As the home of Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota has built much of its economic development infrastructure around the patients who visit for top-rated medical care. A spirit of innovation drives business development in health care, the life sciences and beyond, with entrepreneurs embracing a variety of opportunities throughout the region.
Shrpa is just one example. Co-founded by Chris Lukenbill and Andy Vig, Shrpa is an online platform that helps travelers find activities and experiences that allow them to explore communities more like a local.
On Shrpa, travelers can find mini adventures designed by people who live or frequent the particular destination. Each adventure typically combines multiple stops, creating an itinerary of good food and fun, often off the beaten path.
Shrpa launched in 2019 and added its first full-time employee to a small team of contractors in December 2020. It has received multiple awards in business competitions, including recognition in the Minnesota Cup, the nation’s largest statewide startup competition.
Lukenbill is an experienced entrepreneur, previously founding a greenhouse business and an agriculture technology company. In Rochester, Lukenbill said, they have found that Goldilocks quality of “just right” for nurturing a startup.
Lukenbill said Rochester’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is bolstered by many other organizations, including the Collider Foundation and Destination Medical Center, a $5.6 billion public-private economic development partnership that is the largest in Minnesota history.
Before starting Shrpa, Lukenbill and a team of software developers were working on his last startup in Collider’s coworking space. They were among Collider’s first tenants and worked on the company for about two years before it was acquired.
“We all kind of went our own ways of starting new things,” Lukenbill said. He pursued some consulting and contracting work while starting to explore some new business ideas. Vig, who also worked in Collider, became a sounding board for the concept that eventually became Shrpa.
“He has a lot of experience architecting large-scale solutions for a long time,” Lukenbill said of Vig. “He comes with a lot of knowledge and experience that he acquired from working at Microsoft and a few other organizations.”
As they talked through various options for Shrpa, Lukenbill said they started small but began to see larger and larger possibilities. “It just starts to snowball a little bit, and you get excited about that,” he said. “That's the point where we both had this idea that, okay, this could be something big. Let's figure out how we do this.”
As Shrpa heads into its next development phase, the team continues to draw on its innovative roots to build and scale. They are currently working to connect with communities looking for ways to attract more people to their destinations through digital content and convince residents to explore the hidden gems in their own backyards.
The adventure is just beginning.
Learn more about Destination Medical Center.