How St. Louis became a tech town

[Arch City]

Jul 11, 2013, 11:23am CDT
Call from Google is a game-changer for catering startup



It’s not every day that Google calls, offering up a piece of new business.

But it’s a heck of a day — and a business game-changer — when it happens, according to Ed Spinaio of Time to Cater, a concierge catering service based in St. Louis.

Launched in 2011, the startup arranges catering for clients, taking into account budget, event information and food preferences via a network of more than 300 caterers and restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. “You hope that something this great happens to your business,” Spinaio said. “And it did actually happen.”

Spinaio, a former medical sales rep, founded the company with partner Gary Hilligoss, who thought there had to be an easier way to arrange catered food for visits to doctor’s offices. Time to Cater, which lets customers enter their preferences online, took its first order in March 2011, and within four months was handling 10 to 15 orders a month and had gross revenue of nearly $4,000 a month. By mid-2012, the business had grown to 150 clients and $15,000 to $25,000 in gross revenue monthly, as the company shifted from medical sales clients to a broader, corporate clientele. The Google call came this past November.

So how did the search engine giant find it? A Google search, of course.

Last summer, Chief Technology Officer Chris Gorrell relaunched the company’s website and began using enhanced search engine optimization techniques. “I said, ‘Is this real? Are you really from Google?’” Spinaio recalled thinking at the time.

In November 2012, Time to Cater coordinated lunch for 150 people participating in a Google webinar in 12 different locations. The company grossed $10,000 and landed an even bigger job in December, when Google again called to see if Time to Cater could handle an event for 5,000 people in more than 200 locations.

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[Arch City]

Oct 21, 2013, 11:54am CDT
Done deal: CIC signs lease to move into @4240
Brian Feldt
Reporter-
St. Louis Business Journal



The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC), a small business incubator, is officially expanding in St. Louis.

The CIC put pen to paper earlier this month when the incubator signed a 15-year lease with Wexford Science & Technology to occupy a majority of the second floor at the @4240 building in Midtown.

The @4240 building is part of the $186 million second phase of development at CORTEX, which also includes construction of a $45 million office building for BJC HealthCare and major infrastructure improvements.

With the lease finalized, CIC Founder and CEO Tim Rowe said the incubator will now move forward with plans for its St. Louis expansion — the first location outside of the CIC’s Cambridge, Mass., home.

Rowe said most of his time will now be spent building out the space at @4240. He said officials will look to emulate the success of the Cambridge location, where a quarter of startups are in the life sciences field and another quarter are in software.

“St. Louis certainly has strengths in the life sciences and biotech areas, so we may have a stronger concentration in that area (in St. Louis),” Rowe said. Rowe said the incubator is looking for companies to occupy the space, but those companies wouldn’t move in until September 2014. He hopes eventually to house as many as 100 St. Louis startups.

CIC Director Dougan Sherwood said a number of individuals from St. Louis have already reached out about moving into the space as word has spread about CIC’s plan. Rowe said St. Louis reminds him of Cambridge at the time when the CIC was just getting off the ground.

While visiting St. Louis previously, he made pit stops at the Downtown T-REx, Lab1500, the Center for Emerging Technologies and other tech hot spots. “The whole area feels like it did in Cambridge when we first got started,” he said. “There’s lots of interest and startups but not a lot of venture capital here just yet. I think we see the same characteristics in St. Louis (as we did in Cambridge).”

Rowe said he hopes to join forces with St. Louis entrepreneurs to create a burgeoning tech hub in St. Louis.

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[Arch City]

Oct 17, 2013, 11:37am CDT UPDATED: Oct 17, 2013, 2:04pm CDT
Apprenticeship program for startups coming to St. Louis
Brian Feldt
Reporter-
St. Louis Business Journal



Enstitute, a nonprofit apprenticeship program based out of New York City, plans to expand to St. Louis next year. And barring unforeseen setbacks, the company will open that hub in early 2014.

Enstitute is already expanding its program to Washington, D.C.

Enstitute co-founder Kane Sarhan said he’s 96 percent certain the company will set up shop in St. Louis. Enstitute is also considering opening teaching hubs in Boston and Los Angeles.

Enstitute, according to its website, provides students with one- to two-year paid, full-time apprenticeships at high-growth startups, small businesses and corporations around the country to prepare them for the workforce.

The company, founded in 2011, launched its pilot program in 2012 with 11 students in New York.

Sarhan said company officials chose St. Louis after one of its first fellows put the city on their radar.

“We totally weren’t even thinking about St. Louis and our initial reaction to St. Louis was there wasn’t much there when it came to tech,” he said. “But we started researching and digging around and we got excited because we saw a real ecosystem growing there. We really got excited about the talent and companies in St. Louis and the response we got back was great.”

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[Arch City]

Last night, St. Louis' primary IT incubator, T-Rex, celebrated its expansion. It will join other IT, social media start-ups (such as Lockerdome.com, Pushup.com, Unisys etc.) as well as Lab 1500 entrepreneurial center on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis.

T-REx incubator buys Lammert building
October 23, 2013 12:00 am • By Lisa Brown


St. Louis' primary IT start-up incubator has bought a new building to celebrate its 2nd birthday.

Technology incubator T-REx has purchased the Lammert building on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis to provide more co-working space for startups, accelerator programs and venture capital firms.

T-REx — short for technology regional entrepreneur exchange — has grown to more than 70 startups, accelerator programs and venture capital firms at leased space in the Railroad Exchange Building, 611 Olive Street, since it launched in September 2011.

Backed by the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, the St. Louis Regional Chamber and the city of St. Louis, T-REx offers subsidized office space for startups to help spur job creation. Rates go for as little as $80 a month for an office chair and Internet access, and the ability to work shoulder to shoulder with other emerging businesses.

