Amplify Louisville has made two new hires in recent weeks as its funding from KY Innovation has been renewed for a second year.
The local entrepreneur support organization, which succeeded Louisville Entrepreneurship Acceleration Partnership (LEAP) last summer, has brought on Keionna Baker as director of community engagement and Jenn Callahan as director of marketing and business development.
Baker, founder of Elephant in the Room, was formerly community manager at Story Louisville. Larry Horn, executive director of Amplify, said he was looking for a candidate experienced in event production, but also someone that could drive thought leadership around diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) and entrepreneurship.
"We've been focused really heavily on DE&I programming and talks around those initiatives, but we needed someone really to lead that conversation and lead that impact," Horn said. "Keionna, with her background in not only programs and events, but also her own startup Elephant in the Room that focuses on teaching DE&I, she was just a great fit for that role."
Callahan had already been consulting with Amplify through her own marketing solutions firm, liveFire, before she joined the organization full time. Horn said through the Covid-19 pandemic, he realized Amplify's main way of communicating was through marketing efforts, such as its newsletter, social media, website and job board.
"We knew we wanted to do more work in the marketing space, and on top of that, we wanted to know how to get more stories out regionally and nationally," he said. "The other piece of Jenn's role that made her a good fit to bring on full time is she has this tremendous background in building products and services."
One of the things that Amplify has always had on its radar is figuring out how to become more sustainable and not just be reliant on state funding for the organization, he added.
While Amplify seeks out new revenue streams, the organization just had its state funding renewed in the form of $750,000 from the Kentucky Cabinet of Economic Development's entrepreneurial and innovation arm.
Horn said a portion of that is given to University of Louisville's entrepreneur-in-residence program, while the remainder is used for Amplify's own efforts to impact the ecosystem, in addition to sponsoring and aiding the work of other organizations, such as Render Capital's First Dollar Program, Network and Chill, Network of Entrepreneurial Women and Story's Startup Chowdown event.
"These are organizations that focus on different parts of the community — the last thing I want to do is duplicate any efforts," Horn said. "Let's find people. They're doing the good work and let's help them, whether that's dollars, human bandwidth or just shouting what they're doing from the rooftops. Let's make sure we're supercharging the efforts of everyone."
Looking forward, Amplify is partnering with Greater Louisville Inc. on two initiatives this year: a mentorship site and a first customer initiative.
The first customer initiative, which is led by EdjAnalytics co-founder and CEO Sean O'Leary, will focus on connecting local startups with local companies that could turn into paying customers, pilot trials or just valuable feedback. And an alpha version of the mentorship site is already live now at louisvillestartupmentors.com.
"The goal of this is how do we work with the community — not just other entrepreneurs, which we know are very valuable — but how do we unlock all this corporate knowledge in the ecosystem to support startups," Horn said.
