Turbine Flats Project Aims to Build Community Support for Startups

You’re not alone. Or at least you don’t have to be, especially if you’re an entrepreneur in Lincoln, Nebraska.  The Turbine Flats Project, an office space for startup businesses and a nonprofit organization, is working to build a culture in Lincoln that supports entrepreneurs.

Matthew Wegener, president of the Turbine Flats board of directors and co-owner of the Turbine Flats building, said a community faces less risk investing in an entrepreneurial culture than spending economic development dollars trying to recruit a business from outside.  And local ownership and generation of wealth has long-term impact, he said.

“Those are the kind of people then that fund libraries and parks and things like that,” Wegener said. “But it takes investment from the community to help those people grow and become successful, and it takes failures along the way to learn from,” he said.

Creating such a culture takes time. You can’t make a few phone calls, get together and then have a startup culture six months later, Wegener said.

“It’s a continual work in progress,” he said.

Turbine Flats uses its Web site and Facebook page to promote entrepreneurial activities like networking events, workshops and contests in the area and to provide information on national small business trends.

In addition, Turbine Flats co-sponsors events like the Creative Capital Pitch Session, an “elevator speech” contest held at the building last fall, and Ignite Lincoln, a community speaker event planned for April. Turbine Flats has opened its building to nonprofit and community interests such as arts awards and displays, a straw-bale house building presentation, university business class tours and independent filmmaking.

Turbine Flats wants to renovate more of the building so it can house more businesses. Colby Thomson, Turbine Flats co-founder and board vice president, said an additional benefit of the expansion would be more space for community events.

Turbine Flats also wants to develop a seed fund to help early-stage businesses create proofs of concept.

Wegener said they’d like to work with the investment community to develop investment models tailored to businesses that target specific trades or narrow markets.   These narrow “vertical niche”-market businesses tend to have less risk and need less startup capital than broad consumer market or social-media product businesses, he said.  And businesses requiring less risk and less startup capital fit Lincoln’s culture well, he said.

“Lincoln is a kind of mecca, especially on the software side, for vertical-niche markets,” he said.

However, this type of business tends to grow more slowly than those aimed at broad markets and therefore requires a different investment model, he said.

An investor in a consumer or social-media product company might expect another company to buy it for its large social network. But this exit strategy doesn’t work for vertical-niche market businesses. Instead, Wegener said, a tiered investment strategy that moves vertical-niche market businesses from stage to stage with exits at each stage would benefit those businesses and their investors.

Wegener’s interest in entrepreneur-community building is based on his personal experience starting ISoft Data Systems. He knows what it’s like to be a lonely entrepreneur.i

“When I started ISoft, I had an office clear out in eastern Lincoln,” he said. “I was off my own and I didn’t know anybody and that was a problem.”

Eventually he rented an office suite near downtown Lincoln and sublet space to other startups. The businesses in the building started talking and exchanging ideas and became a support network for one another.

“It became obvious to me that there’s a desire to have a community where people are in the same stage in business life,” he said. “I started to see a lot of value in that myself.”

Three businesses from that original building and five others now share the Turbine Flat building, a renovated warehouse in an area sometimes known as the “research corridor” of Lincoln since it is between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Beadle Center, Whittier Building and the planned Nebraska Innovation Campus.

Wegner said Lincoln’s lack of mountains and beaches shouldn’t hinder developing a thriving startup culture.

“If you have a community that draws the entrepreneurs and keeps the entrepreneurs, you don’t really need oceans,” Wegner said. “It’s do-able. It’s just really, are we here?  Are we ready to support them? Are we going to help them get through stage one to stage two and then to stage three? And are we accepting of all the color that comes out of it, so to speak?”