Now T-REx is moving to accommodate growth. The relocation to the Lammert building, a few blocks away at 911 Washington Avenue, will allow it to add up to 50 more companies and add 240 jobs over the next five years, according to Zack Boyers, chairman and CEO of St. Louis-based U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corp., which is providing financing for the Lammert acquisition.

T-REx will initially occupy nearly three floors of the eight-story Lammert building, which has 160,000 square feet of space and is 60 percent occupied. Ultimately, the incubator could grow to as much as 100,000 square feet of space in the building, said Kevin Farrell, senior director of economic and housing development for the Partnership of Downtown St. Louis.

The building on Washington Avenue “gives us an opportunity for a greater presence,” he said.

The building, more than 100 years old, has tall ceilings, wooden beams and concrete floors. “It’s a beautiful building, with innate character that a lot of entrepreneurs appreciate,” Farrell said.

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[Arch City]

One of St. Louis' breakout social media .com's.

ENTREPRENEURS | 12/09/2013 @ 10:00AM |2,497 views
LockerDome 3.0 Breaks the Field Wide Open
Forbes.com



A cursory look around LockerDome’s St. Louis-based headquarters might give the impression that it’s just like any office in a tech hotbed with its wide open layout, large bar, and pop-a-shot hoop, where two employees are playing what appears to be a heated game of P-I-G. However, to mistake LockerDome, a popular social media site with nearly 20 million unique monthly visitors and more than $8 million in funding, for just another startup is to miss the critical details — like the fact that the lights are off mid-afternoon on a Thursday.

“Did you guys lose power?” I asked LockerDome CEO Gabe Lozano as he showed me around their 7,000-sq. ft. space. “No,” he replied. “Two of our developers just finished a 20-hour stretch of work, so they’re asleep in the dorms.” He is not joking.

In many ways, the LockerDorms, as they are affectionately known, are a hallmark of LockerDome. No one has ever been told to sleep in the office or put in a 20-hour blitz, but it’s been 73 days since at least one of the dorms wasn’t occupied overnight. One developer hasn’t slept in his own bed in ten weeks, having taken up full-time residence in the office as part of the push to release the new platform.

These are not simple cots for employees to slip off to for 15-minute naps after lunch; these rooms boast three-stack bunk beds that almost touch the vaulted ceilings. With showers in the office and plenty of food at the bar, those who stay are well taken care of.

Playing off its name, LockerDome 3.0 is unveiling Lockers, which will serve as public collections of things that interest users, a tool Lozano and his team first drafted back in February 2012. With over 2,000 vertical communities, Lozano says that LockerDome was already seeing its passionate user base using its communities as de facto collections of everything from GIFs of the Major League Baseball playoffs to some of the Web’s funniest memes and videos. Lockers, he reasons, are a natural extension of this behavior. Despite the exhortation on the office wall to imagine big things, it doesn’t take a flight of fancy to understand where Lozano is coming from.

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[Arch City]

St. Louis is one of only a few cities worldwide with a FinTech accelerator.

December 11, 2013, 11:09am EST
Techstars/Barclays partnership fuels FinTech frenzy


Barclays and Techstars are teaming up to launch a FinTech accelerator in London in 2014

The UpTake: Financial technology startups are starting to benefit from the accelerator movement, which is getting more major banks involved to find and vet technologies that impact their industry.

A handful of accelerators are already getting banks involved in the startup community. Last week, we profiled three-year-old FinTech Innovation Lab in New York City, which starts a fourth class of startups next April. It has engaged top executives from 14 of the top banks in the city, helping startups launch pilots and raise $47 million. It recently inspired a sister program in London.

And in St. Louis earlier this year, Square founder Jim McKelvey started the SixThirty FinTech accelerator in partnership with the city's large collection of major financial institutions. They've since graduated four companies and started recruiting for a second class in March 2014.

McKelvey told Upstart this week that the banks in his hometown are interested in any innovation that adds efficiencies, improves the customer experience or takes advantage of the mobile revolution.

"They just don't have the innovation DNA," he says. "First and foremost, it's a business of not losing your money so they tend to be conservative by nature."

[Arch City]

Article: 5 U.S. Startup Cities To Watch in 2014

[Arch City]

No, St. Louis isn't SF, but here's more evidence why there's a serious movement underway in St. Louis. Also read, "Why I'm Moving My Business From San Francisco to St. Louis."

Meet me in St. Louis? San Francisco too expensive for techies, too
By Jessica Guynn
Los Angeles Times
January 24, 2014, 12:43 p.m.



SAN FRANCISCO -- The technology boom hasn’t made San Francisco unaffordable for just middle- and lower-income households.

Technology workers are also struggling to afford the soaring cost of living in the city.

Entrepreneur Jon Wheatley moved to San Francisco from the United Kingdom four years ago. He says it was the best place on the planet to build his startup DailyBooth, which was one of the first photo-sharing services, and for a time, the most popular one. With the rise of Instagram and other photo-sharing services, DailyBooth sold to Airbnb and shut down in November 2012.

Wheatley is now working on another startup, Need/Want, that he is funding himself. But he won’t be doing it in San Francisco. He's trading the Golden Gate Bridge for the Gateway Arch (and the balmy weather for a real cold snap).

Two days ago he left behind his $3,900-a-month one-bedroom apartment in the trendy South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco to join his co-founder, Marshall Haas, in St. Louis.

“It had just become too much of an expense,” Wheatley said. “I could no longer could justify it. So I decided to move somewhere cheaper.”

He says St. Louis is a vibrant city with an up-and-coming startup scene at a much more reasonable cost of living.

Wheatley is now renting a two-bedroom apartment for $1,200 a month on the main drag in downtown St. Louis. And he and Haas pay just $300 a month to rent space in an office building filled with 75 other startups.

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