Leave it to a founder to put a new spin on an opportunity.
On Sept. 1, Angelique Johnson became the fourth entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Amplify Louisville.
What is different from the previous appointments is that Johnson — who is most known to the local entrepreneurial economy for her medical device startup, MEMStim — will not be taking on a traditional coaching role with standard officers.
Instead, Johnson will look to implement the framework that she has been using with Vissionaireum, an organization she co-founded in 2018 to help underrepresented founders “achieve their visions for their businesses faster with less money” — and help with the other components that come with a startup besides raising capital.
“Not only are we getting Angelique, but we’re getting her whole system that she has been using to help underrepresented founders for a long time. … for the work that she has been doing,” said Larry Horn, the executive director of Amplify Louisville.
Added Johnson: “I could come in … and sit there and give coaching — or I could power up the entire Vissionaireum firm into the position.”
The Vissionaireum concept was borne out of the environment that she faced in 2011 when she started MEMStim. The company, headquartered out of The Pointe in Butchertown, has been manufacturing implantable electronics that serve as neurostimulators, replacing or restoring lost nerve function in patients who are afflicted with one of many neurological ailments such as hearing loss, vision loss and heart failure.
“I’m a Black female [founder] doing a medical device firm,” said Johnson, who was named as one of our Enterprising Women in 2022. “And as you can imagine, there are not many of me, so when I started my company I was very lonely. I felt very unsupported. I pretty much had to figure out how to execute and do it all on my own.”
In addition to coaching services, Vissionaireum provides extra hands for daily operational tasks, as well as connections and resources to underrepresented founders.
“When you're Black and Brown founder out there, we get funded at less than 1% of the venture capital money, and so we end up having to start a business on our own and execute and learn how to be the accountant, the branding, the marketing, the sales, how do we hire our first employee — we have to learn all of that,” Johnson said.
Before accepting this role, Johnson became one of the first board members at Amplify.
“It is testament to people seeing the value of the role,” Horn said.
Johnson becomes Amplify’s fourth entrepreneur in residence, joining Kela Ivonye, Natalia Bishop and most recently Lydia Henshaw, who began in 2022 and is still serving in that position. Under the current framework, EIRs can stay up until two years.
“That is one of our best [return in investments] because we can easily measure the impact of EIRs [by] how they’re helping founders manage through the process,” Horn said.
Amplify Louisville, which opened its offices in 2020, is one of six innovation hubs located throughout Kentucky that are part of the system of KY Innovation, the entrepreneurial arm of the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development.
The other five KY Innovation hubs are: Awesome, Inc. (Lexington); Blue North (Covington); GroWest (Paducah); Central Region Ecosystem for Arts, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CREATE, Bowling Green) and Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR, Pikeville).
