A familiar face is sticking close to Wichita in a new role designed to boost the city’s entrepreneurial appeal and help local companies partner with startups to drive future growth.
The e2e Accelerator on Tuesday announced that Mary Beth Jarvis has joined the organization and will serve as the executive director of a new pilot accelerator.
That program will build off e2e's original mission of helping create local startups, to now connect established local businesses to entrepreneurs in Wichita and beyond to help them sharpen their competitive edge.
Jarvis announced in April that she was leaving her position as president and CEO of Wichita Festivals Inc. after more than six years.
Her last day with that organization was Aug. 15. Her first day with e2e was Aug. 16.
“I guess that’s just how I roll,” Jarvis says with a laugh.
Apart from the opportunity to continue to help strengthen the Wichita community, Jarvis says it was the way in which e2e was going about helping building that economic foundation for the future that attracted her to the opportunity.
Jarvis says she had admired e2e and its mission and vision since its original launch in 2016, through its work last year to refresh and refocus that vision under new CEO Josh Oeding.
Now, she says, she sees an organization that is itself ready to accelerate by mining for entrepreneurial talent wherever it can be found.
“We want to bring those two worlds together — startups and established companies,” she says.
Jarvis says she sees her role first and foremost as being eyes and ears for the organization to help work with Wichita's major employers to identify where their challenges are.
Then e2e’s expanded mission will be to connect those companies with startups that can help solve those problems, which means potentially looking farther than Wichita for solutions that fit those needs.
The local startup community will always be a focus, she says, but it will be part of a mission that will now look further than just the Air Capital.
“We want to cast our net more widely,” she says.
Oeding says the addition of Jarvis adds energy and clout to the organization, as she brings with her the connections and reputation built through years of community involvement and organizational leadership.
And, he says, her ability to identify what problems Wichita companies are having and help cast that wider net should drive a new level of impact for the non-profit organization.
Oeding says the pivot toward focusing on large local companies is a change of mission shouldn't be thought of as a change of mission.
Nor is it that the group will now look beyond Wichita for entrepreneurs.
Oeding says e2e-backed programs like LaunchPrep can — and will — still help get local startups off the ground.
But for those local businesses partnering with e2e, many will be facing problems that need solutions beyond just the idea phase. And with its focus on what Oeding says are scalable, high-growth startups, often in the tech world, e2e can be that bridge between problems and solutions that are ready now.
And ultimately, say Oeding and Jarvis, the goal is that combining efforts to build local startups with attracting outside ones will serve to more rapidly expand entrepreneurship as a whole in Wichita — which has been the goal of e2e all along.
And there is no one better than Jarvis to help supercharge this next step for e2e, says Aaron Bastian, president of Fidelity Bank and chairman of the entrepreneurial organization.
“After making great progress in 2019 to broaden the base of local investors supporting startups, this is our next big launch,” he says. “Mary Beth’s diverse background as a leader and her knowledge of our region’s business landscape are ideal ingredients to ensure this effort succeeds in boosting our (entrepreneurial) ecosystem and helping Kansas companies and communities thrive.”
