The symbolism was hard to miss on Monday morning — literally draped across the sky.
The inaugural Foree!castr Startup Scramble was scheduled to take place at 9 a.m. at Lake Forest Country Club in East Louisville — but a steady downpour delayed the start to 10 a.m.
At 8:05 a.m., Steven Plappert, co-founder and CEO of Forecastr, sent out an email after the one-hour delay was announced, in which he said he was “irrationally excited” about, well, the forecast.
Plappert wrote: “What could be more fitting for a bunch of startup founders than playing a golf scramble in a thunderstorm? … If that's not a perfect metaphor for what it's like to be a startup founder, idk [sic] what is…”
Around 10:20 a.m., I stopped by the course to check out the scene, with the goal of talking to a few founders around the “closest to the pin” contest, an event that was being run by Lisa Bajorinas, executive director of KY Innovation Hubs at Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. She also serves as the program director of the Louisville-based Vogt Awards.
“As we say, flexibility is the hallmark of an entrepreneur,” Bajorinas told me.
The rules of the contest were as follows: Golfers could stop by and try to sink a putt on the practice putting green from about 20 feet away (give or take). To enter, they had to either give a 10-to-20 second pitch of their company or pay $20 on the spot through Venmo.
At the end of the day, the person who hit the ball closest to the pin — or made the putt — would win a gift bag that mainly consisted of premium alcohol of varying kinds.
Under a coarse, gray sky that would eventually give way to sunshine upon my departure, I met a few members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, who were there to both network and raise money for programming efforts of Amplify Louisville, one of the six innovation hubs in Kentucky. Tickets were $150 per person or $600 a team.
Full disclosure, Louisville Business First was one of the event’s sponsors.
Out of the 75-plus golfers who took part, I guess I imagined that many of them would be founders or investors, but what I discovered is a whole cross section of the ecosystem — including several of those from the corporate world.
As Plappert had told me last a week ago when we spoke about his company’s latest capital raise, although golf scrambles have been going on for a long time — especially in a city like Louisville where it is ingrained in fabric of the community more than others as a social outlet (wait your turn, pickleball) — there had never been an event like it for the local startup community.
“The whole goal of this really, is to just get something that we can use year over year is just this opportunity to build the startup ecosystem,” said Brock Burton, an account executive on Forecastr’s growth team who was one of five team members at the course. “It extends past just founders and venture capitalists. It is the corporate sponsors that help everything else get started too, right? So they’re kind of the big brother.”
A representative from the corporate world who one of his teammates called a “typical corporate dude” said that he had done hundreds of similar scrabbles during the course of his career.
“It’s a stereotype for a reason… business deals are made on a golf course at these types of things,” he said. “When you're around for four or five hours with somebody, you really get to know them. You get a feel for them. I think it's a perfect avenue to strengthen relationships.”
Here’s the pitch…
And how about the pitches themselves?
Here are a few responses. Note: Not everyone who pitched was a founder in a traditional sense.
- “We give outdoor guides all the tools and resources they need to run their business, so they can focus on their clients and giving their clients the best experience possible outside,” said Stuart Jordan, the co–founder of Guide Book, which I profiled back in February. Jordan, whose pitch was exactly 10 seconds, told me that this company had just received a $100,000 match from Keyhorse Capital — and had raised approximately $270,000 since we had last spoken.
- “We are the NIL [name, image, likeness] collective for [University of] Louisville athletics so we support Louisville athletes in a variety of ways while we work with local businesses to generate revenue and provide marketing opportunities,” said Dan Furman, president and co-founder of the 502 Circle Collective, which formed two years ago.
- “Light is the toil when the hands are many. The United Way uses data to solve our community's deepest issues. We are the great convener in the community, bringing people together to solve for [creating] thriving kids, strong households and equitable community,” said Mack Simons, the director of the corporate giving for United Metro Way, who added regional entrepreneurs “are the type of people that drive our economy, looking for the next great thing to make our lives easier and to also bring jobs into the community.”
- “Barreled spirits is not just bourbon …. And the [spirits] industry is behind as far as knowing what kind of inventory they have on hand and also what’s going on with it when it’s maturing … so they’re constantly opening up barrels and finding that one leaked, or maybe they had hotter summers than they thought and their inventory projections are off. So what we did is we created a sensor that goes on to a barrel head and looks inside to see how much liquid is inside and reads those out, but also takes real time reading on what are the temperature fluctuations that are happening,” said Todd Pitts, co-founder and chief product officer of Roth River, which was has been mainly heads down since its founding in 2018.
- “A social commerce platform for outdoor enthusiasts and we are using that technology now to launch Holler Commerce, which is an enablement platform for content creators and offers them true turnkey e-commerce without any obligation on their side for customer service or returns or inventory requirements,” said Zack Grimes, the co-founder and president of GoWild.
‘Rooting each other on’
Grimes said he signed up for the scramble as soon as he heard about it, knowing the lack of resources that existed for founders when he and his team set up GoWild in 2017.
“I wanted to support it, because anything we can do to expand the resources that startups have available to them, is going to foster more startups and want to start,” Grimes said. “It's all about just giving advice, where it makes sense — and just feeding off other startups and rooting each other on.”
Grimes shared a golf cart with Brandon Keith, a vice president and senior underwriter at WesBanco based out of New Albany, Indiana, who had recorded the closest putt in the pin by the time I left. Grimes and Keith went on to win the scramble by shooting a collective 17 strokes under par. Grimes also won the event's pitch and putt contest.
Keith, though, was not the only member of the banking community that I spotted. I reconnected with Rolandas Byrd, whom I first chatted with for an exclusive story in January when he was named the Republic Bank’s first senior vice president of community and multicultural banking.
Byrd provided one of the better descriptions of the playing conditions earlier in the morning:
“It’s like Heaven opened up and just poured a glass of water right over top of us, so it’s a little wet out here, but we’re trying to do our best.”
The metaphors continued when talking about the current state of Republic Bank (Nasdaq: RBCAA), which sponsored one of the holes.
“We’re trudging along,” he said. “The bank is going very well, very sound — and we want to ensure that we let our clientele know that. I know that with the downgrade of other banks that have come along in the past week, we want to make sure that everybody knows that we're sound.”
As for the bank investing in the local tech scene? His reply would most likely mirror the rest of the day’s competitors: “We definitely have an appetite for it."
