
So, we put together OnRamp, a conference series designed to connect large, established corporations with startups. Since we started three years ago, we've run eight OnRamps in locations such as the Bradley Center here in Milwaukee and then across the region with events at Lambeau Field, Camp Randall and now Soldier Field (we affectionally call it, "Lambeau Field South").
The event started around a simple idea: let's rent out box level suites and invite the big brands in town to meet one-on-one with startups. The event is free for startups to attend and each corporation pre-selects the early-stage companies that they would like to be pitched by. Prior to the meetings, the corporations agree to one of two options - they'll either become a customer or "grab a coffee" with at least one of the startups (mentor or continue conversations) with them. There's no other alternative.
Since we started, dozens of corporations have participated, such as American Family Insurance, Northwestern Mutual, Kohl's, Harley-Davidson, and many more signing up for multiple events per year. We know that millions of revenue and investments have flowed to startups as a result of these one-on-one meetings.
As we've grown, OnRamp has evolved from industry agnostic one-on-one pitch meetings to now a vertically specific conference series with pitch sessions with top corporations in each vertical. In the spring of 2016, we added an annual OnRamp Insurance Conference and in the fall, introduced the OnRamp Retail Conference. We plan to add additional industry verticals with programing across the Midwest in 2017.
We'd love to work with partners across the Midwest to expand this platform. We know that Milwaukee's leading corporations are eager to engage with their peers across the region in designing best practices to work with startups. And we're hopeful that with the OnRamp events, we've collectively made a great start.
(Image via gener8tor's twitter page)
