Community

2020 What a doozy! We want to pause for a moment and reflect on what the year held. The reality is that this past year had its full share of ups and especially downs for each of us. But we firmly believe that as we look back there is much to learn and much to be thankful for.

We love celebrating the successes of our clients, and believe now it is more important than ever to acknowledge these solid wins when there is so much concern and anxiety in our current environment. In this spirit, I would like to tell you a little bit about a startup company from the western side of Iowa that we are working with closely as a technology partner.

I realize that this is a bit late, but as we all know, it’s been a crazy year! Despite this, we still want to pause and reflect back and celebrate that in 2020, we have now passed 16 years in business (January 27th, so we are actually almost at 16.5 years)! It’s hard to believe how quickly time races by, but Mike and I want to take a moment to reflect on where we’ve been and look ahead to what’s to come.

We at Bio::Neos were happy to once again participate in Computer Science Education Week 2019. Steven Davis, Cody Metz, and I volunteered at schools throughout the ICR area.

We've been thinking about Computer Science Education Week 2019 since March and are extremely excited about it. We hope that this will be the biggest event for the ICR.

I always enjoy learning more about other businesses in the tech industry and had a chance to explore several during the CR Tech Crawl. Tech Crawl was created to be an evening of exploring different locations in major cities across Iowa while getting to know fellow Iowans in the industry. Last year the two largest metros of the state played host to a Tech Crawl in both Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

In addition to my responsibilities at Bio::Neos, I teach a course at the Kirkwood Regional Center of Johnson County, on the University of Iowa campus. The course is provided by the Jacobson Institute for youth entrepreneurship, an organization that creates and empowers the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs. I enjoy the opportunity to pass on my knowledge.

I'm excited to share that I recently completed Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program. I was one of 36 small business owners that were part of the second class from Iowa to participate. It was a diverse group with businesses across multiple sectors including, IT, cosmetics, animal care, and more.

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On the weekend of July 12th I attended Startup Weekend IC, a startup competition held at Merge. The event had three stages. In the first stage, participants pitched their ideas to the crowd and attempted to win a popular vote for their ideas. The six most popular pitches were chosen to continue into the second round. I pitched an idea for self-assembling furniture, but sensing the idea was overly ambitious, was happy it did not go on to the second round.

Community involvement has always been important to us. We embrace as many chances to share our experience as we can. One of these chances came in the form of a great local event that has been a huge catalyst for action in the Eastern Iowa community of entrepreneurs: EntreFEST 2019. As soon as we heard there was a new technology track added to the 2019 event, Mike Smith and I applied to be speakers.