You could say Sean Parker’s first days at Main Street Ventures were spent heavily under the radar.
The Cincinnati native — and Walnut Hills High School alumnus — quietly took the reins of the Over-the-Rhine-based organization, known for its entrepreneur support programming and funding, as its new executive director Feb. 27. It’d be a month before his post was officially announced. The job hadn’t even been advertised when Parker said he started looking around for his next career opportunity.
He called the hire by the Main Street board opportunistic, one that also plays perfectly off his previous corporate stints, which include all three local heavy hitters — Procter & Gamble, Fifth Third Bank and Kroger — and most recently, Nike, where he remotely served as its global senior director of finance and strategy communication.
Don’t let the muted start fool you. There are big plans for the organization going forward, he said. The goal is to make Main Street Ventures a national model for startup funding support.
The following interviews has been edited and condensed for length.
Talk about your decision to leave corporate life in favor of a nonprofit. What drove those decisions?
I’ve always been entrepreneurial. I actually left P&G (in 2012) to start a credit card processing company. I know how hard it is.
When I left Nike in May last year — people were going back to the office, and we had made the decision not to move to Oregon — it was the first time in my life I didn't have another job waiting. I don't know if "recover" is the right word, but it took almost nine months to get out of that corporate America mode. I spent that time with my kids, taking them to school and participating in PTO meetings. I thought I was present before — I was going to my son’s soccer games with two phones and texting and emailing back and forth — but I wasn't.
With Main Street Ventures, I’m here to amplify the work they're already doing. I like to say I picked passion and purpose over paycheck and ego.
How will your corporate background aid in this role?
I’ve been in a lot of rooms. I understand how decisions are made inside corporations, but I also have an appreciation for people trying to get business with those companies. Being able to marry those two worlds really, really appealed to me.
It's not as flashy a name as P&G or Nike, but the work has been so satisfying so far. I can only imagine what's next.
Main Street Ventures plays a pivotal role in the city, most notably by providing equity-free funding to small business and startups across the region (since 2018, the organization has distributed more than $3 million to more than 100 local startups through its signature Launch and Leap grants). How do you view the organization’s role in the city?
We're the front door. We get to see everything. I said this in my announcement, but there are some great public and private companies in town. We want to create the next one. Whether it's TQL or Tire Discounters. Those businesses started small, and I would imagine they needed capital and connections at different times so they could grow and scale. That's really what we aspire to.
We can even help VCs (venture capitalists) and angel (investors) with their deal flow.
Overall, the goal is to be to be so good at raising money, but also finding businesses to support, we become a national model for startup funding. It’s inclusive of tech, but it’s not just tech. It’s CPG (consumer packaged goods), it’s food products. We've supported restaurants and coffee shops, especially when they have a community-building component.
When does that work start?
I'm spending a lot of time right now studying the words we use, and how we talk about startups. There are tons of good organizations that help you ideate from scratch. Our launch grants (which range from $5,000 to $10,000) live a bit beyond that phase and help companies with growth. On the validation side, leap grants (which range from $10,000 to $30,000) help companies validate themselves or their product, so they can make themselves attractive to those who live in the backable phase, whether a VC or a bank or an angel investor.
Are there recent success stories you can share?
Cooler Keg (a Covington-based company that’s developed an ultra-portable kegerator built into a classic-sized picnic cooler) is a perfect example of the type of businesses we want to invest in — and at the right time. Cooler Keg did this amazing Indiegogo (crowdfunding) campaign, and our grant is going to help them unlock the funding they were able to amass.
Nettie Pickleball and what they've done since they've received a grant — not saying our grant was solely responsible — but it has been amazing.
Eventually, we hope a company like Cooler Keg gets so big they then donate to Main Street Ventures to help the next generation of Cooler Kegs.
In your role, you lead grant management and serve as the chief fundraiser for the organization, among other responsibilities. Main Street Ventures just announced its latest funding round in March, and it was a record-setter (19 companies overall received nearly $366,000, including Cooler Keg, and Soundtrace, a Cincy Inno 2023 “Startup to Watch”). Will that be the new norm for the organization, especially as other outside funding sources shrink in this economy?
The focus will be on quality versus solely on large amounts. That being said, if we get another quarter or string of quarters where we feel so strongly about the applicants that we give (to) at that level, that's a challenge personally I'm up to — helping to raise the funding to do that.
