“What can St. Louis do better to get more young people involved in entrepreneurship?”
We posed that question to the honorees of our inaugural Inno Under 25 feature, which spotlighted seven up-and-coming St. Louis innovators who are 25 years old or younger. Their responses focused on two specific areas — funding and outreach — in which they believe St. Louis can improve upon to help startup founders like themselves. Here’s a closer look at the honorees' response to St. Louis Inno’s prompt.
Taking more chances
Several founders featured in our Inno Under 25 list said they could use funding to get their startup to its next level of growth. And those founders would like to see more sources of capital available to them.
Joe Beggs is CEO of St. Louis-based startups Hive Medical and GenAssist. The 24-year-old’s startups have had luck acquiring financing. Hive Medical has won about $110,000 in nondilutive funding and in-kind services while GenAssist has been backed by seed funding. Even so, Biggs says he's heard potential investors say the companies haven’t gained enough traction yet to merit investment.
“How does a young entrepreneur get started if you’re not going to take a chance on them?” Beggs said. “You should judge a young entrepreneur based on the quality and detail of their plan and the excitement and enthusiasm of their customers for their product. I think St. Louis needs to take more chances on young entrepreneurs, because we have really good ideas and we are willing to work.”
Beggs said he’d welcome an approach from investors that targeted younger, early stage founders with small doses of funding rather than traditional pre-seed or seed funding amounts of capital.
Chiara Munzi, co-founder of e-commerce startup ClosetSwitch, shared Beggs’ sentiments. While the Washington University student’s startup has been a finalist in a couple of collegiate startup competitions, she’d like to see additional funding sources in St. Louis for student entrepreneurs.
“It’s been pretty hard to get cash,” Munzi said.
Munzi said she’s noticed other universities and cities have more robust programs to provide seed funding for students. She’d welcome that in St. Louis, she said.
Creating a network
Marc Beinder, the 25-year-old founder of podcast management startup Podtrics, says he’s mostly navigated the St. Louis startup ecosystem on his own.
“The network that I’ve built has all been through happenstance or accident,” he said.
That’s why he believes there should be better outreach locally to younger entrepreneurs like himself.
Owen Zhang, a Washington University student and co-founder of health technology startup Caralyst, also said he’d like to see more engagement with college-aged founders. He spent this summer interning with Google in the San Francisco Bay Area, where networking events were a constant. He wants that for St. Louis. Zhang suggested he’d like to see St. Louis startups and venture capital firms host happy hours to engage with local college students. That's something he hopes his fellow students would take advantage of.
“I wish Wash U students would go out of the Wash U bubble more, going downtown and getting integrated more into these networking events," Zhang said.
Meanwhile, Alex Quinn says he’d welcome engagement with potential entrepreneurs before they enter college. Quinn launched his startup Disruptel as a high school student. He said he’d like to see more programming geared toward introducing high school students about what it means to be an entrepreneur.
“They don’t need to know step by step and they probably won’t make it as an entrepreneur if they need that. I think that giving them some kind of guidance on what that path could look like, when they're in their later high school years, could definitely be helpful if they are open to this type of career,” Quinn said.
