116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
NewBoCo celebrates 10 years
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This story first appeared in Celebrating Entrepreneurship, a new special section that highlights the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Corridor.
Like the new businesses it supports, NewBoCo has learned to adapt over its 10 years.
“The organization has evolved a lot,” said Jill Wilkins, NewBoCo’s executive director since last December. “It’s been cool to see, because when we first started, it was really focused on tech startups. While we’re still doing that, it has really expanded to those that might be more apt to go into a Main Street business. That has been a neat evolution in that it’s been able to broaden those we serve.”
NewBoCo — officially New Bohemian Innovation Collaborative, Inc., — draws on resilience and adaptability to grow the region’s economy. The agency based in its namesake Cedar Rapids neighborhood has expanded its programs beyond the often high-concept, tech-based hopefuls it first envisioned.
“Every state already has a couple of organizations like NewBoCo that sit at this weird nexus of technology and workforce development,” said Eric Engelmann, a founding board member and former executive director. “We’re not doing that kind of workforce training. We’re doing really high-risk things. We learned some things, or the market changed, and you moved on.”
“People who have been out of state come here and see the work that we do across the state to support start-ups,” said Alex Taylor, managing director of NewBoCo’s Iowa Startup Accelerator. “In other states, the environment is a lot more competitive for financing and support for start-ups, and we just don’t have that. It’s just not that way in Iowa, and it makes for a really pleasant experience for people who are starting a business.”
The Accelerator, which identifies and assists likely business start-ups with financial and technical support, was a motivating force behind NewBoCo’s 2014 launch.
“It really started with the Accelerator, but as the founders and the staff identified the gaps, that’s where we started to bring on these other programs,” Taylor said. “Rather than sending those startups to a marketing agency, (Engelmann) hired a marketing person. Rather than send those startups to software developers to do their apps, Eric hired them. He ended up having this skunkworks agency bolted alongside the Accelerator and he decided, ‘We’re just going to call this agency NewBoCo.’”
The new agency tapped into the Vault Coworking & Collaboration Space, which had been operating since 2011 at 415 12th Ave. SE. To further a community of entrepreneurs and their supporters, NewBoCo stages regular events such as the annual two-day EntreFEST conference, the twice-monthly 1 Million Cups Cedar Rapids programs, and specialized seminars.
The lessons of CoderDojo, which invites local kids to explore, create, and play with technology and STEM-based activities, are being applied to public schools across the state.
“The founders recognized that to have innovative and entrepreneurial businesses, you really need to have that computer science workforce available,” Wilkins said. “One of our programs is teaching teachers how to teach computer science within the classroom.”
That program has reached more than 100,000 students statewide over the past five years, Wilkins estimates.
“Many school districts don’t have the ability to hire a computer science teacher, so it may be an existing teacher teaching math, teaching English, art, whatever, who’s interested in learning how to do that,” she said.
The global pandemic brought a more basic, local focus.
“From coast to coast, venture capitalists got cagey and conservative about investing in early-stage startups, and that is true for ISA Ventures,” Taylor said.
“It certainly forced us to take our own medicine when you think about being innovative,” Wilkins said. “We’ve had to pivot and adjust a lot of the programs.”
“The job I was hired to do sort of shifted,” Taylor said. Services now are “not just specifically for saleable, multi-million-dollar interstate businesses, but also for Main Street curbside businesses. If I’m selling bread at the farmers’ market and I want to open a storefront, how do I do that? I provide the coaching and mentoring and the resources through coaching and connections and networking to help them solve those problems so they can open the storefront, they can start their own website design services or accounting firm.”
Serving smaller hometown businesses led to the 2021 launch of Kiva Iowa, the state arm of the global nonprofit Kiva Microfunds. The microlending organization provides zero-interest, zero-fee loans up to about $15,000. NewBoCo manages the program, which was seeded by a grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority.
“Any small business that is looking for capital access in the state of Iowa, they start with Kiva,” said Kaitlin Byers, Kiva Iowa’s capital access manager. She works with local banks, development agencies and chambers of commerce to find new businesses in need of gap financing.
“They serve as referral partners,” Byers said. “If (a business is) outfitting a new space or hiring a new employee, they borrow the money, they grow and they repay the money.”
Kiva Iowa has disbursed 93 loans worth a total of $630,000. The loans can’t be used to pay existing debt. Byers also connects Kiva borrowers with NewBoCo’s mentoring and other services.
Taylor continues to work with programs such as the University of Iowa John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center and with local development groups across the state.
“If I find that investable scale-up, certainly I’ll introduce them to ISA Ventures, but I’ll also make sure that the venture capitalists know about these companies,” he said. “Economic development is the driving force behind what NewBoCo does, and they do it through tech services and entrepreneurship, which is what I’m working on. If a business is hiring more people and selling more goods, eventually they’ll pay taxes on it and that creates economic development.”
“That has been really exciting to see, that statewide impact,” Wilkins said. “We’ve always worked with businesses across the state, but in the last few years with the Kiva program, with Alex’s work with communities and helping them build an entrepreneurship community, that has really allowed us to stretch that impact. Every community is different, but to be able to take the things we’ve learned over the years and be able to work with communities and say ‘this might be a good way for you to help.’”
“When you look at what NewBoCo has done over the past decade, those have been some extremely high-risk ideas that no one has done in Iowa before,” Engelmann said. “This is not run-of-the-mill stuff that anyone can do. This is hard, and a lot of it’s untested. We’ve done enough it now that people can come to us and say what’s worked.”
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